Daniel Farson

Daniel James Negley Farson (8 January 1927 – 27 November 1997) was a British writer and broadcaster, strongly identified with the early days of commercial television in the UK, when his sharp, investigative style contrasted with the BBC's more deferential culture.

Farson was a prolific biographer and autobiographer, chronicling the bohemian life of Soho and his own experiences of running a music-hall pub on east London's Isle of Dogs.

He visited Germany with his father while Negley was reporting on the Nazi regime, and was patted on the head by Adolf Hitler, who described him as a "good Aryan boy".

A regular guest on Farson's programmes at this stage was James Wentworth Day, a reactionary British writer of the Agrarian Right school, who commented in the programme about mixed marriages, referring to mixed-race children as "coffee-coloured little imps" and argued that black people must be less "civilised" than white people because "their grandfathers were eating each other" (Wentworth Day's remarks were featured in Victor Lewis-Smith's series Buygones and TV Offal).

[citation needed] Farson insisted that the episode of People in Trouble in which Wentworth Day had made those remarks – concerning transvestism – was scrapped before it had been completed.

He publicly insisted that the Independent Television Authority would ban it; in reality Farson was terrified that Wentworth Day would attempt to bring him to trial.

[citation needed] Farson's Guide to the British (1959–1960) took a critical eye at a nation in transition and was the first public expression of his long-term quest for the true identity of Jack the Ripper.

In 1960, he helmed Living For Kicks, a documentary about the frustrations and uncertainties of British teenagers in the Beat Music era, in which Duffy Power was interviewed.

The Daily Sketch, a tabloid paper then owned by Associated Newspapers (who were the "Associated" in Associated-Rediffusion, although they had sold their stake in the company by this time), led the chorus of revulsion to the documentary.

[citation needed] Soon after this he bought a pub, The Waterman's Arms, in the East End with the explicit intent of reviving old-time music hall, but it failed.

He moved from London to live in his parents' house in Devon (his father had died in 1960), but continued to make regular visits to the pubs and drinking clubs of Soho.