Poor show
Richard Ingrams
I used to enjoy having a good sneer on a Sunday at Read All About It, the BBC programme devoted to new paperbacks. Now however it has been taken off for reasons that are not altogether clear; the programme was pretty ghastly, it is true, but things could easily have been put to rights with a new compere in place of the ingratiating Ronald Harwood and a resolute refusal not to invite show-biz show-offs like Terry Wogan to talk about W. B. Yeats. There is certainly enough going on in paperback publishing to provide fodder for a fortnightly programme but the BBC seem to have abandoned the idea leaving only the Book Programme to deal with new publications.
The Book Programme still has Robert Robinson in the chair but the format has changed slightly. The idea now is to discuss a genre of books rather than an assortment of new titles. As with all panels where two or three are gathered together in the studio, the success of the programme depends on getting the right mix.
An earlier programme in the series featured four travel writers including Jan Morris and Paul Theroux, and worked so well that I was quite annoyed when it ended. Last week the subject was treachery, with special reference to Andrew Boyle's book A Cli mate of Treason and the panel included Boyle himself and Malcolm Muggeridge.
Mugg was especially good on the motiva tion of Philby & Co, seeing them not like Graham Greene as dedicated Marxists but more as frustrated liberals attracted by the brutal methods of Soviet dictatorship. Mugg referred to the excitement with which Beatrice Webb, another Soviet admirer, used to say 'It is true, Malcolm, that in Russia people disappear!', thinking that if only she could cope with her opponents in that sort of way everything would be plain sailing. The question of how Cambridge and homosexuality fitted into the picture was never answered partly because the two other speakers, Bryan Forbes and Phillip Knightley (part author of an earlier Philby book), had nothing much to contribute to the debate, which for that reason failed to take off.
While the world of books gets a poor show on TV, new films are given excessive coverage, the stars and directors being treated with ill deserved reverence. This week, on his Films 79, Barry Norman reviewed a film called Yanks directed by a man with a beard called John Schlesinger and written by a fat man with a moustache called Colin Welland who does the commentaries on bowls tournaments for the BBC. Some idea of the film's quality could be gauged from a romantic scene in the black-out featuring Vanessa Redgrave and an American Admirer.
V.R.: 'You make it too simple'.
A.A.: 'I come from a simple primitive people'.
Barry Norman described this stuff as beautifully observed, witty and tender. I thought it all looked jolly dull.
If Schlesinger, Norman and Co wanted to see a good film they should have watched A High Wind in Jamaica (BBC1), directed by Alexander Mackendrick of Ladyk liters fame with a theme song composed by Christopher Logue and Larry Adler and starring, among others, Viviane Ventura and Martin Amis, quondam literary editor of the New Statesman. The youthful Amis plays one of Richard Hughes's children who on their way home to England from Jamaica become accidental stowaways on a pirate ship captured by an unshaven Anthony Quinn. Like the book, the film has an appealing throw-away quality. If it has messages they are not stressed. Love and violence are everyday things, and the death of little Martin Amis who falls off a window ledge trying to get a better view of a cockfight below is accepted as a matter-of-fact event by the other children. There is no sentimentality, and a great deal of style and humour. No wonder the film sank without trace when it was first shown in 1965.
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