Some people did rather well in lockdown and mastered French, or needlepoint, or read all 75 Maigret novels. Me, I watched old television, most of it courtesy of the BBC archive – anyone heard of Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who did some terrific programmes on archaeology?

Some people did rather well in lockdown and mastered French, or needlepoint, or read all 75 Maigret novels. Me, I watched old television, most of it courtesy of the BBC archive – anyone heard of Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who did some terrific programmes on archaeology? They included a funny quiz show featuring distinguished archaeologists called Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? Alas, the archive offers just a few programmes from each series.

One of the best was Face to Face, a series of half-hour interviews by the politician-broadcaster John Freeman, with distinguished figures of the 1950s and 1960s – Martin Luther King, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh (who said the reason he was taking part was that he was broke) – and Carl Jung.

I knew little about Jung except a recollection that he was more mystical than Freud. But, as this half-hour interview from 1959 showed, he was fascinating: a Swiss pastor’s son who studied medicine, then psychiatry, because he couldn’t afford archaeology. He was shrewd and humorous. When Freeman asked whether he believed in God – as he did with many interviewees – Jung said, “I don’t believe; I know.” (He had a problem with the concept of belief once he’d accepted an hypothesis – “If I know a thing, I don’t believe it.”)

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