The Deayton Dilemma

I can’t believe it has been 20 years since Angus Deayton’s scandal. It feels like 10 years ago. As one gets older, everything ends up being twice as long ago as one supposes.

The gist of it is that a man who by that time had a career in comedy going back over two decades, with half of that period dominated by hosting the BBC’s flagship news quiz show, Have I Got News For You, was revealed by the tabloid press to have used cocaine and the services of a prostitute. Later, it was also revealed he’d had an affair behind the back of his long-term partner Lise Mayer.

The BBC initially stood by Deayton (though halved his incredible pay) but the unfolding scandal eventually persuaded them to fire him from his very high-profile job as host of HIGNFY.

Such a firing would change the course of anyone’s life. There would be an immediate and drastic drop in income, along with a sharply reduced palette of job offers to choose from, leading to less money and less prestige for the rest of one’s life.

Deayton did eventually recover to some extent from the scandal, but it will never fully leave him nor will the damage to his career. However well he has done since, he would have done better had this scandal not occurred. Never again will he host the BAFTAs, for example - which in 2001 netted him a staggering £50,000 for two hours’ work. (This, incidentally, was exactly the same as he was being paid for each episode of HIGNFY.)

But the scandal lost him more than money, options and status. He also suffered a “moral” or reputational demotion. Never again could he claim to be “above” those many politicians and other celebrities whom he had, for 12 years from the smug comfort of his presenter chair on HIGNFY, eviscerated the moment they made some lapse in judgement, taste, morality or principle. To the guffaws of an adoring audience, the smallest or rarest mis-step would be magnified to colour the target’s entire character. They were only human, but Deayton showed them no mercy. When he made his own lapse in judgement, taste, morality and principle... little mercy was shown to him.

This included his own colleagues on HIGNFY, Paul Merton and Ian Hislop. The first episode after his scandal broke has gone down in British TV history, as the two of them mocked, taunted and probed Deayton about what was happening to him (ie. his life falling apart in slow-motion).

Such a spectacle really gives the lie to the notion that left-wingers are more kind, or less selfish, or less sadistic, or less egomaniacal, than the right-wingers they love to denounce. When a rule has been broken and a pretext for cruelty has appeared, the nastiness comes out. Merton and Hislop had worked with Deayton for 12 years (23 series) of the show, and the chemistry they had enjoyed with him had led to both of them becoming household names, loved across the nation and no doubt massively well-paid. Still today, the two of them benefit from the prestige this era brought them, as they continue to appear in every episode of that programme. But there was no camaraderie that night, and apparently to this day they have never reconciled with Deayton.

Leaving aside the morality of affairs, drug use and prostitution, things are complicated further by the fact that, as an employee of the BBC which is publicly-funded, Deayton paid for those drugs and prostitutes “with public money”. This was spoken about as an aggravating factor that tipped the balance in favour of firing him. I have never known what to think about this. A private company also gets its money from the public, so when its employees pay for drugs or prostitutes, is that not “with public money”? Why is it different when the money has been collected via the License Fee than when a consumer buys commercial products? If anything, surely the relationship is even more direct in the latter case, not less?

Then there is the matter of whether you would want your employer vetting what you are allowed to spend your wages on. Is it anything to do with the BBC what Deayton did with his money? And why should the BBC be held culpable or be seen as morally tainted by what he chose to do with the wages it paid him? Probably most people have done things with their money that their employers might disapprove of; how far do we want to go down this path?

But to get lost in these quagmires is to miss the wood for the trees, really. The BBC is publicly-funded but more importantly, it is a national institution. Therefore it was right for Deayton to be fired for engaging in unseemly behaviour. Firing him protected the institution from the reputational harm of being associated with such things, and of being seen to condone them.

As for HIGNFY itself, the scandal neutered the show’s moral authority, undermining the basis upon which it had always operated. Probably, it should have been axed there and then, with a new show devised to take its place. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. It has continued on for 20 years, without that crucial ingredient of the acerbic, charming host.

