Television
Folk opera
Alexander Chancellor
rrhe Dismissal, a six-part Australia' .1. political soap opera, is about the ri,se and fall of the former Labor Prime ter, Mr Gough Whitlam. It is obvious'Y inspired by the dramatisation on Arnericar: television of the Watergate affair, but; Australian politics cannot quite carry burden of such melodramatic treatnielit; The effect is ridiculous, even if ratlige; enjoyable in its way. The theme music lit the series, which began last Sunday on Channel 4, is a Chopin etude, presti—u ; ably chosen with great care to convey we atmosphere of Australian politics in tuilie 1970s. After the briefest imagillatT account of Mr Whitlam's rise to Povier'e' spoken in tones of dark foreboding, vie,a;e suddenly transferred to Amsterdam %sin% a sinister Middle Eastern financier, wh°,:fit spectacles hang from his neck by looks like a string of diamonds, is discus; sing lending the Australian governMetlie some hundreds of millions of dollars e. help it carry out its Utopian prograraill He is clearly up to no good. Back in Canberra a Michael Heselti.n,,c look-alike, the Deputy Prime Minister, Pal; Cairns, falls for a sultry Asian w°,,Artiiss called Juni Morosi. Until he meets ''to Morosi, Dr Cairns — so we are given
understand — has been busy trying to do good to others. She scoffs at this and tells him that she, in contrast, has spent 30 years trying to put herself in touch with her own feelings. This approach to life is new to Dr Cairns. It comes as a revelation and he asks Miss Morosi to become his personal assis- tant. It is clear that another seed of tragedy has been sown.
If Dr Cairns is disguised as Mr Hesel- tine, Mr Whitlam looks uncannily like my brother-in-law John Wells when he is dressed up as Denis Thatcher. We see Mr Whitlam taking part in what by Westmin- ster standards is a dull and rather well- behaved debate in the Australian Parlia- ment. The Speaker, played by a little bald man with glasses, is unaccountably hyster- ical, screaming 'Order, order' at every 0Pportunity. The whole thing is like a little folk opera that has been orchestrated by Wagner. But I will watch the next instal- Ment.
Last week I was writing about the Shameless plugging of books on television. On Sunday we had the greatest plug of all When Melvyn Bragg devoted the whole of 11,Is South Bank Show (LWT) to Mr Joseph do love the limelight') Heller, whose 11.eW novel, God Knows, has been pub- lished in England this week. The book, Which I haven't seen, retells the biblical story of King David in what seems a rather racy manner. The interview with the un- attractive Mr Heller was interspersed with quotations from the novel read by the actor David Suchet dressed as King David. I watched it for only a few minutes when I had to turn off. From Mr Heller's point of view, I fear that the programme was a mistake. Those who might have been tempted to buy the book on the strength of Catch 22 and Good as Gold will most probably have decided not to after seeing it.
Last Friday's Arena (BBC2) offered a long profile of one of the most miserable people in the history of jazz, Billie Holi day. She was raped when she was ten years old and then punished for it. She also fell asleep as a child in her grandmother's arms and woke up to find the old woman dead, with her arms locked immovably around her. These were only the worst of innumer- able ghastly experiences, which included in later life imprisonment for heroin addic- tion. The programme was extremely well put together and included some memor- able performances, though there is some- thing a bit depressing about the way in which Billie Holiday makes even the most cheerful lyrics sound sad. Among the people interviewed on the programme, the most interesting and also, I thought, the most sinister was Miss Holiday's faithful maid, a demure and rather sophisticated woman of slightly Asian appearance who described how she would supply her with clean drug syringes to reduce the risks of infection. She also smuggled her beer into the hospital where she lay dying. Humph! After this it was a relief on Saturday night to see another Arena profile, this time a repeat, of another jazz musician, Eubie Blake, who although born like Miss Holi- day in Baltimore remained incorrigibly cheerful and died when he was over 100 years old.
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