Television
The Shame of Waste
By PETER FORSTER Now the Sheriff enlisted a near-by group of actors to improvise sketches and give us some Method Lust : `Then perhaps we can Pin Lust Down,' he intoned. So they pretended to be in a coffee bar, and a glowering young actor leered at a girl (was this lust?), whose shoe hurt (some strange foot-fetish here?), until a jazz band started (had Sunday Break over-run?): only this, said the Sheriff, was not lust after all.
But next, in a saloon bar, we had 'the Don, Juan type,' eyeing a solitary girl. `Look at him, sneered the Sheriff, 'cutting her out with his eyes as if she was a pin-up!' Don Juan touches the girl, whereupon she goes to talk to a group et total strangers, and then his own girl ('the up 'he's taking down!' explains our compere) re- turns from the Ladies, foiling further aggression. 'I feel I know him, don't you?' asks Mr. WheatleY. 'Men who court women constantly, don't under' stand them,' chips in the actor.
Next adultery, personified by the typical case of the wife with her husband queueing for the cinema, who takes a fancy to the man ahead and accosts him in the foyer while hubby is buying the tickets. 'That marriage is dying oC its feet,' snapped Mr. Wheatley. The actress added : 'If you've a baby, you don't expose it to germs, if you can help it—if you've a marriage, you don't expose it to adultery.' Because, Mr: Wheatley said, 'sex should be properly built in.
Lastly, 'commercial sex,' exemplified, in the Sheriff's words, by those clubs 'where half-naked girls prance around like a lot of cold chipolata sausages!' (Oh, how the Sheriff hates cold chill- olata sausages !) A visiting businessman was ensnared by a hostess—all due, explained our guide, 'to a nodule of lust in a harmless little man.' The sad sequel came when we found the businessman reduced to showing dirty postcards to a chum in a railway buffet, and interrupted by his morose, kerchiefed wife : 'I don't knoW where you find your fun, Eric Fletchard, but it's not with me!' Mr. Wheatley smiles : 'We know where, don't-we?' Afterwards he sums up 'Why fall for substitute sex? The devil finds work for empty hands.'
It remains only to add that About Religion is often said to be the best of the religious pro- grammes, and Mr. Michael Redington the doyen of religious producers; and that this sort of script was written by Elizabeth Young. Me, I'm mr to join Robin Hood.
The' week was also notable for the name of Mr. Ken Taylor. Many- adapters have mucked up good stories, but to muck up a little master- piece quite as thoroughly as Mr. Taylor did Maugham's The Alien Corn (A-R) was an ex- ceptional feat by any standards. Perhaps the trouble was that Mr. Maugham made it too easy : all an adapter had to do was to follow the plain, actual narrative of the Jewish family trying to assimilate itself into Englishness and the son who opts out. But where would have been the original Taylor in this? So there had to be a pointless interpolation about Nazi activities among Munich students, and lines like 'If you must live la vie de Boheme, you might as well combine it with l'amour.' I dare say it could just be argued that first-quality stories make second- rate plays (and vice versa), but Mr. Taylor turned a quiet comment into a noisy vulgarity, and made the best short story Mr. Maugham ever wrote seem like a clumsy pot-boiler. For Once, Miss Joan Kemp-Welch's direction was far from steady-handed, and the incorrigibly Jewish Uncle Ferdy was played by Henry Kendall in a manner so halting he might have been appearing in Another Little Bit of Fluff. Footn,,:e: The Prime M inister's shifty, note- consulting party political appearance was stag- geringly inept after the poised statesman of the General Election. How, I wondered, to describe him. A duck-billed platitude? Then I recalled a similar figure in that film about the Thirties, addressing the plebs in just such resonant clichés, and realised that I was watching Ramsay Macmillan.
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