Television
A slight Frost
Clive Gammon
Somewhere in the trackless middle of The ' Frost Programme (ITV) this week, a distraught member of the audience began to interrupt violently. "You're spoiling it for everyone else," Frost chided him. This was in Tel Aviv, the subject the shooting down of the Libyan airliner and hence more basic questions of , Arab-Israeli relations, matters obviously evoking intense feelings in the Israeli audience and in the Palestinian Arab lawyer who confronted them.
But Frost, to judge him by his choice of words, seemed to be thinking of it in terms of a children's party: "You're spoiling it for everyone, Tarquin. Another word and it's off to bed, birthday or no birthday! " He is also a master of the question which reduces a subject of great passion to the level of a dispute over piecework rates: "Have the Palestinian Arabs currently got an unfair deal?" he asked.
I saw only a little of the first of the new Frost series last week before switching across to the considerably more heavyweight probings of William F. Buckley Jr in Firing Line on BBC-1 where, to be honest, I found surprising symptoms of homework not done (for instance, to keep calling the province 'North Ireland' was either evidence of this or remarkable affectation). So this week I did it the other way, missing a Buckley/Shirley Williams confrontation.
It soon became plain that this was a first-order mistake, in spite of the appearance of Mr Leo Abse (always a treat and this time looking like a little old lady with some embroidered garment peeping through his nearly buttoned-up tunic). Could anyone have expected a serious discussion among a large number of vociferously patriotic Israelis, a Palestinian Arab and two British Jews who further infuriated the main audience by their easy detachment from events? What was the point of it? Clearly nothing new could emerge, only a powerful venting of feelings.
I think that what David Frost was after was a spectacle. Surely television has now got to the stage when it has outgrown a shouting match for a shouting match's sake, though you wouldn't think so from the proliferation of mass audience participation shows. Shallow and noisy is the only way to describe most of them.
Shallow but not noisy, though, was the phrase for the first of Hugh Whiteman's series of four plays under the title of The Pearcross Girls (BBC-2). This one was 'Sweet Julia ', a light piece about one of the four sisters (all played by Penelope Wilton and on this form very prettily too). As we kept being told, Julia and her family were Middle Glass, i.e., non-persons on the evidence of the play. Julia struggled feebly for a little while against her planned marriage to an inarticulate square, recognisable by his short haircut and watch-chain, but in the end succumbed in spite of the charms of that that very professional charmer Richard O'Callaghan, a long-haired aspirant writer (wore a duffle-coat and wrote short stories! Time-switched from 1943, maybe?). Slight? Superficial? More than a touch Woman's Own-y? Yes, of course. But not as slight as David Frost.
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