Charlotte Bingham looks back on 50 years of making people laugh
“People feel very affectionate towards you if you can tell a good joke,” says Charlotte Bingham, the writer of 33 romance novels and numerous successful plays, films and TV series, as she giggles down the phone-line. She’s talking about what drove her to write her first book, A Coronet Among the Weeds, first published in 1963 when she was just 19 (she is now 76), but she could equally be describing her general – wickedly funny – outlook on life.
A Coronet Among the Weeds, which is re-published this week, is a memoir of Bingham’s teenage years, detailing the fun of the parties and balls she attended during the British Season. It may all sound very glamorous, but Bingham can’t help but make a farce of the situations in which she finds herself in the novel – and particularly the potential ‘suitors’ to whom she is introduced. “They really were weeds, these boys, anyone could see they were … Not even the cat would have brought them in,” she writes, in her typically dismissive style. The book is diary-like, with a no-frills honesty typical of someone so youthful. “I was fat and she had spots so we had plenty to talk about,” she writes at one point. Sometimes, her frankness ties her up in charming knots: “My real trouble is I’m absolutely normal, and I’ve got no ambition,” she says, before determining a few lines later that “it worried me no end, going round with these normal people”.
Among the boring boys, Bingham makes plenty of amusement for herself. “I have got one story you might like,” she says, opening up her box of plentiful anecdotes. “I arrived for a ball wearing a gondolier’s hat that my mother had brought back from Venice the previous summer. And the brother of a girl who was also going to the ball said to me, ‘I bet you don’t dare wear that to dinner, with your evening dress.’ Of course, I couldn’t resist it.”
Working through Bingham’s eventful biography, one can’t help but think that she was always destined to write tales of bizarre excitement; her life has played out just perfectly. In the early 1960s she worked as a secretary for MI5, following in the footsteps of her father, John Bingham, who was an inspiration for John le Carré’s character George Smiley. Two books – MI5 and Me and Spies and Stars, the latter of which is also published this week – detail those years, full of boisterous frivolity.
If MI5 seemed exciting, the best was yet to come. A Coronet Among the Weeds became a best-seller and Bingham went on book tours around the world (“It was a hoot”, she says). Her encounters with the stars of the age only served to give her more material for her future books, as she whips up a long list of impressive name-drops: “In America, I had breakfast every morning beside Eartha Kitt and tea with terribly famous painters and writers. Once I had the felicity of getting into the lift with Harry Belafonte and Marlon Brando.” No wonder the ‘weeds’ Bingham came across were no match for her. “I mean, I could really have written a book called My Year of Fame!” she says.
Back in London, she married Terence Brady and started a writing partnership that would change the course of her life. The couple, living “in a lovely little cottage in Kensington”, collaborated on scripts for early episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs and Yes, Honestly, among many others. “It was more than marriage. It was writing with someone else, which made work so much more fun,” she recalls. We had to write at night because we were looking after our baby during the day. Very early each morning we’d push her out, still talking work.” Bingham and Brady’s London was “full of confidence”. She reminisces about the fun they had around Carnaby Street and the King’s Road, and her favourite fashions of the time, which included a dress based on a Mondrian painting by the designer André Courrèges, “which you wore with white boots, absolutely de rigueur. But I’m sorry to say you had to cut your hair off to suit the dress, and my husband didn’t like that much!”
The tremendous success that A Coronet Among the Weeds brought Bingham is hard to overstate, setting her as it did on a lifetime of writing – and she shows no sign of stopping, starting at her desk at 9am every morning. “It still astonishes me how much of a fuss that first book made. I was told it brought society to its knees! My husband used to say that society couldn’t be made of very much,” she says with a chuckle. ‘Society’ – and the joys of the Season – no longer exist in quite the same way as Bingham knew. But contemporary readers will still find a lot of joy in her books (the narrator’s youthful spirit is contagious) – and, Bingham says, should be grateful for how much has changed. “When I was growing up, it didn’t do to be too clever. Young ladies were discouraged. Now it’s quite the opposite.”
Today’s Season, Bingham says, revolves around sporting events rather than grand country-house balls, and is “about people having immense amounts of money, which wasn’t quite the same in my day. Then, it was based, I’m afraid to say, on class, and your background.” And, of course, it’s also down to the calibre of men: “Let’s face it – there were fewer and fewer young men who were considered suitable partners.”
Are there any events that take place during the Season that Bingham still attends? “My brother goes to Ascot for all the top days, lucky thing, and I would love to join him – and Henley, and Wimbledon, of course – but I am too busy! The Muse calls, and if you miss too many days she will punish you – and then some.”
‘A Coronet Among the Weeds’ and ‘Spies and Stars’, both by Charlotte Bingham, are out now.
