Television
Changing Guard
By PETER FORSTER My private awards for the year would go to Paul Scofield for his Pirandello Henry IV (I still remember that awful cry, half-groan, half-howl, when he met the girl he thought existed only in his imagination), and to Vivien Leigh for her Sabina in The Skin of Our Teeth, dismissing the years with a toss of the head and flutter of in- comparable eyelashes. Both these were superlative acting performances, as against innumerable players who were effectively lifelike in fiction. If
were a star-making film producer I would have thought the year's best bet among unknowns was a striking cool blonde called Sheila Allen, who briefly illumined a play in which General Wolfit shot his soldier son in the first scene, which was about the same time that the author shot his bolt. The most interesting new play to come my way was Promenade, about Northern teenagers, a bit of nouvelle vague beating on the shore at Black- pool. In a good year for comics, I laughed most of all at Charlie Drake with his malevolent cherub's face and knack of producing a jarring note in a sentimental moment. Among the major comedians (of whom, with Hancock and Jimmy Edwards also under contract, the BBC currently bolds an unbeatable hand) he alone is purely
visual, and lost on radio. Far and away the funniest single turn was Zero Mostel's pantomime of a hungover actor making up on Chelsea at Nine, Which I hope ha; is:Am filmed for posterity.
But all these lists of bests and worsts are relative and far too simple. Over the year a vast amount of first-class acting, writing, and production goes into television, and nobody can see everything that goes out. In 1959 trends were mostly of a minor kind. The BBC's experiments with modest variety series, especially in its two summer shows, came off much better than the expensive imported 'specials,' though Perry Como, with his after- thought style of crooning, ambles amiably and perennially on. If a seasonal wish may be allowed, please could all variety departments do something about their male chorus dancers, and those prissy pants which fit so tight that, in Dylan Thomas's words. 'their bums glitter like beacons'?
. Apart from Lord Beaverbrook's memorable swipe at Alanbrooke, the Generals had another good year, culminating last week in a discussion on Murrow's Small World between Montgomery, Clark and a German general, our chaps and the enemy's chap, which may well have done more than a whole year's written propaganda to make people determined never again to have a war. 'One shouldn't criticise the characters of commanders,' said Montgomery. 'I quite agree,' said the Ger- man. For the rest, a country longing for peace was given frequent doses of Horrocks. It is hard to present a programme about war which does not depend on cheap tear-getting effects; a rare example was Robert Reid's Battlefront (BBC) last week, re-creating the liberation of Paris. His account of the American company who took their officer's body to be first into St. LC) conveyed exactly that note which Horrocks misses, of respect without relish. The year's most overtly pacifist preaching was in a play by Miss Mar- ghanita Laski. It was also the year's worst play. The BBC which exists by virtue of dedication to the better things still has no regular programme about books, whereas ITV currently has two, notably ABC's The Bookman, which is much improved on last season and sports a pleasantly opinionated anchor-man in J. W. Lambert. A-R documentaries have not shirked difficult subjects, such as Freud, and Granada's Searchlight has often illuminated, but in this field BBC's massive The Inheritors still holds the palm. (Incidentally, I owe Granada an apology for suggesting recently that the cubicles in which speakers sit for Who Goes Next? are not soundproof; apparently nobody ever suggested that they were.) Tonight (BBC) again kept it up wonderfully well for most of the year, but has had a rather desperate air of late—in one edition Alan Whicker was used no fewer than four times—and perhaps before long the mixture might be given a vigorous shake. In Panorama (BBC) the shake-up is long overdue, and the fact that Messrs. Day and Kennedy have wrought no great improvement suggests a behind- the-scenes paucity of ideas.
What else happened in 1959? For much of the year A-R hired an uncompleted electrical adver- tisement in Piccadilly Circus which seemed to state that Associated Rediffusion presents the London Institute and Morris School of Hairdressing, which I naturally assumed to have some reference to Late Extra. (That programme's title should be plural, anyway : what about all those people round the walls?) There were still Westerns in 1959, and still more Westerns. Ivanhoe continued, and the BBC was rumoured to be considering a counter-attraction, Wivenhoe. Four Just Men proved to have no resemblance whatever to a book of the same name by Edgar Wallace, and The Third Man went hither-and-zither but no- where near Graham Greene's, story or Carol Reed's film. The Sportsview commentators (BBC) still shouted in exactly the same stentorian tones for defeat as for victory. Blown-up photographs became and remain the rage for all discussion programmes, and new producers discovered old tricks with split screens and shrinking dancers.
In 1959 the interviewers worked overtime, and the man in the street never had it so good. We have suddenly discovered that we are a nation of character-actors with statements to make. In a bar recently I watched a young man carefully reading the Spectator (until he came to my piece, at which he put it in his pocket). I asked him why he read the paper, and he offered cogent reasons without the slightest surprise. And what, dared I ask, did he do? He was a tree-lopper; he lopped trees in Wimbledon. 'To complete the picture,' he added. 'my agent thought my, first two books brilliant but unpublishable, and has high hopes of the third.' I might have been Mr. Whicker : tele- vision has made interviewees of us all.
The year's end sees a change of control at the BBC. Many of us have written harshly about Sir Ian Jacob on occasion, but as he goes it is only fair to say that in the opinion of some well qualified to judge from within he has been a much-maligned and underrated Director-General.
Probably his military dislike of the press caused him to put on a wrong face in his personal public relations, and though he showed no signs of understanding the point of view of artists, he is said to have stood up to political pressure far more often than has been realised or allowed.
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