The writer Terry Coleman, who has died aged 93, had a fair claim to being the inventor of the modern set-piece newspaper interview. As Robin Day had done before him on ITV, he swept away – in countless Guardian articles – the deference that had largely characterised the interaction between the British media and the famous.
“Terry was really combative,” recalled the former Guardian deputy editor David McKie. “He took on an interview as a joust, riding into battle with his lance ready, and every now and again would use it as a weapon.” It is hard to find a modern equivalent; today’s PR people would quickly warn off their celebrities.
But in the 1970s and 80s when leading politicians were more like big beasts than frightened rabbits, they submitted to his interrogation, as did almost everyone else who interested him: actors and archbishops, writers and cricketers, tycoons and professors. He prepared prodigiously, backed up his notes with a then rare tape recorder and was a master of noticing unconsidered trifles. A Coleman interview often took up a full broadsheet page in the paper; it was an event.
The thumbnail sketch that often accompanied his work made him look impish but he was actually rather imposing. Eventual political editor Michael White, a features subeditor in the Coleman era, remembered his visits to the office in “a sports jacket, white shirt, tie, grey flannel trousers … a bit aloof, shy, I suspect”.
This was a help when talking to Conservative cabinet ministers, less so on the desk, where he was sometimes referred to as “Lord Terence”. And indeed he was not a typical Guardian journalist: he gravitated to the paper because it encouraged writers not from radical tendencies. He described himself as having “liberal constitutional opinions of a kind that went out with the Second Reform Act”.
But he would skewer anyone when he had a mind to, whatever their politics.
He unsettled Margaret Thatcher in 1971, in her milk-snatcher days as education secretary: “Why do you go for me much more than you went for my predecessors? Why, why, why are you doing it?” She never granted him a second bite. And he tore into Vanessa Redgrave in the February 1974 election when she was standing for the Workers Revolutionary party in the East End by day and appearing in the West End in a Noël Coward play by night.
He listened to her intense but half-baked Trotskyism then concluded she was someone “demonstrating the sad truth that to act a gay, witty part in a civilised play, and act it very well, an actress does not need an atom of gaiety or wit, or very little of what would pass for civilisation either”.
Coleman was never shy of inserting himself into his copy. As White reflected: “On a bad day I used to feel that Terry had interviewed himself in the presence of a famous person. On a good day he was wonderful and won awards.”
Terry won fewer awards than he perhaps deserved but he won plaudits from the titans of the profession: Bernard Levin proclaimed that the Guardian would close down if he left (it did not), and Alistair Cooke wrote an adulatory preface to Movers and Shakers, a 1987 collection of his interviews.
Terry was the eldest of the three children of Doreen (nee Grose) and Jack Coleman. Jack was an engineer based in Poole, Dorset, whose job involved stints elsewhere in Britain installing machines for months at a time, usually taking his family with him. This meant Terry went to 14 different schools, making friendships difficult. He was able to settle at his last school, Poole grammar, and enjoyed it. This was followed by Exeter University where he began studying law, then switched to English, then left early after clashes with authority.
The result was an immediate call-up for national service. He served in the Royal Army Education Corps, took an external law degree from London University and entered journalism on the Poole Herald. In 1954 he married Lesley Thomas.
Impulsively, he then accepted a job to edit a start-up magazine being trialled in Bournemouth called Savoir Faire. The name should have been a warning – it soon folded. Thus he found himself, already with a wife and daughter on the south coast, living in a hostel in Birmingham and subbing on the papers there.
He made it to the Guardian in 1961, and in 1970 was made chief features writer, succeeding Geoffrey Moorhouse. Over time the interviews became his metier.
But now and again he chafed under the paper’s below-par salary structure and in 1974 he succumbed to the siren song of the richer Daily Mail. He soon left, amiably, and returned to his natural home. And for a while any financial problems were forgotten: he wrote a novel about the early settlement of Australia, Southern Cross (1979), which was so successful he had to report from abroad for a while to avoid penal taxes.
In 1989 he staged another impulsive departure, this time to the Guardian’s upstart rival the Independent. This did not work out at all. And when Terry put out feelers about a third coming, the Guardian editor Peter Preston said no. Preston had been wounded by the Independent poaching his big names and, it was said, Terry’s resignation letter was a brusque one. Soon after this debacle, I ran into him at the Oval. “It’s cold outside,” he said.
However, he had a long history of writing books, starting with The Railway Navvies – written in 1966 but very much in print – and so, still not 60, he retreated to an upstairs room at home and wrote more of them, including biographies of Nelson and Laurence Olivier and a history of the Old Vic. There were occasional newspaper commissions and Terry was a congenial attendee at Guardian reunion lunches until his last years, which were blighted by Parkinson’s disease.
His first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Vivien Wallace, a theatre administrator, whom he married in 1981, two children from each marriage, and a sister.
• Terence Francis Frank Coleman, journalist and writer, born 13 February 1931; died 2 April 2024
