Television
No idea
Richard Ingrams The BBC has been getting stick for its Falklands reporting so I made a special effort to watch Newsnight (BBC2) which seems to attract more than its fair share of Tory criticism. It is a dreary affair as it always was with a curly-haired Scotsman presiding and a woman called Linda Alex- ander who has large glasses and a plunging neckline. The Scotsman is a familiar figure but it is a curious fact that I have never been able to put a name to him. Also hovering about is Peter Snow who was lured away from ITN for a salary of £40,000 p.a., though what he does or did to deserve it I have never been able to fathom. Whenever I see him he is presiding like a Sandhurst lecturer over a huge relief map studded with little cut-out models of tanks and ships illustrating, it could be, the Iran-Iraq war, or more recently the Falkland Islands. How this ill-assorted band of late-nighters could constitute a threat to Mrs Thatcher's drive for National Unity in the face of the enemy I cannot conceive.
This week's Radio Times has on its cover a picture of the human brain heralding a new six-part BBC2 series on the subject. I am becoming used to medical horrors early in the week and they only reinforce my resolve to stick with my black and white set, it being slightly less unpleasant to watch without having to see blood and brains in colour. A few weeks ago there was a heart transplant operation going on; this week it was the turn of brain surgery. I keep saying that such sights are of no interest or value to the general public but the BBC persists. It also persists in these long, dreary series on scientific subjects, when there are so many more interesting things to think about. Not so long ago there was an awful American called Carl Sagan who banged on week after week about the Universe. Yet it was clear from the first episode that there was very little to say about the Universe for the simple reason that no one knows much about it. Then there was the Leakey series on Evolution — where again it transpired very quickly that the good professor like all his colleagues was whistling in the dark. Now comes the Brain, another topic about which the sum of human knowledge is ex- tremely small. So how is it to be spread over six instalments, each 50 minutes long? The first programme relied heavily on an
American lady whose brain had been cut in half to cure her of epilepsy. Not surprising- ly her mental processes did not function too well as a result, but we were not told whether her epilepsy had been controlled. An argument was also posed between two sets of experts about whether the mind can be said to operate independently of the brain. This seemed to be more of a philosophical problem that called for the gesticulating Dr Jonathan Miller to come on and resolve rather than the bearded American selected for the job. I expect that most people, like me, were left in a state of utter confusion.
Meanwhile on ITV another boring marathon is in progress under the aegis of the irrepressible Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape. You can tell a lot about his latest effort, The Human Race, from the title sequence which includes the run- ning silhouette of a man, a pair of praying hands and a nude woman slipping into something loose. The Morris formula can embrace any human activity along with any other and tie them all together with a glib commentary full of pseudoscientific ex- planations signifying nothing. This week's instalment was supposedly about Art and Religion. It included women in Bali dancing about, shots of Christie's staff flogging off a lot of old icons, a bit about television commercials — 'every time we buy a car we are making decisions based on an aesthetic response' — and a group of silly Americans belonging to a California cult trying to ex- plore themselves while writhing around in an undignified way. References to Darwin, John Lennon and CND were thrown in for good measure and at the end no one was any wiser about Art or Religion.
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