Up with the News
This Week and Panorama, particularly the latter, have made amender hottorahles for my complaints last week about the inadequacy of television's news coverage. Mr. Crawley being doggedly lucid about the Middle East; Mr. Crankshaw and M. Metaxas managing to get an intelligent word or three about Russia
past Mr. Muggeridge; a slightly soggy. interlude with the oldest man and woman in England, and then a series of brilliant interviews (live from Vienna) which even Mr. Dimbleby's proprietary handling of the Radians and the Red Cross failed to dim. Mr. Mikes and his sincere, stumbling, sometimes pompous, but always most moving, Hungarian refugees was television at its best. The BBC is doing a fine job with Panorama: and, 'in a less prominent position, an equally good job with Highlight. This unambitious little programme, early on weekday evenings, covers background news stories with a refreshing and simple directness. It is mostly interviews (with Mr. Michelmore doing as competently self-effacing a chore this week as any of his more highly publicised colleagues), but no one seems worried about stepping out of the normal framework when they want to. On Monday, for example. with the United Nations very much in the news, Highlight went back and picked up seven or eight well-edited minutes of an old Press Con- ference programme with Mr. Hammerskjiild —a far more effective way of commenting on the possible outcome of the Cairo talks than twice the time spent with someone explaining the character of the Secretary-General t second hand.
Another bright spot on Monday was th first successful Joan and Leslie programme its new half-hour format. As a quarter-hour this was the best British situation comedy show on television, livelier and wittier than I Love Lucy and I Married Joan put together. Much of its charm was in its intimacy, its unelaborate sets, its realistic approach to washing-up, bed- making, hangovers and budgets—the words were real words, but stage sentences strung together by gag-writers for laughs. Success at first went to the show's head. Stretched awkwardly over its bigger skeleton and with the inevitable studio audience laughing nervously off-screen, it looked as though Joan and Leslie was going the way of all good ideas —down the drain of formula. But after several weeks of discomfort the 'ability of Mr. Randall and Miss Reynolds is shining through the dreariness of the clumsy package, the swollen set, the expanded cast, even the studio audience. A cautious British cheer, please.
But nothing, alas, not even the' golden bravery-that is the substance of each episode, can even begin to penetrate the cloud of dreary writing and shabby production that is making Secret Mission so damply disappOinting a series. Here's everything anyone—writer, actor, producer—could ask for : high drama, comedy, courage, suspense; and all of it with the kind of documentary background that has served Mr. Barr so well in the past. But there's an air of slapdash improvisation, of hurried care- lessness about it all that has made the three programmes I've seen quite painful to watch. The French Resistance was a glory; it deserves better treatment.
I find Make Up Your Mind (Granada on Mondays) annoyingly absorbing. I do not give a damn whether a six-foot German meer- schaum dated 1912 is worth four guineas or six, or a diving suit worth eight and sixpence or ninety-two pounds ten. But I get a shame- faced kick out of guessing the value of every item, right or wrong. And in addition to the unexpected fascination of prices, there is Mr. David Jacobs, who is the first interlocutor to emerge from the jungle of quiz-show jollities without losing his dignity. His mannerisms arc acceptable in the quietest of living-rooms. An epoch perhaps has ended. JOHN METCALF
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