Witty, hard-drinking, artistically talented, and sexually voracious, Daniel Farson (1927-1997) is perhaps the quintessential mid-twentieth-century Soho bohemian. The son of the once famous American travel writer, foreign correspondent, and memoirist, Negley Farson, he inherited his father’s restlessness but, in Daniel's case, this didn’t just take the form of wanderlust. It repeatedly prompted him to switch careers just as he was becoming successful within that career.

He went from being a staff photographer for "Picture Post" magazine to being a television chat-show host with a taste for what were regarded as controversial subjects, including naturism and mixed-race marriage. By the late 1950s he was fronting "Farson’s Guide To The British", a popular television series that anticipated the work of Alan Whicker and Louis Theroux. Within a few years, though, he’d abandoned this career and moved to Limehouse, where he ran a pub/music venue that hosted performances by Annie Ross and other well-known singers.

Towards the end of his life, he reinvented himself as a writer of memoirs, biographies, travel books, essays, and journalism. Among the most successful of his books was "Soho in the Fifties", which juxtaposed his beautiful black and white photos with his amusing and often rose-tinted reminiscences of the area. He also wrote a biography of his friend, the painter Francis Bacon – a book that spawned the 1998 movie "Love Is The Devil", starring Derek Jacobi and the young Daniel Craig.

Leo Hornak – post-production maestro for Radio Sohemia and writer/producer of BBC Radio 4’s forthcoming "Archive Hour" documentary about Farson – will be discussing the life and career of this charismatic, charming, self-destructive, and often difficult man. The documentary is scheduled for broadcast in January 2027, the centenary of Farson’s birth.

Leo Hornak is a freelance radio and podcast writer/producer. His work for“This American Life” podcast was shortlisted for a prestigious Peabody Award. He has also had occasional journalism published in “The Sunday Times” and “The Independent”.

Artist and writer Clive Jennings has lived in Fitzrovia for around thirty years. He is Arts Editor of both the Fitzrovia News and the Soho Clarion. Clive studied Fine Art at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and St Martins School of Art. He had a career in fashion and and as an art-dealer, print publisher and curator, during which he ran galleries in Mayfair, Fitzrovia and Chelsea. He organised the Contemporary Print Show at the Barbican and founded the National Print Gallery. Clive has a studio in Covent Garden – and his nom de guerre is “Fitzrovia Flaneur”.

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