Television
All-embracing
Richard Ingrams
ITV seem to have decided that Sunday night is Lesbian night. Gay Life has only been off the air for a few weeks and now we have a gay film called Richard's Things adapted by Frederick Raphael from one of his own short stones. This was a truly awful affair, one of the worst I can remember seeing and I speak as one with terrible memories of the works of such masters of the banal as William Douglas-Home, Lady Rachel Billington and Harold Pinter. Raphael gained some fame a few years ago as the author of The Glittering Prizes, an overpraised saga about a group of Cambridge graduates. I doubt whether even its keenest admirer looking back now could remember very much about it. Raphael is a clever man with an ear for dialogue but like a lot of intellectuals he has no insight into character. Behind the surface gloss the people in The Glittering Prizes were all indistinguishable from one another and therefore boring. It was a women's magazine affair and it is a hallmark of women's magazine writing that, existing in only two dimensions, any one of the characters can pair off with any other without putting any strain on the reader's credulity.
Richard's Things had this same quality of superficiality and dross. It started quite promisingly with Mrs Richard Morris (Liv Ullman) driving along the A27 to Ipswich to see her husband who is in a coma in the intensive care unit. After some realistic hospital scenes, I began to go off the film when the husband became conscious for a moment and said 'Shit', his last and only word. (Some of you may remember a truly awful Hollywood film called Love Story when the young heroine passed on with the word 'Bullshit' on her lips.) After the funeral You-Might-As-Well Liv tracked down her husband's girlfriend (Amanda Redman) who had been with him on the night of his fatal heart attack, a pretty young thing who had worked as a secretary for the deceased at his Garden Centre.
After some predictable lines, e.g. 'You hate me, don't you?', the two women fell into a homosexual embrace, at which point Mr Raphael's story plunged into nonsense and obscenity. The sudden change of gear seemed an admission on his part that he could do nothing to explore the characters of the two women, or the dead man, who seemed anyway to have been a right old bore, and could only therefore fall back on the old ITV Sunday night standby — Gay Life. No amount of fine acting, classy background music or meaningful close-ups of Ms Ullman's sorrowful expression could disguise the tinselly nature of the scenes that followed. It was as if Sylvie Krin had gone to work for Spare Rib. The only excitement on the telly has come from the Test Match, yet another cliffhanger in this year's dramatic series. Unfortunately the BBC failed yet again to rise to the occasion. On Monday, for example, Richie Benaud apologised to Australian viewers for the fact that it had not been possible for them to see Botham's historic century on Saturday afternoon. But he did not apologise to BBC viewers for the fact that even they had been deprived of the first 50 or so runs because Grandstand in its wisdom had opted to show racing from Newbury and the Midland Bank Horse Trials from Locko Park — a sporting fixture which was deemed by someone in authority to take precedence over Old Trafford — much, I imagine, to the delight of the 'Listening Bank' who might otherwise have been deprived of valuable publicity. The Test Match coverage, when it is allowed on the screen, is now cluttered up with so many slow-motion replays and recordings of different incidents, with wickets being shown from either end of the ground, that it is often totally confusing. Someone has decided that the viewer, who just wants to watch the game like anyone else, must be bombarded with information, often provided, we are told, by a Honeywell Computer, another piece of gratuitous advertising when usually the information given could have been given by any competent person.
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