Television
Oases in the summer desert
Martyn Harris
Sitting in a waterfront bar in San Diego last week (how many TV columns have openings like this?), a familiar croak came drifting. across the bay. 'Who's that?' we asked the waitress, and she said it was some singer-songwriter playing the bar next door. 'Guy namea Leeownard Cone or somethin'."Leonard Cohen!' we all squealed and ran to the dockside, where sure enough was the old groaner himself, playing to an audience of about 50 and a couple of moored rowing-boats.
Cohen, who started out as a Canadian beat poet and novelist, is a European taste, with his ineradicable reputation for bedsit- ter blues and Songs To Slash Your Wrists By. North Americans, as his collaborator Jennifer Warnes remarked in Rock Docs (Friday, BBC 2, 12.10 a.m.), are too keen on 'Keep Your Sunny Side Up' to appreci- ate the self-parodic element in Cohen. There are other rock stars who dress con- stantly in black and grey, for instance, but only Cohen has a black and grey tour bus.
Folk rockers were routinely praised as poets back in the Sixties but there were only two or three who deserved it. Cohen's best lyrics, like 'Story Of Isaac', never had the range or joyous derangement of Bob Dylan, but his was a more scrupulous talent which has lasted longer. In albums like I'm Your Man and The Future he combines a wit, seriousness and accessibility which once seemed to be where pop music was inevitably heading, but where hardly any- one else has followed.
The Cohen programme was actually a repeat of the excellent 1988 Omnibus pro- file directed by Bob Portway, but I'm not apologising because practically everything is a repeat at the moment as July sun shriv- els up the schedules. Your critic has been reduced to watching things like Channel 4 Comment (Monday–Friday, 7.50 p.m.), a total dog of a slot, which is presumably some kind of hangover from the original Channel 4 prospectus with all its babble about minorities and open access. It is a five-minute opinion piece delivered straight to camera, unrelieved by film clips or clever angles or fast cutting or any of the gimmickry our eyes are now schooled to expect. The result is that it echoes like a school hall and drones like a headmaster's address — and because of the lack of expertise on the part of its commentators almost always serves to diminish rather than empower them.
This doesn't matter when it is some party-lining MP, sucking up to his leader the slot is increasingly being carved up between Tories and Labour — but it is a shame when there is something interesting to be said, as in this week's comment by Donu Kogbara, a black woman critic of the Race Relations Act and Commission for Racial Equality. 'Education statistics', she
said, 'prove we can achieve equality with- out special laws or the patronising atten- tion of white liberals and black activists who claim to speak for us while securing themselves comfortable jobs for life on the massive gravy train of the race relations industry.' It was stirring stuff, but in the tin box labelled Comment it echoed and died.
One pleasant treat in the summer desert is the Tour de France (Channel 4) which is now a total TV event with cameras mount- ed in motorbikes, helicopters and appar- ently riders' groins, such was the view of Jesper Skibby heading into a 20-bike pile- up on Sunday. Unlike Grand Prix, which is now little more than a tedious argument between computerised suspension systems, the Tour is exciting and sexy and vicious and you can tell who is winning. It is the Spaniard Miguel Indurain at the moment, who looks like being the first man since Eddie Merckx 20 years ago to win the Tour three times in a row. He is built like a whip, has a grin like a wolf, won his last stage on a flat tyre and has as much in common with Nigel Mansell as a bullfighter with the Birmingham Bull Ring.
Indoor bungee-jumping.
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