Television
. . . and yet again
Richard Ingrams
Iwas not quite right last week about the 1. book programmes. No sooner had I in" ferred that the BBC had abandoned the idea than I read in the newly relaunched Books and Bookmen that a new programme is on the way. Good news, until you get the addi- tional information that the comperes are to be Esther Rantzen and Russell Harty. Neither has any literary expertise but that might not matter so much, nor the fact that they are both of them rather grotesque specimens. My gripe, which I reiterate again and again, is that the BBC keeps on dredg- ing up the same old faces. Good television, like good journalism should involve con. stant experimentation with new people. But the BBC being a comfortable monopoly prefers to play safe. This usually involves Barry Norman, who returned with a new series of Omnibus °_,,11 Sunday. Almost all the critics were agree' that the last series was fairly abysmal, the main reason being that Norman quite eh" viously is not an Arts man. If anything he is Showbiz. But here he was back again kick- ing off disastrously with a progranniie about furniture and fashion design in Milan. Old Barry seems to have done very well on the trips front in the last few months. According my reckoning he has been to Hong Kong, Hollywood and now Milan — and all at our expense. I found it hard on this occasion to see why we were expected to admire various expensive Italian sweaters and jeans on the BBC's 010 programme devoted to the Arts. Bar/ Norman obviously has an interest in nails clothes, as was clear from his Hong lOng, film, but it is going a bit far to make out that this is all to do with Art. One gushy buyer from Harrods tried to make out that when you buy a Missoni sweater 'it is like, buying a Rembrandt' — a far-fetched and pseudy claim if ever I heard one. The 10,
i gramme became more preposterous as `
moved on to the ugly modern furniture designed by Milanese pseud Ettore Sottsass whose idea of a good joke, according to the Radio Times, is a bookcase angled at 30 degrees. A senior designer from C°n: ran's told us that the great thing about Signor Sottsass is that he 'forces people to renegotiate their relationship' with things like bookcases, and apparently a lot of his stuff is shortly to be put on show in the V&A's trendy basement annexe. Especially offensive was the way Norman angled his programme as an attack on British attitudes to design. I am sure there are plenty good British designers who make sensible bookcases and who could do with some publicity on the BBC. But then no one would get any foreign travel out of making a programme about them. Along with some newspapers the BBC tried to drum up an atmosphere of hysteria about the raising of the Mary Rose from the bed of the Solent, even urging viewers and listeners to go down to Portsmouth and line the shorefront! As for viewers at home the Whole thing came a cropper when those who had got up at 7.30 on Sunday morning (not, I need hardly add, myself) to see live coverage were told that owing to a technical hitch it had all been postponed. When the ship finally came out of the water on Mon- day, the BBC representative went wild even going so far as to say, 'she is seeing air for the first time since she sank'. But amid all the hooting of sirens and the popping of champagne corks I found it hard to get ex- cited about some rather boring-looking, very muddy old planks of wood, Maybe it will be better when it's all been tidied up but I doubt it Like the recapture of the Falkland Islands, the raising of the Mary Rose looked like a superbly efficient but ultimately pointless exercise. Much of the him of the historic event featuring strange Men in wellington boots wandering around With bits of nautical equipment was very reminiscent of Smiley's People. You had the same feeling that no one knew what on earth was going on.
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