Tina Brown

which gave me a kind of skew-eyed view of sort of realms of society, which I think actually helped me be a journalist.

So that when I took over Tatler, which was essentially, you know, the house organ of the sort of the silly people, as it were, I was able to make it into something kind of more satirical and more journalistic, while at the same time being able to kind of pretend that I could, you know, pass, as it were, in all those Debbie balls and things.

Were they patient?

My parents were absolutely wonderful.

I mean, my mother was hysterical.

She was very, very subversive and funny and iconoclastic.

My father was a big sort of lovely teddy bear of a man, sort of country gentleman look in that era of filmmaking, which was, you know, he made the Agatha Christie films and actors were all kind of

you know of the lawrence olivier type so there was he was a wonderful guy but they were very very warm and supportive of me and i was very rebellious and very iconoclastic like my mother and i was constantly being asked to leave these boarding schools because i just was just trouble you know it wasn't i was going out meeting boys getting drunk whatever i i just was giving a lot of mouth you know to to the staff what were the specific expulsion causes

Well, I led a demonstration on the lacrosse pitch against the fact that we weren't allowed to have clean underwear more than twice a week.

Well, I mean, I cared about it because I didn't like it.

And I led a march across the lacrosse pitch and I was, you know, thrown out because of it because, you know, school was very annoyed about it.

I mean, they found me just somebody who was disruptive.

So, but every time this happened, it happened three times, actually.

Each time my father would drive up with my mother and he would say to the head teacher,

you must feel so incredibly disappointed to have failed with this brilliant girl.

I mean, what a terrible thing to be such a kind of unable to handle, you know, people who are different.

Yes, that was the other thing.

I kept a diary.

And I mean, again, they were in the wrong.

They were snooping in my diary.