Psychiatrist in the Chair The Official Biography of Anthony Clare

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To win the big one at Royal Ascot means so much to her,’ said the Queen’s grandson, Peter Phillips. ‘This is her passion and her life and she’s here every year and she strives to have winners.’

Clare decided on medicine as a career when he was teenager recovering from an accident in hospital. It seemed to him to be interesting work. Later, as a doctor, he was seeing patients in general wards who were clearly distressed and depressed, and the doctors didn't know what to make of them: "This was during the 1960s of course, a time when psychiatry had become a very interesting branch of medicine. I had read RD Laing's remarkable book The Divided Self, and that was a great influence on me."

Throughout the interview Savile refuses to open up about his feelings and goes to great pains to claim he has no skeletons in his closet: “I mean I don’t go away from here and indulge in some wild fetishes or wild weirdo things or anything like that. We hadn’t put her away yet and there she was lying around so to me they were good times, they were not the best times. Assess exactly how you spend your time and how it makes you feel. Audit your happiness and then, if you fancy living longer, do what you can actively to increase the happiness quotient in your life.  I can picture him clearly, but I can only remember one thing that he said to me. He said it to me so often I am not surprised it was something I could never forget. What he said was this: ‘Keep that Latin accurate.’ He said it whenever he spoke to me – without fail.

Clare was a persistent critic of Sigmund Freud and of psychoanalysis, though his criticisms were not new. He regarded Freud as "a religious prophet speaking in a secular language". In a 1985 two-part newspaper essay about psychoanalysis, he remarked on the fact that "patients selected for psychoanalysis are very much healthier and more socially capable than patients treated otherwise". He referred to a study that pointed out that more than half the patients in psychoanalysis in the United States were either themselves practising psychiatrists or psychologists, or were their wives, husbands or children. He said about psychoanalysis that "the overwhelming majority of reported cases involve patients suffering minor degrees of psychiatric ill-health or people who are not patients at all. This high degree of selectivity has largely been ignored by psychoanalysts and their supporters." While Clare was clearly intrigued by Savile, he was also disturbed by him and, in the end, found Savile chilling. His oratorical skills would lead to him becoming a persuasive advocate for psychiatry and his patients at a time when they needed him and would still. He also became an accomplished broadcaster, and I remember him popping up regularly on The Late Late Show in the nineteen-seventies and eighties when there was very little discussion about mental health in the public square. Anthony Clare and his wife Jane in Sardinia, December 2003. The key task now, Clare argued, was not revealing the repressed and the forgotten, but processing and understanding what was already known. The purpose of the new series, he said, was to cast light on the sources of each guest’s life and values. What motivates them? What sustains them through difficulties and crises? What fuels the notions of excellence that so many high- achievers appear to demonstrate? Above all, why do they do what they do? And how? In Africa, we say that a person is a person through other persons. That’s why God gave Adam that delectable creature, Eve.’ Think of the Garden of Eden and be a leaf on a tree. 

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His areas of research were practical, often exploring the relationship between psychiatry and society. He did a study showing that the rate of schizophrenia in Irish emigrants in London was no worse than in the indigenous population, thereby dispelling the myth of the mad Irish. Soon after the inauguration of Radio 1 in 1967, he was recruited by the BBC; his weekly show ran for two decades from 1969. His old-fashioned showbiz style – "Now then, now then ..." – was worlds apart from his innovative fellow DJs from the pirate-radio world, and nobody could ever accuse Savile of being fired by a crusading zeal for finding and promoting revolutionary pop music. Savile reveals that there was nobody who knew him intimately and insists “what you see is what you get”. Dr Clare notes that as the seventh child in his family a young Savile was emotionally and materially deprived and his “spartan emotional regimen” hinted at powerful reasons to shun intimacy. Prescribing happiness is fraught with difficulties, because what makes one person happy may make another unhappy. My very good friend President Bashar al-Assad recently told me that using chemical weapons against his own people made him very happy. My very good friends, the Syrian people, said that chemical weapons didn't make them feel very happy. I have some experience of this in my personal life. Losing my seat at Westminster was the worst day of my life. Most other people I speak to say it was one of the best of theirs.