Television
Fiftyish
Richard Ingrams
It is always a pleasure to see Mr Rene Cutforth on the box. --He is a battered gravel-voiced survivor from the days when people who presented programmes for the BBC were expected to be reasonably welleducated and literate. His survey of the Fifties, The Fifties Revisited (BBC 2), shown on Sunday came at an appropriate time. Scenes of the Festival of Britain, the Coronation, and poor old Churchill tottering into Downing Street; the talk of throwing off the shackles of Socialism and getting things moving again, all had a topical flavour and I was left with a curious illusion that nothing much had changed over the last 20 years and that Heath and Wilson might never have existed.
The aura of the Fifties so well conveyed by Cutforth came over very strongly in Michael Cockerell's Panorama profile of the new Prime Minister. Some of those fa' tured, for example the Humpty DumPtY look-alike Lord Thorneycroft (69) a.nd Angus Maude (67), are of course genuine Fifties figures, but it emerged too that Thatcher is a great admirer of Supermae. The shot of Denis tackling the lawn with a massive Atco watched by his attentive wife could have been a scene from an early Boultings film, Premier's Progress. We later decline of British film comedy, loci,: den tally, was evident in A Shot in the DO' (1964) the early Pink Panther film shown on Sunday (BBC 1). P. Sellers gives ,a brilliant performance but Blake Edwards s screenplay is slipshod and vulgar). The general swing to the Right has not Yetf been reflected in the BBC's treatment current affairs. An Omnibus programme °II cartoonists and their coverage of the Gen; era! Election, Drawn and Quartered (BB,' 2) betrayed the kind of boring left-wing bin! which already has an old-fashioned eir about it. Excessive time was given to allow the representatives of Spare Rib and Social' ist Worker to air their Dave Spart-likue views, while the New Statesman's galP" Steadman, recently featured on Omnibus, with the intolerable American bore Hunte; S. Thompson, once again provided plentiflu proof of the fact that he is not a man of the most brilliant intellect. There was a gratlf): ing embarrassing scene of the Punch lune" with poor Alan Coren trying in vain, t° control a gathering of overtired cretins. Particularly oafish were the Evening Stan' dard's Jak and Franklin of the Daily Mirror. After all the drama of the abortive Park)! chat show, I was rather surprised to see, Tonight still functioning at its usua' unearthly hour late at night. The BBC May have reprieved the show but they ought to do something about reforming it. There are certain obvious faults. It is silly, for exam' pie, to give the news headlines in the middle of the programme. They should come either at the beginning or not at all. I watched what I imagine was a fairly typical specimen last week, which was inadequate in every we' Wedgwood Benn's departure from the Labour Party front bench was covered by OA uneventful interview with the dour any dreary Editor of Tribune Richard Cl ments; then there was one of those interminable discussions about Rhodesia featuring two first-rate minor bores Lord Balniel and Lord Chitnis; the late David Owen came on to say his piece about how wf should not recognise Bishop Muzorewa government and finally there was an 80th birthday tribute to Fred Astaire. Somehow. the producer managed to make even this bit boring, by bringing on Benny Green to ping a book and waffle away about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers being American archetypes, symbols of an era etc, etc. I was left imagining a pas de deux featuring Astaire and Green, with Old Twinkletoes weaving his magic circles around poor flat" footed Benny.
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