TELEVISION
In at the deaths
Patrick SKENE CATLING
One of the most well written, well directed and well acted tele- vision plays so far this year was also certainly one of the nastiest. Its characters and their behaviour were en-
tirely devoid of redeem- ing features, except that the principal antagon- ists both had the de- cency to bring about their own horrible destruction. Deathday, by Brian Hayles, adapted from the novel of the same title by Angus Hall, was unmitigated hell from beginning to end. This gory, psychopatho- logical shocker was in the BBC 2 series Out of the Unknown, which has made me wish more than once that the events enacted in it had remained unknown forever. By the time that Deathday was over, I felt disgusted with myself for feeling so cheerful.
The story got off to a lively, obviously fatal start when a marital loser called Adam Crosse (Robert Lang) looked in his wife's handbag for some soothing pills and found instead a letter from her lover. In the cir- cumstances, the name, Adam Crosse, was an ironic understatement. His home was no Eden; it never had been; and he was not merely irritated; he was apoplectic with rage. Loud sings the cuckold.
To make sure that there was no possi- bility of sympathy or understanding, the wife told her husband that her lover was gentle and passionate and he knew what he was doing, 'It's only physical,' she added, as though to reassure Adam, whose face had already begun to turn as ugly as an insanely jealous samurai in a Kabuki soap opera. 'Here we go,' the viewer was able to promise himself, 'I wonder what weapon he'll use.' On a convenient table there was a large spanner. He beat her head until it was un- attractive.
So far, so bad. But that was only the beginning. Adam then undertook to commit a vengeful act of posthumous adultery, which was spoiled by his casual partner's contempt, and then Adam noticed that he bad an alter ego. It was no ordinary inner voice that might have been expected to chide him for his monstrous sin. Adam's alter ego was an eloquently sneering smoothy. Appar- ently, Adam did not mind so much that he was a wife-killer. What he could not abide was the realisation that he was impotent, and that he was impotent because he was homosexual. Naturally, because there is no painful looking method of suicide that may be shown on television, Adam finally com- mitted hara-kiri.
Virtue, dramatised by Gerald Savory, in the W. Somerset Maugham series OK ' 1)
was an old-fashioned short story about a marriage destroyed relatively formally and slowly. Margery Bishop played a typical paradoxical Maugham heroine of early middle-age who fell in love with a twenty- five-year-old District Officer on leave from Borneo, didn't 'have an affair' with him, as the saying used to be, but felt honour-bound to tell her husband that she was extra- maritally in love, left him when he laughed at her, and so drove the poor silly to suicide by an overdose of veronal. There were many other nice period touches but, after all, the husband really did die and the widow bought a villa on the Riviera with the insurance money, thus symbolising, one gathered, that virtue was dead, too.
Omnibus (sec 1) postponed its scheduled programme last Sunday in order to discuss the topical subject of invasion of privacy. Computerised data banks are rapidly storing records of intimate personal statistics that could be used to control the population of a police state long before 1984, Omnibus predicted. Someone on the programme said that 'we have a pathological drive in this country to know everything about everyone.' Who is revealing all this private information? It seemed that door-to-door investigators were getting a lot of it in the name of market research : 'A bored wife likes to chat.' More treachery! Television could be making British husbands paranoiac.
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