In my opinion, it has never been as good without Deayton. The show’s creator, Jimmy Mulville, seems to agree with me, saying in 2021 that he wants him to return. But, after the way Ian Hislop and Paul Merton treated him, why would he ever go back?

Deayton has spoken very rarely about the scandal. When he has done, he has spoken only in oblique terms, of secret forces, and of things not being as they appeared nor as they went down in the public record. But he has never explained clearly “what was really going on”. Without wishing to dwell on tawdry private matters - how much business is it of ours, really? - I do get the feeling that he is making it seem more complicated than it was. Perhaps he just doesn’t want to admit that the fault, ultimately, was his. It is not easy to admit that one has destroyed one’s own reputation, and that one’s enemies were merely utilising the opportunities one’s own behaviour presented to them on a silver platter.

However, Deayton seems to be claiming that the real motivation for firing him was not the scandal itself, but personal animosity between him and his employers, and the scandal was merely a pretext. I can believe this. Speaking from my own experience of such things, people often manufacture or amplify controversy so as to justify actions that they wanted to take anyway, with the object of their outrage really not being as bad as they claim. To that end, they might well misrepresent things so as to induce outrage towards the object in other people.

But in the case of Angus Deayton, what he did really was outrageous. So while it may be true that enemies took advantage, it is also true that he was guilty as alleged, at least of using drugs and prostitutes. Whether this means “he brought his fate upon himself” is a much more complex question, since it involves moral judgements and social dynamics.

We cannot be fully aware of the interpersonal dynamics. For example, was the affair really an affair, or was he temporarily split from his partner when it occurred? Or perhaps it was an understanding they had, that now and again he would have a meaningless fling? The partners of prominent men can hardly be surprised that such things happen. (Certainly Deayton’s partner was no stranger to it; a previous boyfriend, Rik Mayall, had also been unfaithful.) In addition, it seems that the resulting scandal brought Deayton and his partner closer together, not the opposite. So, the dynamics are clearly more subtle than one might suppose.

This touches on another aspect of the scandal, which is the division between public and private. After my own private life was delved into by people determined to find the worst, I am especially sensitive to this kind of thing. I used to sometimes be curious about other people’s private lives, but this experience extinguished that completely. Nowadays I see a forcefield between a person’s public “persona” and whatever they get up to in private, assuming that if they do anything criminal, the law will handle that so the rest of us don’t need to know, still less “investigate”. This is partly because I would have appreciated the same respect myself, but also because the experience taught me how adept people are at misunderstanding things about another person’s private life. Anything can be misconstrued. Any two things can be erroneously connected. Any fake allegation can be favoured over honest explanations. Often, the truth is benign but complicated, whereas a lie is nasty but simple, and therefore more interesting. More insidious still is the tendency of people to conclude “there’s no smoke without fire”. Actually, there often is. For all these reasons, I think it is generally better to assume that, whatever other people do behind closed doors, it should interest nobody else except, possibly, the law.

Of course, in the case of Angus Deayton, he actually did do what he was accused of, so my own experience is not exactly comparable - to say nothing of the scale of his fame compared to mine.

As for moral judgements, we like to believe we are fully aware of the machinery within ourselves that makes them - but that is doubtful. We are fallen creatures and we use scapegoats; when one of us errs, too often we condemn him only to disguise our own failings, or the fears we have that we might fail just as drastically if only given the chance to do so.

But that implies that we only judge others to hide from truth about ourselves, and that cannot be true. It is like the line beloved of progressives that homophobes are closet homosexuals - probably true a lot of the time, but not all the time, and regardless, the issue remains real.

So, for all that we can get lost in complexity, we have to make moral judgements. Those will usually be a bit unfair and disregard some aspects and concerns. But if we do not plough ahead and condemn and condone, life could not proceed in any civilised way.

It is a mercy that most of us can forego this duty. I do not envy those who are tasked - whether by profession or by nature - to spend each day morally judging the private lives of others. It is difficult enough to understand the world outside.