TELEVISION
People for sale
Patrick Skene CATLING
One of the oldest tricks of the journalistic game is to deplore cheesecake while shovel- ling it into the public's insatiable maw. 'Look at this exploitation of vanity and lust!' the second-hand exploiters cry in mock outrage, `What a disgusting exhibition! And how about this?' Their pornography is your eroti- cism and my valid social comment.
Television is a far more effective medium than the press for this particular sort of hypocrisy. Black and white stills of shameful exhibitionism sometimes pack quite a wallop; but moving pictures in colour—wow! Cellu- loid Village of Dreams (ATv), a round-the- clock survey of Wardour Street, was as sleazily commercial as the commercial sleaz- iness it exposed. There were plenty of fear- less closeups of what one Soho entrepreneur called 'bums and tits'. 'There are two kinds of prostitution in Soho,' one of the entertain- ment industry's lovably candid pragmatists pointed out, 'and films pay better'. Not to mention rv.
Nowadays, it seems, money is what most surely turns people on. Sex merely symbolises it, just as sex symbolises high-octane petsol and chocolates. The most potently alluring programme of all is The Money Programme Om 2). It recently starred that mod brunette bombshell of high finance, Pierre Salinger. the late President Kennedy's press secretary•. As a senior executive of Gramco, the world's largest real-estate fund, the old smoothie did a great job of explaining how West German legislation caused the decline of the whole off-shore mutual-fund industry, which had once seemed foolproof, like the invasion of the Bay of Pigs. Salinger's act wasn't easy to follow, so Brian Widlake prudently switched from glamour to business plain and simple, the packaging of a young Norwegian woman whose manager hopes she may suc- ceed Raquel Welch. The BBC having a cer- tain dignity to uphold, Mr Widlake eschewed references to bums and tits; he spoke instead of 'breasts and bottoms'. The product under scrutiny, Miss Julie Ege, a former Miss Nor- way, remained unshakably friendly through- out the proceedings, even when they were grimly dehumanising.
The Long Distance Piano Player, by Alan Sharp, the first Play for Today Om 1), was about a marathon pianist (Ray Davies of The Kinks) who finally rebelled against dehuman- isation when all seemed lost (they shoot lonely runners, don't they?) and achieved metamorphosis—more symbolism, of course into a freedom-loving red fox of cherished childhood memory. The play was well writ- ten, well directed, well acted and well photo- graphed in its inexorably dreary way. All its suspense depended on a single question: would the pianist quit before playing for four days and nights or wouldn't he? 1 was sorry when he did, because halfway through the third day he was beginning to sound like Thelonious Monk.
Try not to miss the Marilyn Monroe movies Om 1) on Fridays. She sold out, too, but for the highest price, and, as they say, for keeps,
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