Television
All amiss
Richard Ingrams
There seems to be no stopping Ian Curteis. Following hard on the heels of his Churchill and the Generals we had a three-hour Suez blockbuster on Sunday with the same Madame Tussauds type of atmosphere and semi-lookalike actors impersonating such minor celebrities as the late Selwyn Lloyd. If anything, this looked an even more expensive production than Churchill, including even a life size representation of the House of Commons in full session with recognisable figures like Bessie Braddock and Sidney Silverman thrown in for good measure.
All, needless to say, in vain. The money would have been better spent on paying off the BBC's £50 million overdraft, which is now going to mean a £34 colour TV licence. The mistake Curteis makes is to accept the journalistic cliché that Eden's Suez adventure was some kind of watershed or whatnot of great significance in the history of post-war Britain. As such it obviously still exercises a powerful influence. There was another Suez play on ITV recently by the veteran Fleet Street scribbler James Cameron. On neither occasion did I find myself able to share the dramatist's enthusiasm for his theme. Like Caesar's dream this Suez is all amiss interpreted. The only interest. the crisis holds lies in Sir Anthony Eden's gallbladder. In other words it is a study in diagnostics rather than the Twilight of Empire. In his fascinating book The Pathology of Leadership (1969) Hugh L'Etang shows that most statesmen of our day have been physically unfit to hold office. Eden was no exception. A botched operation on his gallbladder in 1 953 resulted in 'intermittent hiliary fever' right up to Suez. In this condition, the doctor writes, the patient becomes introspective, querulous and suspicious', a description that fits in well with Eden's state of mind, at the time. A report in the New Statesman of 10 November 1956, quoted by L'Etang, describes Eden as he appeared, to otle House of Commons observer: His hands twitched at his horn-rimmed spectacles or mopped themselves in a white handkerchief, but were never still. The face was grey except where black-ringed caverns surrounded the dying embers of his eyes. The Whole personality, if not prostrated, seemed completely withdrawn.' I saw no sign that Ian Curteis had made a Proper study of the Eden gall-bladder situation and its remarkable symptorns. 11°wever, I cannot speak with 100 per cent authority because for a lot of the time that the Curteis 'play' was grinding on I was watching a quite interesting programme about the German conductor Furtwangler on BBC-2. Furtwangler's gall-bladder as far as I know was perfectly sound and, unlike Eden's, the drama of his life posed a moral and not a medical question. To what extent was he to blame for staying on in Nazi Germany and conducting concerts throughout the war? The various speakers, including our own Hans Keller, were surprisingly kind to him, pointing to little signs that Furtwangler found the Fuhrer a distasteful character. However, the extracts from his own. murky compositions which were played suggested that the maestro was prone to Wagnerian fantasies of a kind which would to some extent make him sympathetic to Hitler's crazy nationalism. The propaganda film of him conducting Die Meistersinger interspersed with pensive shots of photogenic members of the Herrenvolk was very depressing and of course stays in the mind after the tributes have faded.
Not The Nine O'Clock News, BBC-2's new venture into the world of satire came to an end after a very successful first series. This promising programme has gone largely unnoticed, which is probably a good thing as it has been able to find its feet without the usual hullabaloo going on. The last programme included a spot-on take-off of Donald Sinden whose ridiculously mannered lectures on English churches have made him a laughing stock. The young satirists also poked fun at the Monty Python crew — quite a daring thing to do, I imagine; but high time somebody had a crack at those overpraised poseurs in the supertax bracket.
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