T e l evision TOO smug Richard ingrams A part from American policemen and
animals the big thing on the telly these days is adultery and divorce. Whole armies of playwrights are working overtime to feed the national appetite for dramas about hus!Dands and wives tearing one another apart in several instalments. `Itudi and Julie make a last ditch attempt to save their marriage Was the ITV offering last Friday only forty rnInutes after Another Bouquet had finally ground to a long overdue halt.
I continue to be somewhat riveted to John
featured an and Families. Last week
teatured an ugly moustachioed estate agent
who within seconds of arriving home from work was abusing his wife for asking the neighbours to dinner and then shouting hysterically at his son because the lad had expressed a worthy desire to join the army when he grew up. Soon an ugly scene developed and husband and wife were grappling on the floor. Shortly after this I switched over to see Wilson's disastrous appearance on the ITN News and still don't know what happened. I suppose I'm not quite interested enough in them They're all
so unattractive. I am however quite interested in their creator John Hopkins who
writes these depressing plays about depressing people. But the Radio Times has so far failed to supply
a sycophantic profile of him by Sheridan Morley. What is he like? I picture a man of about forty-five with a beard and a Volvo living with his third wife in somewhere like Walton-on-Thames. But this could be completely wrong.
I do not warm to either of the Dimbleby brothers, David and Jonathan, who preside respectively over the current affairs programmes, Panorama (BBC) and This Week (ITV). Both admittedly are presentable nicelooking chaps who give the appearance of reason and moderation in all things but there is something just a little bit too smug about them for my liking. Last week Jonathan was to be seen in Africa interviewing President Nyerere and Ian Smith about the Rhodesian crisis. Smith, of course. is doomed. He looks like a half-crazed shifty old fox refusing to admit that the game is up. But that is no reason to be starry-eyed about his opponents who go around murdering priests and abducting schoolchildren. Dimbleby stressed that the Americans had wisely come to see the guerrillas as patriots fighting for the freedom of their homeland, whereas to Smithy they are all part of a Communist plot to which apparently even the lumbering old jumbo Ivor Richard is a party. Nyerere, the most civilised of the African dictators, was selected to put the anti-Smith line. Sitting in his peaceful garden beneath the whispering palm-trees he emphasised that the fact that the guerrillas were getting arms from Russia and China didn't mean that they were Marxists. Nyerere may be right. But the programme did not investigate the matter. Mr Mugabe's views were not canvassed. And, again, I could not warm at all to young Dimbleby with his flowery tropical shirt nodding politely in agreement while Uncle Julius proclaimed his gospel of sweetness and light.
Simpson and Galton, famous for their Hancock and .Steptoe scripts, have perhaps been over-praised with the result that a new play by them is treated as a major event. But last week's Car Along the Pass was no great shakes. The comic English tourist making anti-German remarks is a cliché and Arthur Lowe, who is an excellent actor, was confined in his role of ,Harry Duckworth to a civilian version of Capt Mainwaring. This seemed to be playing safe on everyone's part. Even so it was a jolly half-hour and made a change from John Hopkins.
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