17 SEPTEMBER 1983, Page 29

Television

Misplaced

Richard Ingrams

least one fairly welcome sight greeted I. Ine on Monday this week, to wit Sue ips—te5' reading the Nine O'Clock News on 13C1 instead of the unappealing John tifttrnArYs. (We were not spared the sight ; u "4111Phrys altogether, as he subsequent- 7 cropped up reporting on the SDP con- r.ence at Salford in company with the unintelligible John Cole.) It is difficult to a. PPreciate the BBC's thinking in transferr- I,Zg Sue Lawley from Nationwide, to which e was very well suited, and replacing her ,the Nationwide-substitute with Yester- . aY s Man Desmond Wilcox and the con- troversial left-wing Jamaican lady about mwhnoArrl f wrote last week. It would have more sense to leave Lawley where she i and to promote Jan Leeming, who s ethasilY the best BBC newsreader, either to ih e Nine O'Clock spot or to the early even- ini news place of the thoroughly n- i e°111Petent Moira Stuart. All the same t Takes a change to have Lawley on at nine least she looks quite sane and sensible has no trouble reading out the news, in contra st with the utterly hopeless Ms Stuart, Spy all the hoo-ha about the ITV al?, series Reilly, which seems to have been 4;.retrY damp squib by all accounts, comes Inas of War, another multi-million- America lITV marathon, this time of Of

manufacture. It is based on one b those' enormously fat and indigestible f:r"s bY Herman Wouk and follows the tunes of Nave,' a senior American naval officer, O

bY Robert Mitchum, and his two sns at the outbreak of war in 1939. I must :1: 1.4 heart sinks at the thought of televi- ..'1 re sinks the second world war yet i especially now that writers and m- ,1;esamos have discovered the showbiz value racial hatred and genocide. Winds of 7ar, or seemed least the bit of it that I saw, ,llued horribly reminiscent of the appall- 'H "? g Holocaust which the BBC to its great anle broadcast a few years ago. There was

a totally implausible series of scenes in which a group of American neutrals escap- ing from Poland were lined up by the Gestapo and questioned about whether they were Jewish or not. Meanwhile Robert Mit- chum was watching President Roosevelt having his breakfast in the White House. The prospect of this absurd saga continuing for several more weeks I find extremely depressing.

There has been some controversy in ec- clesiastical circles about the decision of ITV to transfer their 6 p.m. God Slot on Sunday tb 2 p.m. on the grounds that nobody watches it. It is pointless of church leaders, however, to complain about the change. What they ought to be concerned about is the content of these so-called religious pro- grammes and the fact that invariably they are produced and presented by non- believers. The recent success of the Mug- geridge interview with Catherine Bramwell ,Booth shows that there is always a big au- dience for religion so long as the speakers do not mince words and try to please everybody. (In one recent ITV God Slot the speaker was Jean Rook, for heaven's sake.)

The BBC is just as guilty as ITV in the camouflaged and apologetic way it presents religion. So much so that it has now become quite hard to tell which programmes if any are put out by the religious department. On Sunday a new series began in the traditional Peter France slot, i.e. extremely late at night, called Taking Stock, described as a New Series on the problems facing people in middle age. As a well known middle-aged person myself I felt a faint flicker of interest in this but it turned out to be an extremely dull affair — a four-day seminar in Bristol attended by carefully selected middle-aged, middle-class types who were asked to discuss their problems by a man with a beard called Professor Charles Hardy who we were told has made a special study of people in their fifties. In fact the pro- gramme was almost entirely concerned with the subject of Unemployment. Virtually everyone involved in the seminar was out of a job. It may be that only the unemployed would consider signing on to take part in a seminar of this sort. But it seemed odd that the BBC should announce a programme 'Do you know what you're doing the night Len Fairclough dies?' about middle age when in fact the whole thing was about coping with redundancy. Why then all along did I have the strong im- pression that it was all supposed to be about religion? Perhaps because it was never once mentioned.