Television
Pure yuck
Wendy Cope
Last week I made a few comments about the extraordinary things that people will laugh at. Thursday evening saw the first episode of a new Comic Strip serial called South Atlantic Raiders (BBC 2, 9 p.m.). There were some funny scenes in it, most of them featuring Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders as a pair of ornitholog- ists hating each other in an isolated wooden hut. The part that surprised me was set in a prison, where one of the male characters narrowly escaped being the victim of a homosexual rape. Since the programme is recorded without a studio audience, you didn't actually hear anyone laughing at this, but somebody must have thought it was funny, or it wouldn't have been there.
I haven't had a chance to discuss the scene with anyone else who saw it and find out if I was alone in being stonily un- amused. The programme that does come up in conversation at the moment is A Sense of Guilt (BBC 1, 9.30 p.m., Tues- day). Over tea the other day a friend asked me what I thought about Rudi Davies, who plays the young girl, Sally. Is she attrac- tive? And what about the way she talks? I think she's good-looking and I like the way she talks. My friend disagreed. Neither she nor her husband is at all taken with Ms Davies's appearance and they find her speech peculiar. Their daughter's friend's father, on the other hand, speaks of little else but how much he fancies her. On another occasion a male friend expressed admiration for Trevor Eve as Felix, the middle-aged writer. Right from the start, he said, it has been a very accurate portrayal of a man pretending to be in love but actually on automatic pilot. All of which goes to show that this Andrea Newman serial has, like its predecessors, gained quite a hold on the viewing public. The tug-of-love drama Stolen (ITV, 9 p.m., Friday) causes me to suffer a mild sense of guilt. We are, presumably, meant to feel some sympathy for Marianne, the mother, even though she is selfish, flighty and thick as the telephone directory. I find 'It's the queue to be ill.'
this difficult. When I've seen current affairs programmes about the issue I've felt a great deal of sympathy with the mothers and I can't help feeling that Marianne may be damaging their cause. I'm not sure why I'm still following this serial because much of the time I find it boring. Every week I think I won't bother with the next episode, then I see a trailer and want to know what happens.
I was looking forward to seeing the much-advertised new Coca-Cola advertise- ment (ITV) but this turned out to be something of a disappointment. We heard only a few snatches of 'I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing', a number for which I have a nostalgic fondness. In the early Seventies I taught the decommercialised version to hundreds of schoolchildren. The headmaster, a nice man, loved to hear his flock belting out the pretty song about peace and international siblinghood. Too busy to watch television, he didn't realise it had begun life as a soft drink commercial and was quite upset when I told him. Part of me knew it was pure yuck but another part still fancied itself as Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, despite the regret- table absence from the staff-room of any- one resembling Christopher Plummer. I never did buy the record; it would have been nice to hear it sung all the way through. Never mind. I've still got the sheet music. And the guitar. Some fanta- sies die hard.
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