Contemporary Arts
TELEVISION AND RADIO
SINCE I began looking at it I have had a notion that splendid television can result from artlessness—artlessness in the actors, of course. not in the production. And artlessness, of course again, of a rather high order : the ease of the man who knows perfectly well what he is up to, is perfectly sure of his subject (and so of himself when he talks of it), and can look the camera in the eye, as lion-hunters do lions.
This notion was confitmed by an evening at Lime Grove for last week's production of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. Fifteen minutes before the show began the Panel arrived. exuding after-dinner high spirits and good humour. In this small breathing-space they rehearsed with three extra exhibits, had lights and cameras adjusted about their cars, and were ready, with none of their spirits damped, for the boX to twirl and announce them. No wonder it comes across as the most amiable of the panel shows. No fuss, no distractions, no audience: just three learned men who have eaten a good meal, and Glyn Daniel, who beautifully avoids the simper and unction so often found sidling us in and out of pro- grammes. But what exactly makes up the pleasure of watching them? The fun, I think, of seeing anything skilfully done, the layman's gasp that anything can seem so magically divined, the faint risk of obloquy if the magic fails and the layman's faint, foredoomed, and malicious'hope of catching out the expert; the personality of the Panel and its chairman, and the interest of each fact produced. This last not the leait of them : we are a nation squirrel- like about its facts. Was that large object like an enamelled sunflower really used to make candles? Before the \end of last week's pro- gramme Lime 'Grove was shrilling With tele- phone calls to say that, whatever Letchworth or thb.Panel said, it was something connected with sausages. The viewers may bc laymen. they may rnuddle their facts about candles and sausages, but they aren't napping, they care about accuracy and facts, and pots and tiles arc bec311114 a national hobby. By the look of things, tire, 'anel explained to me on its way to the station afterwards, we arc fast trying to become a nation of archteologists, with far more students thari there are museum posts or spaces to dig in, and a firm and perhaps healthy belief that learning is somethinsg romantic and adventurous, that archveologtsts, far from growing dim-eyed among their pots and fossils, spend bronzed, athletic lives in sunny Mediter- ranean digs, in caves and pot-holes less sunny but no less exciting, or, best of all, wearing fins and flippers on the bed of the sea. Animal, and allowed for a good deal of rolling, but a few minutes more of Beryl Reid's Confessions of a Lady Glass-Blower (her dreadful straw- like hair, her sad flat hat hung over one ear, the wriggles in the glass at each disturbance of her blowing) and I might, as they say, have died laughing. This is the best of the personally introduced variety shows I have yet seen on television, with a singer called Alma Cogan who looks peculiarly like Gina Loilobrigida, and Benny Hill himself looking like a moon- struck Bob Hope but behaving quite differ- ently; and it made Henry Hall's Face the Music on Wednesday look rather wan and sad, except for Elisabeth Welch singing fit to melt the screen in a snowstorm, and the Hulberts who, like- crumpets or the Albert Memorial. and a few other dear and imperishable things in life, go on and on, and always as good as ever.
Not to neglect the wireless, there was the Third's production on Sunday of Roy Camp- bell's translation of La Vida es Sueilo of Calderon, a play which spends some of the greatest of Spanish poetry on philosophising that old chestnut used by Boccaccio. Shake- speare, the Arabian Nights, and a lot more— the sleeping man transported from rags to riches, treated royally for a day, and then returned to his misery. Sly has turned into Segismundo. Prince of Poland, chained from birth and ignorant of his identity to cheat a ferocious horoscope, and, rechained after a day of barbarous freedom, making the most famous soliloquy of the Spanish theatre on the dream quality of life, of authority, of experience, and of dreams within dreams. A distinguished cast headed by Fay Compton did its best, but poetry and production sounded tinny, as if it was all-being shouted in an enormous empty studio, the nearest, I suppose. they could get to Calderon's cavernous wastes. But at least, praise heaven, they didn't have accents—Spanish or Polish or any other sort. Monday's production of On Bee's Strand, also op the Third, was so thick with the Oirish that I swore to read, and not listen to, my Yeats from now on.
ISABEL DURAN
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