Bakewell '˜in Paris for Pinter affair but came back for tea'

Joan Bakewell has told how she once jetted to Paris to spend the day with playwright Harold Pinter during their affair before returning to England to cook dinner for her children.

Dame Joan Bakewell. Picture: Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire

The Labour peer, 84, is preparing to release her own account of the eight-year relationship nearly four decades after Pinter used it as the basis for his play Betrayal.

She said she was “deeply shocked” when she first read Pinter’s much-acclaimed piece following their relationship in the 1960s when she was a BBC presenter married to producer Michael Bakewell.The mother-of-two wrote a drama, Keeping In Touch, in a fit of “intensity” in reaction to Pinter’s work, first performed in 1978, but kept it well-hidden until Saturday when it airs on BBC Radio 4.

Ahead of its broadcast, she told the Radio Times: “Once, I was doing a series about bridges that required occasional filming outside London.

“I said to Michael, ‘I have to get up early because I have to go to Ironbridge’. I went to Heathrow and got a flight to Paris to spend the day with Harold, who was filming there.

“I was back in time to cook supper for the children.”

She said she did not feel guilty during much of the affair, which also coincided with Pinter’s marriage to Vivien Merchant.

Nobel Prize winner Pinter died in 2008 at the age of 78.