James Mossman

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David James Mossman (10 September 1926 – 5 April 1971) was a British journalist, broadcaster, a TV reporter, film-maker, interviewer and former MI6 agent with a famously acerbic interviewing style. He once verbally attacked then prime minister Harold Wilson live on air, over his support of US President Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War. On another occasion, he took the Singapore prime minister to task for his habit of throwing his political opponents in jail.

A member of the Panorama team in the 1960s specialising in foreign affairs, he was reassigned to presenting regular arts slot by the BBC because of the controversy around his interviewing style.

With David Webster, he made two notable programmes about the 1964 presidential election: A Choice or an Echo, about the differences between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater; and Thunder on the Left, about the Right-wingers surrounding Goldwater.^[1]

Generally recognised to be very handsome, he had a Canadian male lover called Louis Hanssen. Hanssen was married and 8 years younger than Mossman. He died in 1968 of an accidental overdose.^[2] Work colleagues of Mossman described Hanssen as domineering.

Probably suffering from depression, he committed suicide in his cottage in Norfolk by taking a fatal overdose of barbiturates, leaving behind a note that read: “I can’t bear it any more, though I don’t know what ‘it’ is.”

Peter Shaffer, the author of the play Equus claimed that during a stay at the Norfolk cottage that Mossman, of whom he was a friend, told him the story on which he based the play.^[3]

On 14 February 2007, The Reporter, a play by Nicholas Wright based on his book and directed by Richard Eyre premiered at the Royal National Theatre in London. The play explores the social climate in the years before Mossman's death as well as the reasons for the death itself.

[edit] Bibliography

• Rebels in paradise : Indonesia's civil war, Jonathan Cape publishers, 1961, ISBN B0007KG0SE
• Beggars on horseback. Little Brown, 1966, ISBN B0007DRYJ0
• Love, Love, Love, BBC, 1967, ISBN B0007K7YY8
• Lifelines, Bodley Head, 1971, ISBN 0370014308

[edit] Sources

• The Real Jim, The Guardian, 3 February 2007
• Interview with Nicholas Wright, Financial Times, 16 February 2007
• Slot on Mossman and the play The Reporter on BBC Radio 4's programme, The World Tonight - 22 February 2007

[edit] See also

• James Mossman at the Internet Movie Database
• Vladimir Nabokov talks to James Mossman, 4 October 1969 - BBC 2
• The Reporter, play about James Mossan at the National Theatre based on the book by Nicholas Wright.
• To Be a Witness - James Mossman
• "Sir Oswald Mosley Discusses His Political Career with James Mossman" [transcription of BBC Television Panorama program]. The Listener Vol. 80 (31 October 1968), pp. 576-78.