Television
Diary of Our Mr. Peeps
By JOHN BRAINE THERE is a special kind of pleasure which only the one-eyed monster can give. To taste it at the keenest the weather must be bitterly cold, the fire blazing, the feet tired, and \ the telephone silent. This doesn't happen every evening; last Friday it did, beginning with Tonight, which repeated its famous visit to the dogs' beauty parlour. I watched it again in a sort of trance, not knowing whether to admire a society which is healthy enough to afford such conspicuously useless extravagance or to imagine gloomily what Pravda's TV critic will say ('In capitalist England little children are brutally ill-treated whilst dogs are prinked, per- fumed and painted like cocottes . . .'). I was rather shaken to learn, too, that dog clippings were all sold to stuff pillows and to be woven into cheap blankets and suits. No wonder there's more money in shoddy than in worsted.
On the same programme appeared one of the most beautiful young women I've seen for a long time, a Miss Diane Todd. I was enchanted by her face—a woman's face, not a slack-mouthed doll's—though not by her song, 'My Ain Folk.' She-sang it very well, but to match her appearance there should have, been a less hackneyed piece, one with real bite and—for the two can go to- gether—douceness. For some reason Tonight has an eye for new singers but not an ear for the right songs.
Quite Contrary, which followed, I'm beginning to have an addiction for; I even like the strange enunciation of the compere, Miss Rosalie Ashley in this instance. I wish I knew why she should consider it necessary to be so extremely ladylike; her little finger, as it were, is extended daintily outward from the teacup handle. And why is there that faint suggestion of simulated age in her voice : that sweet-old-lady note? But I'm carp- ing. For the virtue of Quite Contrary is that it's specifically a woman's programme on the same level as Good Housekeeping and Homes and. Gardens. I don't say this with a superior sneer; any programme that is as competent technically as these magazines will be of a very high standard indeed.
I wasn't enthusiastic about the comedian who spoke broken English and pretended to conduct an orchestra. He seemed to enjoy himself and I. might have done so too if I'd not been conscious of having seen this turn at least a thousand times before. When he'd finished, Miss Ashley prepared her face for a joke and said : think he must have. learned his conducting on a bus.' To me he seemed a quite accomplished musician, fully in control of the orchestra; but such was her spell that I found Myself laughing so as not to hurt her feelings.
There was also a girl who sang 'In a Trance' and 'Magic Moments,' and a trio of acrobatic dancers. The latter I didn't find very enjoyable; I may be naive about this, but when I see a girl's head whirled at high speed an inch from the floor, rn always afraid, as an old uncle of mine said in connection with H-bomb tests, that somebody. may get lamed. These performers aren't, in any !ase, the real backbone of Quite Contrary. For it Is, in the nicest possible way, a girl show. The TV Toppers and, to a lesser extent, the Littlewood Songsters are its raison d'être.
More and more as the evening proceeded I found myself simply looking at the girls; and par- ticular girls are in fact singled out for our admiration. There is no suspicion of a leer when We are shown these girls in close-up; for they are being paraded not for masculine but feminine approval, as models of what the Englishwoman should be. And they are excellent models, healthy and wholesome and eminently marriageable.
I watched ITV's The Army Game in what was essentially the same spirit, ready and willing to suspend disbelief. I didn't expect to be given a searingly satirical picture of Army life : I looked forward to a cosy half-hour round the stove in the Nissen but with a brassy-voiced Sar'nt-Major, a bumbling CO, at least one wide-boy corporal, an intellectual, and a Northcountryman. I wasn't disappointed, and I'm not complaining. What 1 did object to was the flabbiness of the story-line Which last week hung upon, as far as I could Make out, a fiddle with travel warrants and the attempts of the whole camp to keep out the CO's wife because the male orderly room sergeant had been replaced by a blonde ATS. However, a little transvestism cleared everything up to the satisfaction of the CO, if not to mine. I know that this serial is meant to be funny. I know that it's not written for eggheads, but why on earth should any woman object to her husband employ- ing an ATS clerk? After all, he didn't choose her. Even the wildest farce should have some tenuous connection with reality.
Before I returned to the Pepys serial I had five Minutes with Take Your Pick. A twenty-one-year- old student accountant rejected a box containing £14 in favour of one containing a credit note for a hundred gallons of petrol. As a consolation prize he was given a £1,000 sports car to go with the Petrol. I then switched back to the BBC. There is, of course, no difference morally between winning a £1,000 car and having one given by one's father; and long may this excellent young man enjoy his Motoring. But I'm not happy about this pro- gramme and won't watch it again. Probably what saddens me about it is that it so loudly emphasises the fact that in this England of ours gambling is the only State-approved method of acquiring Money or its equivalent.
I shall watch The Diary of Samuel Pepys again. The introductory calypso, though a bright enough Idea, just didn't perform its function of informing the viewer what had happened in the last instal- ment. 1660 and its anagram 1066 happen to be the two dates I've never forgotten; so I was able to sort things out after a loOk at the Radio Times. Nevertheless, I found the first five minutes a little confusing. Peter Sallis, as Pepys, could do with being a bit more dressy. He did, though, put across the fact that Pepys was first and foremost a devoted public servant; so well, indeed, that I found myself wanting to know more about his job. Douglas Wilmer played King Charles II with all the requisite charm, aided by what must be an unusually well-trained spaniel. This is a difficult part to put any real acting into, since Charles is established as a stereotype in the public mind. But I was never aware of the inverted commas round the quotations: I appreciated, as if I'd heard it for the first time, the graceful way in which he accepted a copy of the Bible from the Mayor of Dover. 'It is the book I love above all others,' he said, brushing it aside impatiently.
Finally, there was A. E. Matthews, as one expected, running away with Press Con- ference. Unwillingly almost, for one can become rather tired of hearing a man called a grand old character, and because I'd heard a little too much about that lamp-post, I warmed to him. In this case there's no doubt about Aristides being the Just—and the Wise, and the Witty and, in every sense of that much-abused word, the Vital. Inci- dentally, how much better actors—and painters, and writers—show up on TV than do politicians. How the politicians flannel, how they evade, how they watch every safely abstract polysyllable. But I shall return to this attack another time.
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