Review: Did you Really Shoot the Television?

Accustomed to writing weighty tomes of military or political history, a personal family memoir might not be the kind of work you’d immediately associate with Sir Max Hastings, journalist and ex-newspaper editor extraordinaire – but prepare to be surprised.  His quirkily named Did you Really Shoot the Television: A Family Fable has received favourable reviews across the board.

Descibed by Andrew Marr in the FT as a ‘slim, delightful book’, Did you Really Shoot the Television is a stirring and bawdy portrait of several generations of the illustrious Hastings family.

‘Relatives of memoir-writers,’ asserts Jonathan Sale in the Independent, ‘are legally obliged to be exasperating and eccentric.’  Serendipitously, Hastings’ ancestors exude both criteria – a family of hopelessly improvident individualists.  His Great Uncle Lewis for example, was sent down from Stonyhurst college for ‘alleged homosexuality.’ Undettered, he headed for Africa and became a professional hunter, mounting, amongst other things, a campaign to protect the tse-tse fly.  His own father Mac once spent three months on a desert island for The People, managing to lose 32lb and show signs of scurvy in the process.

And nor does Hastings spare anybody, revealing in detail, for example, his parents’ disastrous relationship (‘not a single image exists of them posing together as a couple’), his strained relationship with his demanding mother and his hopeless attention-seeking as a child – manifested most spectacularly in the anecdote which lies behind the work’s title.  In fact, it’s a testament to Hastings’ honesty that his childhood self emerges as a pompous, disagreeable type.

Alongside the family history, Hastings’ book colourfully relates the history of the newspaper industry – with which almost every member of the family has had dalliances with at some stage.  All have at some other contributed copy to the nationals – from small vignettes, to his mother’s role as a pioneering women’s editor at Harper’s Bazaar, to his own copious output.

What also marks the book out in amongst the warm and vivid family portraits is Hastings’ meticulous attention to detail.  We learn, for example that in 1890 the Hastings family income totalled £416 per annum, with the puritancial Edward Hastings allowing himself £200 for household costs, £70 for rent, £6, 2s,0d for lunches and £3.12s.0d on travel.  By 1916, Basil, Hastings’ grandfather, was earning £1,100 a year.  Despite this, the novel retains a quick picaresque pace, whisking us from spartan British boarding schools one minute to hunting trips in Africa the next.

A gripping read throughout, Did you Really Shoot the Television seems certain to concretise Hastings’ reputation as a versatile and talented author in any genre.

More like this:

• Max Hastings: Why Churchill?
• Max Hastings in the Great Hall