The Crying Game

For decades, game-show host Hughie Green was the face of family entertainment, but his private life was a very different affair...

"He could have sex with women, but he couldn't form relationships with them"
- Trevor Eve -

From the 1950s to tye 1970s, Hughie Green was one of TV's Untouchables. Creator and host of fame shows such as Double Your Money, The Sky's the Limit and Opportunity Knocks, the cheesy, supercilious Green had, at the peak of his powers, a third of the British population tuning in to his programmes. Away from the cameras, however, his private life was a less jolly affair. He was serial womaniser who secretly fathered five illegitimate children, including TV presenter Paula yates, who was dramatically revealed to be his daughter shortly after he died in 1997. To Christopher and Linda, the children he had with his long-suffering wife Claire - they divorced in 1975 - he was a distant figure who could inspire dread. Hughie Green, Most Sincerely, the latest in a series of stories about troubled entertainers of the past, offers an elegiac portrait of the flawed showman. "There was something about the unevolved emotional state of the man," says Trevor Eve, who turns in a mesmerising performance as the TV host. "I think he was in a state of agony. He was probably full of hatred at the fact that he wasn't really talented himself, but at the same time he had delusions of grandeur. And he couldn't relate to people, especially to women. He could have sex with them, but he couldn't form relationships with them." The physical similarities between Eve and Green are slight, but Eve manages to capture him completely. One of his achievements is to perfect the languid, mid-Atlantic drawl - aquired on Green's childhood visits to Canada, where his parents had lived and maintained close ties. "I watched endless footage," says Eve. "Then I wandered around my house speaking in his accent. My family looked at me as if I was going mad." yet he admits to being equivocal about taking the role. "I turned down this role a couple of times at first, because I thought it was a rather relentless portrait of an irredeemable figure," reveals Eve, who met Green's son Christopher as part of his research. "Then I started to see the trouble he'd had, the pain that he was in, his sheer inability to deal with people. I found him fascinating." In one poignant scene in the drama, Green summons a young Christopher into his room to look at the train set bought for the boy's birthday. Present unveiled, Green then curtly dismisses the boy and plays with the trains himself.

Eve points to Green's turbulent early years as the wellspring of much of his behaviour. At the age of 13 he led a touring company of wannabe child actors called Hughie Green's Gang Show and aged 15 appeared in his first lead role, in Midshipman Easy. "His childhood was unpleasant," says Eve. "He worked and kept his parents. They were driven around in chauffeur-driven cars. They insisted that he carry on doing what ever he was doing so they could live the high life." Green's mother cheated on his father, which the young Hughie witnessed, walking in on her in flagrante with a stranger. "If you see your mother fornicating with a man who isn't your father, it's probably not the best upbringing to give you a well-balanced view of women," suggests Eve. "He had no respect for women. He was probably frightened of them, probably hated them. Who knows? If he'd had a really good therapist, he might have done a lot better. but it wasn't really the time for that. It was the time for boozing and whoring." green certainly did a lot of that. A copious drinker who wasn't averse to popping amphetamines, he's said to have had more than 1.000 lovers ... some of them contestants on his shows. With hindsight, it's surprising Green's myriad trysts weren't exposed in the press, which could have ended the ITV star's career. But Eve reasons that "the papers weren't after that stuff so much then ... things just didn't get revealed."

A pandora's box was, however, opened after Green died from cancer in May 1997. At his funeral, a tabloid journalist announced that a British celebrity was in fact Green's illigitimate daughter - sensationally revealed a week later to be Paula yates, the presenter of Channel 4's The Tube and The Big Breakfast and former wife of Bob Geldof. Subsequent DNA tests supported the claim. yates was devastated, having believed all her life that her father was Stars on Sunday presenter Jess Yates. In a further twist, her mother, who now calls herself Hélène Thornton (a former Bluebell girl who, as Elaine Smith, married Jess yates in 1959), has always insisted she didn't have consensual sex with Green when Paula was conceived, though she admits to having had an affair with him eight years later. The tragic coda to the Hughie Green story is, of course, the Paula Yates story. Yates who had followed her biological father into the world of TV presenting, was to follow him to the grave three years after his death. She was found dead from a drugs overdose in September 2000, aged 40.