Contemporary Arts
TELEVISION AND RADIO
'HELEN, who will muddle things,' says Margaret Schlegel, of Howards End, rattling along about German rivers at a luncheon party, 'says no, it's like music. The course of the Oder is to be like music. It's obliged to remind her of a symphonic poem. The part by the landing stage is in B minor, if I remember rightly, but lower down things get extremely mixed. There is a slodgy theme in several keys at once, meaning mud banks—.'
Like Helen, television will muddle things, and in much the same way. It has still to learn that saying a thing twice at once is not • necessarily twice as good as saying it singly. It is over-emphatic; it labours its points or its imagery; it galumphs where it ought to trip. At home, detached from the warmth and snugness of hundreds of your fellow-beings, which in the cinema tend to sweep you up into some sort of communal excitement, you arc subdued, sharp-eyed, in a debunking and deflationary mood: the more effortless tele- vision appears, the more it throws its lines away, the less it twinkles and makes eyes at you, the easier it is to like it. Peter Ustinov made this point when he showed us round his house in an engaging but slightly embarrassed way on Thursday evening's television. 'Animal. Vegetable, Mineral' was a success (he said) because it seemed to behave as it wanted to, because those taking part didn't try to appear as anything but middle-aged dons and museum- men; other programmes of elaborate explana- tidn for the simple-minded were failures because they went on so, repeating. under- estimating intelligence, talking down. Eco- nomy, authenticity, reticence: these three, not the smallest bit necessary in, the cinema, are very well suited, I think, to the television screen.
Himalayas in the tracks of Abominable Snowmen. Two crooked stunt-promoters and one straight scientist went up into the snow and had their fill of horrors: avalanches, gales, howls in the night, dmmonic possession of the wireless, furry hands creeping under the tent flaps (only Lime Grove's gloves should be a little longer, unless Abominable Snowmen have smooth white arms)—all this, and a good deal of terror and atmosphere too. All went well until they shot an Abominable Snowman. ten foot five and with long brown hair. And then, dreadful mistake, we were shown him. His was to be a face beyond humanity—wise, gaunt, suffering, inexpressibly moving—and we would have accepted that he was so if only he had been kept wrapped up in his shroud on the sledge. But the face kept appearing, and finally six or seven creatures (or their ghosts, it was not clear which) stood there writhing and suffering, ten foot five. They looked rather like the Yak in The Bad Child's Book of Beasts. It spoilt everything. Songs without words are what television has yet to learn.
ISABEL QU1OLY
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