Television
The worst is the best
,Jeffrey Bernard
Saying goodbye to Poldark last Sunday brought a lump to my throat. For sixteen weeks solidly I've followed the ups and ups of the delectable Demelza and her po-faced husband Ross, and now it is with some reluctance that I bad farewell to eighteenth-century Cornwall, her tin mines and those who loved and fought over them. For the past sixteen weeks I'd grown fonder and fonder of this load of old rubbish and recently I'd even got to the stage Where I spent a lot of the week worrying about What was to become of them all. Sunday's final scene on a beach a sort of poor man's From Here To Eternity clip had me reaching for my handkerchief. You could somehow tell that, clasped in each other's arms and whispering about the future, what they were really worried about was whether they'd finally fluffed their Chances of ever making the Play For Today slot. If you think Poldark was nonsense kindly remember that it's being replaced this weekend by yet another agonising series of The Brothers. Brian, apparently, has come out of the nut-house; I imagine the only thing that keeps his incredibly boring brother, Edward, out of it Is the fact that he's actually too thick to be neurotic. During the last series of The Brothers I found to my surprise that I didn't identify all that easily with the Trattoria eating, marriage on the rocks, cuff-shooting younger brother, but I shall try again. I shall try again since I'm a compulsive viewer and also since I got in the habit of watching BBC1 at 7.25 pm on Sundays in the days when they filled this spot so well With things like Red Gauntlet. 1301dark always brought me down and back to earth after the soul searching I do during Songs of Praise, when I wonder each week Whether I might not have made a colossal Mistake in being an agnostic. Close ups of the twin-setted girls who sing in church choirs lead Me to believe that there might be more in Church than meets the mind. What I like about Poldark was the lack of a Message and the fact that everyone in it was clearly defined. The bad were rotten and the good spoke like newsreaders. Paul Curran's uronken, toothless, dirty, incoherent Jud must have had Robert Newton turning in his urn With envy. I'm also quite fond of watching the gentry galloping through their villages Watched by their sulky, envious serfs, the g,entrY drinking claret at breakfast time and everyone killing everyone else without having t
° Worry about the CID. In fact, some of the best television is the
worst television. That's to say that in too many *serious programmes do people take themselves 1-00 seriously. It's the malaise of show business today. So many 'good' and 'serious' prograrnmes are ruined for me since the people aPPearing speak a different language from the °Ile I know. Take the word 'Yes'. It is no longer
ed today. In answer to a simple question like,
IS Harold Wilson the Prime Minister?" television personalities reply, "Well, of course, uasica Hy
this is it." The hoards of women who this is it." The hoards of women who
appearon television to talk about the remarillable fact that they are women it's incredible 1.2.t so many people can make a living out of -`11-ig female talk in technical college jargon.
Perhaps even that though is preferable to Leonard Bernstein's current love affair with. words. I switched him on The Unanswered Question, as an aperitif for my fix of Poldark and watched him play a cross between God, Scheitzer and Cary Grant and give a talk on 'ambiguity'. He's the sort of man who, in spite of being physically very attractive, is stupid enough to try and talk a woman into bed. Furthermore, f he's not very careful, he'll end up in a Ken Russell film. Like Robin Ray, though not so arch, he annoyingly talks about a piece of music as though he's written it himself or at least conducts it as though he has. Incidentally, who, oh why, does the producer or whoever of Face the Music think that only Ray, Joyce Grenfell, Levin and the scruffy, mad astronomer are fit to be seen on that programme?
That's the other thing that I've noticed more and more recently. Not just an inability to use a simple word like 'yes', but a refusal to answer the question and to prevaricate, plus a pretence of not knowing the answer to a question in the misguided belief that it makes the panel game more fun. So now we're got to the stage where, in the last series of Face the Music, for example, someone like the Archduke Ray listened to the opening chords of Beethoven's Fifth and then pretended that he wasn't sure what those first four notes were.
"Well, could it be Beethoven? Yes, I think it's Beethoven and I'm not sure, but I think it could be a symphony. Now, wait a minute, that sounded to me to be a bit like C minor. Yes, I think I've got it. Could it be, by any chance, Beethoven'sFifth Symphony?" Well, of course, basically this is it. Yes, with regard to this one, I think we can make the basic assumption that this is in fact absolutely right. That's to say that intrinsically the probabilities are that the answer is yes. Give me Poldark.
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