Harry wields his cut-throat knife
You’ve worked in commercial TV for 30 years, you’ve made it to the top, rubbed shoulders with fame (well, Margaret Thatcher, Princess Anne and Fergie at any rate), invented a celebrity glove puppet and served as role model for a character in a Jilly Cooper novel. What next? You take a leaf out of Harry Turner’s book and write about it.
A Frenzy of Indifference is a crisply crafted little memoir crackling with dry witticisms and displaying, as the author would put it, a hallmark tendency to mild hyperbole. It’s particularly good on the cut and thrust (invariably Borgian) of boardroom politics, and occasionally wields the stiletto itself, with devastating effect on the dastardly victim.
Not that Harry, once managing director of ITV company TSW, seems to be missing the champagne lifestyle all that desperately. Whenever the Diary has tried to contact him he is without fail abroad, sipping mojitos in Cuba, skiing in Aspen or refighting Wellington’s campaigns in Salamanca. Roll on retirement…
PS. Whatever happened to Gus Honeybun, Harry? Answer on a postcard please.