Television
American memory
Clive Gammon
The only time I ever hated the US and everything about it was in 1944 when I was a sixth-former at Swansea Grammar School. I was not politically motivated in this. At the time, my main preoccupation, and that of my friends, was with my contemporaries at the Girls' 'High School up the road. Courtships proceeded slowly and according to a strict convention. Notes delivered by a third hand. Saturday afternoons in the dark Odeon. If you were lucky you could end up in the bracken after a bike-ride.
The advent of the GIs wrecked all that. Suddenly we schoolboys were cut down to size. Scowling in our blazers, circling slowly on our bikes, we looked forward passionately to the day when the Yanks would go home. Then we'd see. The Frencli Resistance seemed to know the right way to deal with Jezebels like these.
When Alistair Cooke, in the first programme in his America series last Sunday night on BBC2, began by talking of his preconceptions of the States before he went to live there, I recalled those bitter days and my squeezed-out, unwilling admiration of Duke Ellington and Count Basie and the way that in spite of our humiliations we scorned the BBC and tuned instead to AFN Munich/Stuttgart (that must have been a little later on). The America to which Cooke emigrated, though, was the earlier one of O'Hara's Julian English, the Depression and Jelly Roll Morton (quite a time-span there, I know, but now almost melted into one bY the process of history). So it is not surprising that already unkindly critics have pointed out sternly that Cooke's series has little in it reflecting the contemporary US.
Certainly it took a bold man to begin with a shot of the Statue of Liberty and to follow that with sumac and maple leaves in the New England fall, cable cars in San Francisco and the Grand Canyon. Not a bussing demonstration in sight, or even a small mugging.
In spite of this I believe the criticisms to be quite unfair. The series isn't, after all, billed as a hard-nosed investigation of the US as it is, but as a history of America and a personal history at that. And somehow Cooke's cliche shots transcended the cliche and became valid again. Those leaves in the Vermont fall, for example, turning from green through yellow to red. In his special, casual, informative way, Cooke told of how the barren acid soil and the lack of rain created the brilliant colours. Then, shifting gear like a skilled driver so that the passenger is unaware of the change, he was speaking lyrically (and I don't mean that pejoratively) of the brave colours of death, scarlet as mourning, not black.
On the evidence of this first programme, the visual quality of the series is far above the travelogue level. The long ascending shot of the built-up San Fransciscan hillsides, the liquid quality of a misty, aerial shot of the New York skyline, the filigreed balconies of New Orleans: it took a fine skill to re-interpret these on film. They were very beautiful.
I'm willing to concede that the visual was out of balance with the human. The people Cooke talked about and showed only in still shots were the dead and the long-dead: Roosevelt, H. L. Mencken, Jelly Roll Morton, Mr Mayo. But the programme was sub-titled 'The First Impact' and the intention is historical. I'm sure that succeeding Sundays will show that America is no mere exercise in nostalgia.
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