• ARTS • LETTERS • MONEY- LEISURE TELEVISION
Organised spontaneity
PATRICK SKENE CATLING
One of the fundamental truisms of tele- vision is that it alters the quality of the events that it covers. Sometimes, of course, it even instigates them: there are happenings that would not occur in a world without television. Some corres- pondents in the Congo were sickened when TV newsreel cameramen directed mercenaries'. atrocities for the sake of re- cording them on film as dramatically as possible. Machine guns were silenced temporarily during one roadside massacre, I was told afterwards, and the victims, like movie extras, were obliged to await their deaths, while one cameraman
loaded his camera. • I was reminded of these facts of modern life last week, when 1 attended a 'Med- iaeval Banquet' at Beaulieu. Lord Mon- tagu had organised it in the thirteenth- century abbey on his estate to welcome delegates to a conference on how to run a stately home for profit. There were comely serving wenches and jolly minstrels and noble guests—and television.
. One way to keep a stately home pros- perous is to maize sure that millions of people are shown that it is. The BBC and ATV sent newsreel units to the dinner and thus transformed the abbey into a TV studio. The hot, 'dazzling arc lamps in- cinerated any sentimental delusions that the occasion was itself perpetuating a traditional way of life.
The following evening, both the anc and ATV used Noel Coward's record of his own sardonic song, 'The Stately Homes of England'. in attempts to ridicule the dinner that the BBC and ATV themselves had done so much to spoil. Andy Price, on mu' I, called. it an 'inaugural bun-fight' that meant for some stately home-owners of 'fourteen-carat breeding' that 'it's off with the coronet and on with the cloth cap'—time to go to work. And yet, as the camera plainly showed, there were some earls eating chicken with their lingers and drinking mead—as though. in Noel Coward's words, 'the upper classes have still the upper hand.' Keith Hatfield, on News at Ten (Krv), was similarly caustic. Palace House. lie Pointed out, is 'no architectural master- piece,' but Lord Montagu opened it to the public 'because of the ravages of death duties and the death-watch beetle.' There were brief interviews with some of Lord Montagu's students—Lord Guilford, who told of his 700-acre park:. Lord Leicester, who said he thought his home was 'the most wonderful house in England'; and Lord Bradford, who diffidently mur-
mured : a beginner.' There was nothing really nasty about the programmes, but they seemed point- lessly rude. I thought I detected what Evelyn Waugh once felicitously called 'the snarl of the underdog.' The following afternoon, a flotilla of small boats took the visitors to Cowes. Aboard Lord Montagu's Winch, 'Cygnet,' television again dominated. The peers
• were outnumbered by a team that were making a film for One Pair of Eyes, to be shown some weeks hence on BBC 2. The team consisted of a director and his secre- tary, a cameraman and his assistant, two electricians and a sound engineer. The sound man was carrying a gun micro- phone, a formidable instrument that can be used for high-fidelity eavesdropping eight feet or more from a conversation.
Mischa Scorer, the director, announced that he would use the microphone to re- cord what people were saying from time to time as we cruised down the Beaulieu River. Of course, there were.no objections. Mr Scorer was gentle and punctilious. and, after all, his programme was going to help the stately-home industry. Strange to say, though, I doubt whether there would have been any objections even if Mr Scorer had asked whether one of his men might go around pushing recording devices up people's. nostrils. Television has immense authority on all levels of society.
It seemed also to be making things happen in 'One Man's Week,' on Late Night Line-Up, when Humphrey Lyttelton recently revealed how he typically spends his time—visiting a bird sanctuary, dining in a Japanese restaurant, choosing records for a broadcast, leading a jazz hand. Mr Lyttelton leads an unusually active life and everything he did on the programme he probably would have done even if there hadn't been a programme, and yet . . . somehow, though he is one of the most relaxed of professional television per- formers, I always remained aware of the camera, which was transforming reality into something else. Does the artificiality matter? Perhaps not, as long as one makes the appropriate allowances for it, as one must allow for the artificiality of advertis- ing, the unattainable perfection that drives housewives mad. Can anything be done, should anything be done, to make television more real?
Henri Cartier-Bresson, the celebrated photographer. for many years has been tip- toeing incognito around the world with a Leica, snapping people off-guard to fix their images at characteristic moments of truth. Many of his pictures arc considered classics in the trade. He recently made his first motion picture, California Im- pressions, which was shown on Omnibus (anc: 1). He seemed to be applying the technique he had perfected as a still photo- grapher, catching people unawares to re- cord humanity in its natural state. Here it is at last. I thought—the truth. But Cartier-Bresson, too, is only human. I didn't think his candid shots of grotesquely plain Los Angeles clubwomen were signifi- cantly more penetratingly honest than the most contrived of studio portraits. Sub- jectivity cannot be eliminated.. Cartier- Bresson is renowned for his sympathetic studies of people under stress. But Cali- fornia evidently irritated him and i thought his movie was often harsh and sometimes cruel. The ostentatious camera crew may turn people on unnaturally, but at least it cannot be accused of stealing their ex- pressions without any warning. Cartier- Bresson at Beaulieu might not have des- - 'Toyed the atmosphere, but his pictures might have destroyed some of the people. Must television always be ostentatiously or stealthily intrusive? The answer is no. • Harold Macmillan demonstrated that man can sometimes triumph over TV, with the collaboration of an interviewer who knows how to ask the right questions and then gives the subject freedom to answer them in his own way. Robert McKenzie, an exceptionally able interviewer with an Intimate knowledge of politics and politi- cians, evoked a virtuoso performance from the former Prime Minister in Riding the Storm (Bac. I), named after the latest vol- ume of his memoirs.
Macmillan was very much in control of the dialcrite, because McKenzie respect- fully subordinated his own opinions and feelings and kept giving Macmillan oppor- tunities to display his patrician personal style and his • parliamentary cunning. There were some nicely calculated lines. delivered with histrionic mastery. Macmil- lan recalled waiting to learn whether he or Butler would succeed Eden, and said : just sat in my room and read Pride and Prejudice—a very good book.' A very good show, too, and the content was not
• without interest. I wonder whether a hos- tile interviewer or a photographic Peeping Tom could have demeaned Macmillan. I think not.
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