The journalist featured in George Clooney's new film helped Godfrey Fitzsimons secure a master's degree
It's a rare experience to discover that you know, or once knew, a character in a movie. In Good Night, and Good Luck, which tells the story of Edward R Murrow - the CBS journalist who took on Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s - Murrow's producer is Fred Friendly, played by George Clooney. A decade and a half after the period of the film, Friendly was one of my professors at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. I can reveal that George Clooney doesn't look in the least like him.
Following the Murrow era, Friendly became president of news at CBS. But in 1966 the channel decided that, instead of carrying live transmissions of Senate committee hearings on the Vietnam war, as rival NBC was doing, it would prefer to go with an eighth rerun of an episode of The Real McCoys and a fifth rerun of an I Love Lucy episode.
Friendly resigned from CBS in disgust.
(Ironically, in the light of subsequent events in the Friendly story, Lucille Ball had herself been investigated by McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee because she had registered in 1936 as a member of the Communist Party. She was cleared.)
Friendly used to regale us with stories from the heyday of CBS News. Such as the time when, to mark the launch of Telstar I, the first communications satellite over the Atlantic, CBS honchos decided to transmit live pictures from various locations around the US to Europe. During the broadcast, the director was segueing deftly from one remote camera to another. One of the shots was of a herd of buffalo grazing on the Great Plains, and astonished studio staff heard this deathless cry from the director ring round the gallery: "Cue the buffalo!"
Friendly also gave us a series of talks on his time with Ed Murrow and showed us the ground-breaking series of See It Now programmes the pair did together, including the Senator Joseph McCarthy episode.
I went along each week and enjoyed the talks. I did not take notes. At the penultimate meeting, Friendly announced that the following week there would be an exam.
On the fateful day, I sat down and looked at the paper, and for the only time in my life I could not even begin to answer a single question. So after a few minutes I got up and left the room.
At the end of the year, students were issued with a record listing all the courses taken, and the marks awarded for each (or rather, Pass or Fail). For his series of talks Friendly gave me a Pass.
I never figured out why. Did he take pity on me? Did he think he must have lost my paper? Could he not believe that a student couldn't be bothered to take his exam? (Friendly had an ego as big as the Ritz.) Whatever it was, I had reason to be grateful to him: in order to receive your master's degree you had to gain a Pass in every course. I might well not now have the impressive parchment with the blue ribbon I still keep in a drawer somewhere ("To all those persons to whom these presents may come, greeting . . ."). After all these years I must dig it out, wherever it is, have it framed and hang it on the wall, before it yellows any further.
Good Night, and Good Luck is on general release