Television
Marketing
Richard Ingrams
The election over, BBC reporters felt able once more to assert their anti-Tory bias which they have been holding in check for the last three or four weeks. The Labour Party, which looks all set to elect a young .left-wing windbag to replace the old one who lost them the election, is already doing quite well in pasting together a 'stab-in-the- back' theory to explain their election defeat, with the Social Democrats and the Tory press being made the stabbers. Michael Cockerell, always the most entertaining of the Panorama reporters, Put
forward another version which I should
think will find quite a few takers amongst those looking for excuses for the Labour debacle. According to Cockerell's account the Tory victory owed a great deal to the sophisticated and very expensive marketing techniques used to sell Mrs Thatcher to the voters, the Labour efforts in this direction being correspondingly crude and amateur. It was perfectly true that the Tories PartY politicals were much more slick and suc- cessful — after all, they made the amazing
discovery, which you would think the others would have copied, that five minutes of party political is more than enough for
most viewers. But you cannot really credit Saatchie and Saatchi for the Tory victory,
which was virtually assured from the daY
Michael Foot took over as Labour leader. Besides which, Cockerell and others of .111,s tendency ignore the way in which any kind of advertising and PR can achieve the exact opposite to that intended just by being too
slick and too professional. the massed rally of Moonie-like young Conservatives which featured Kenny Everett's now famous 'Bomb Russia! Kick Michael Foot's stick away!' outburst may have appealed to the faithful. Many others would have been driven by it into the opposite .camp.
Cockerell's programme was well worth watching if only for the many behind-th scenes glimpses of the election campaign: We saw Denis Thatcher sitting gloomily at the back of the Tory bus, we saw Sir Robin, Day and Mrs Thatcher after they .110 finished filming their famous interview., with a BBC figure drawing Mrs Thatcher's attention to her grave breach of privilege by. referring to 'Mr' Day throughout (Mrs...," • 'Oh, Robin, you don't mind, do you? )t and a Labour MP making a complete mess
of his party political slogan 'Think positive. Act positive. Vote Labour' and having to do it all again. 'It's such a bloody silly thing to say,' he blurted out. It was the only mo- ment of sincerity in the whole coverage of the election.
The infamous Ken Russell, who used to make ridiculous bad taste fantasy films about people like Tchaikowsky, has not been heard much of lately. I was hoping that perhaps he had retired and taken up some more sensible and soothing pursuit. But he surfaced again on his Cumbrian neighbour Melvyn Bragg's South Bank Show on Sunday with a film called 'Ken Russell's view of The Planets'. I suppose we ought to be grateful that this did not consist of amazing scenes showing Gustav Hoist Wrestling in mud with Dame Ethel Smyth but it was nearly as bad. Russell had simply strung together a montage of film clips to go with the music. Mars was Trooping the Colour and Hitler's Nuremberg rally, Venus a nude lady on the beach and Saturn a dead rat being devoured by insects. For Uranus the Magician we had the May Day Parade, the Pope saying Mass, a voodoo man beheading a chicken. Russell's point presumably being that these are all forms of magic, which only goes to show the limits of his intelligence. I was not sure how the Chinese wrestlers fitted in. Another equally preposterous affair was launched last week in the shape of Jemima Shore Investigates (ITV), a new detective saga based on some stories by Lady An- tonia Fraser. After Anglia had showed how to do this kind of thing with their ac- complished production of the P. D. James story Death of an Expert Witness, this first episode of Jemima Shore seemed in com- parison an expensive exercise in the ludi- crous. The story, as far as 1 could follow it, was Pure schoolgirl fantasy, with a succes- sion of improbable men with names like Valentine and Sebastian making passes at .Jenuma in between the supposedly sinister bits. Did I dream it or is it really true that
there are 12 more hour-long episodes to follow?
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