Joan Bakewell: preparing for the final chapter

Veteran broadcaster, author and journalist Joan Bakewell knows how the media works. It’s hardly surprising. At the age of 87 she has been a mover and shaker since the 1960s.
She’s an outspoken campaigner for the rights of the elderly and a sometime speaker with Clive Conway Productions. Her forthright opinions and political nous have seen her elevated to the House of Lords.
So with a new Tv programme in the offing - she presents Landscape Artist of the Year on Sky Arts each Wednesday’s at 8pm - it’s hardly surprising that there’s some advance radio, TV and press coverage.
What is perhaps surprising is the depth of that coverage. Right now Joan is everywhere. But then Joan is exceptionally good copy.
I was particularly struck by a feature in The Observer at the weekend which covered her history from northern Grammar School girl to brilliant, bright Cambridge graduate who made her mark on the world of arts journalism.
It covered her marriages, her affair with Harold Pinter and her appointment as a Labour Peer in 2011 as well as her views on everything from the Covid pandemic to her admiration for the current generation of brilliant female journalists. Predictably perhaps The Landscape Artist of the Year gots an almost cursory mention at the end of the piece.
I was most impressed by her realisation of and preparation for the final chapter of her life. How she has downsized from the big London house she lived in for decades to a smaller property in nearby Primrose Hill providing herself with a ground floor bedroom and another upstair for a future carer.