the narrator, Anthony Lawrence, the BBC's Far Peculiar, perverse and
absurd things happening on the box. There was Early Bird, for instance, Exotic Week In spatter bits of bull-fighting and heart surgery With the idea that it is simultaneity which LAST week, to parody Mr. John Grierson, Lione had a sense of strange, wonderful, and baseball and folk-dancing around NATO, Matters and that to be bored in unison will some- how lead to greater international understanding. tYptic whisky on Monitor and so reverently courted as a sage by Muggeridge and Miller that about the actual writing he does, the specifically Clichés about the hardboiled newspaper game. few of their questions elicited much information his contemporaries. There was the second instal- only emphasised its squashily floundering upbringing in South Dakota contrasted with the literary problems he faces or what he feels about instal- meat of Peter Wildeblood's series, Six Shades of Black (Granada), which I had thought promising; the superficial glitter of this episode, however, Humphrey's reiterated expressions of joy at his hY now somewhat histrionic intensity of James Baldwin 's memories of Harlem. Cawston's Born Chinese was packed with infor- In My Childhood (Rediffusion) Vice-President BBC-1 produced documentaries on Hong Kong and the war in the Yemen. But although Richard illation, and brought the canyons of modern factories, the squatter slums, the agricultural apartment houses, the busy harbour, the huge hinterland wonderfully alive, it was very much a documentary it these, and the thesis was that of Past correspondent. His idea was to illustrate the Chinese character—its exclusiveness, un- neurotic was Norman Mailer swilling his apoca- In what must have been a week for the exotic, efficiency, hard neurotic working materialism and, . above all, its sense of racial and cultural superiority to us red, hairy, drunken barbarians— by examining the life of a young middle-class Couple, the Lungs, and their household of two children, unmarried relative and , crisply in- dependent servant. To establish the primacy of the Chinese in the Colony, we were never allowed iii see a European face; lo emphasise Chinese inscrutability, none of the protagonists was ever given the chance to express himself or to corn- 'nent on the narration in English (although Mr. hnit is an English teacher); and I must admit al having myself lived in the Far East, I began t0 long for a bit of argument.
As for Lord Kilbracken's Journey to a War in the 'Adventure' series, this had even more serious narrator trouble. Perhaps because his frightening photographs of chained Egyptian prisoners and of corpses mingling with sand had already appeared in a Sunday newspaper—if not also because there wasn't much film to show— producer Harry Hastings combined the travel- ogue with a poetic treatment of Lord Kilbracken's other career as an Irish farmer. Since there wasn't time to develop this theme of narrator as hero (with wanderlust? with need to supplement income? with special interest in Arabs?) the pro- gramme tended to fall apart.
PATRICK ANDERSON
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