Television
Not notable
Clive Gammon
Let us deal with various ladies to begin with. Notably there was
Diana Ross in Shou. of •the Week
on BBC 2. Why did I write 'notably'? It just slipped itself in, thereby proving that I am as sus
ceptible as anyone else to brainwashing. Because Miss Ross, as a
television artist anyway and I suspect in other ways too, is notably not notable, a thin lady with a thin voice and little else besides ghastly, knowing, practised manner, an unappealingly patronising way with an audience and clearly an invincible belief
that the minutiae of her private life are as fascinating to us as to her. Other objections: the repellent way she thrust the indifferent musicians who accompanied her to the attention of the audience; the constant referring to her inadequate representation of Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues. Lord, what would they say, did their poor Billie walk that way? Earlier, Reporter at Large (BBC 1 — David Dimbleby at the Dublin Horse Show) was in better form than last week with some neatly observed social nuances, Dimbleby sensibly laying off the antics of the Galway Blazers at the She!bourne or wherever and featuring such ladies as the one from the Irish Times (did I get that right?) who poured a load of somewhat catty scorn on other ladies who dressed up and aped the British, so she said. I didn't fancy them much, either, to tell you the truth, especially the petulant miss who laid it spitefully on her horse when it refused a jump.
Now for some funny stuff. I'd really thought that Casanova '73 would have been unrivalled this autumn for basic nastiness but now along comes Men of Affairs from HTV as a very serious challenger. A bad piece of judgement by Warren Mitchell to take on this sad rubbish and a bad piece of judgement by me, too, to miss Softly Softly: Task Force on its account, even in the decadence of this once-proud series.
More hopefully, I looked at Monty Python's Fliegen der Zircus (BBC 2), a programme of somewhat odd antecedents, having first been made for West German telly, which accounted no doubt for the slow pace of the last and major part, the,Grimm-ish fantasy about an unpleasant country with an unpleasant king, queen and princess. Heavy-going and puddingy and just right, I expect, for its original audience. The true Monty Python touch, though, came through with the splendid piece about the hen mines in North Dakota and the man with the white mouse reserve in Bavaria. Also the mouse stampede.
Ashamedly, I have to confess
that through an administrative error not of my making (the roast lamb was served up late) I missed all but the last few minutes. of Gerald Scarfe's superb animated pictures on Second House (BBC 2). Often I find Scarfe's cartoons over-stressed and counter-productive but what I saw of his brilliantly fluid film of contemporary American phenomena made me wish I'd settled for cheese on toast.
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