Television
Deboshed fish
Peter Levi
Some days I am longing for a season of John Cassavetes, some days not, but you have to catch these things while they are on. This week-end I was hungry for the work of young film-makers, but the double bill of new talent was not available on any of the four channels of ITV and so on that a set in North Oxfordshire captures. This is outrageous, because we got four varieties of muck instead. Why do you have to live in London to be interested in a thriller about a swimming bath cleverly photo- graphed? So I sulked next day and refused to watch Alas Smith and Jones (BBC 2), simply because I dislike names like Mel and Griff, being only just able to stand two Ronnies. But I secretly watched them through a half-open door, and they lured me as no other comics could have done, except perhaps for early Monty Python.
It would take Max Beerbohm to trans- late into words how clever and funny they are. One leers and wobbles, one is smaller and neater, but their disguises are marvel- bus and they are adept at role reversal. They work very hard for their laughs, but the work is out of sight, all they present is perfect and laconic. Their items are as swift and brief as ITMA items used to be, but depend less on familiarity and repetition. Their Labour and Conservative politicians quarrelling over the implications of the weather report (do the unemployed de- serve sunshine?) were masterly. Their parody of sport was almost equally memor- able. Their presentation of the newest thing in stomach-churning horror, the Video Nice, was very funny indeed, though I cannot explain why: it must have been a matter of timing. Some of the shortest jokes were the best.
The Incredibly Strange Film Show (Channel 4), modestly presented by Jonathan Ross, who has improved greatly with confidence and experience, had me hooked. It was the story of Herschel Gordon Lewis, the guru of gore, who set out to make films no big company would dare to make, first nudies and nudy-cuties, then the horrors, made in the early Sixties and never shown in Britain. They were hilarious. He made 37 films in ten years, retired when the loopholes of the law were closed in 1972, and is now a millionaire from direct marketing techniques. He spoke gleefully of 'a well-known shot in the crutch opera business'. He used to spend between four and nine days on a film, and 20,000 dollars, and had it on the road in another six weeks. The keys to success were 5,000 drive-in cinemas, and their warning trailers of horror to come. When he tried out Blood Feast in Peoria Illinois he encountered the traffic jam ten miles from the cinema. He is now perfectly cynical and very happy in retirement. Even Mrs Whitehouse might have seen the joke. H. G. Lewis brought back the bad old buccaneering days of early Hollywood, thank heaven, but I have no ambition to see one of his films right through, because the joke would pall. Still, for educative value, strangeness and freshness, this prog- ramme deserved a prize.
Forth Fiesta (BBC 2) has been nosing around the Edinburgh Festival in an in- teresting way, but Muriel Grey is a presen- ter who underlines everything provincial, and on the fringe theatre she was a pain in the neck, though not so bad as Keith Allen dressed as a comic golfer, dismissive of everything but a piece about Marilyn Mon- roe, which was clearly the worst of all. Muriel Grey on the Japanese Tempest, which appeared both interesting and ex- tremely beautiful, was very silly indeed. Even at the theatre in the old workhouse in Chipping Norton we know about Japanese Shakespeare by now. But she had the effrontery to discuss the Tempest with a local buffoon who had no idea of the plot, or of why Caliban should be fish-like, and assured us 95 per cent of the Edinburgh audience were as ignorant as he was. If that is true, the Scots do not deserve their enviable festival, but I cannot believe it. I think the BBC is to blame for smothering its pills in rebarbative jam. Is the Japanese Tempest coming south? If not, why not?
Wendy Cope is on holiday.
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