Television
Real People
Jeffrey Bernard
The people who control television today seem to have the extraordinary idea that Only the working classes are interesting. These people, with their wash-boards, cloth caps, whippets, runny noses, mining accidents and kitchen dramas are regarded by television controllers and commissioning Producers as being the only 'real' people in the land and, as such, the only people worth Portraying. The few exceptions to the rule give them, unfortunately, a pretty strong case, 'Play of the Month' (BBC 1) seems to be a process whereby someone dips their finger into the Oxford Companion to English Literature and comes out with a rotten Plum like The Apple Cart, and Bouquet of Barbed Wire (London Weekend) must have been an enormous setback for the credibility of the middle classes. In Fleet Street, a Couple of years ago, two well-known writers nearly came to blows over an argument about which of them had had the most deprived childhood and it's that sort of one-downmanship that's spreading to television, particularly to the BBC, where denim-suited men wax lyrical over their early days when they were sustained by jam butt ies and had to walk to school with no Shoes to their feet.
I must declare my interests here. I too have seen the darker side of life. Although I was driven to school at first, we once had a puncture outside Godalming, but more to the point, I worked in a coal mine in ClaYhanger country—Hanley—and never once did I meet anyone remotely like anyone on whom I've seen the roof collapse O n television. True, there was a man oddly like James Bolam of When the Boat Comes In (BBC 1) who threatened to beat me up When he saw that I'd wrapped my sandwiches in the Times, but for the most part they weren't the sort of men who can be Portrayed by someone putting on a North Country accent between drinks in the BBC Club. And at the risk of sounding like a fascist pig, their scripts weren't quite as good as those written by the likes of Alex Glasgow. Just different.
Of all the working class goings on on the box at the moment When the Boat Comes In ls easily the best. James Bolam is just right and even better than he was in The Likely Lads and Jean Heywood, utterly believable, gives one of the best sustained performances On television on any channel. I regard C.laYhanger as being in the same category since the taking of afternoon tea never made a gentleman of anyone. They keep telling me, 'Don't stop watching Clayhanger. It gets really good any episode "%v.' Well, I can't wait any longer and I'm storming watching it. It seems to me to be like a British Lion production of Coronation Street. There's Harry Andrews growling through his whiskers—when is a cameo not a cameo ? When it goes on week after bloody week—and there's Janet Suzman with her funny voice and the over-plucked eyebrows she borrowed from Angela Rippon. Peter McEnery is alright as is Denis Quilley but ten times the usual amount of extras don't make a Sunday School celebration any more interesting than the fairly boring event it is.
Two Men from Derby (Centre Play, BBC 2) was very good. In the first place the characters in it spoke as real people really do speak. Barry Hines's dialogue was excellent. Two scouts from Derby County Football Club called at a miner's cottage to give your man a trial. He wasn't in. They waited and while they waited they watched his wife, Sharon Duce, wash, scrub and sweat. They talked about how her life could change for the better if her husband was good enough to play for Derby County. They had a train to catch back to Derby and still her husband didn't show and then you knew he wasn't going to, stuck as he was in a pub. She went on washing his clothes and complained. 'Better to wash them than to wear them,' said one of the scouts. In the end they left. The wife threw her husband's football boots on the fire, had second thoughts, pulled them out and started cleaning them. There she was, lumbered forever. It was 1930 to a tee without ever moving from the tiny kitchen and without any nostalgia props in the way of sauce bottle labels. Just the mangle borrowed from Upstairs, Downstairs. Raymond Westwell and Terence Davies were very good as was Sharon Duce even though she was a little too attractive, but then you may have noticed that working class crumpet on television gets better and better looking and it's nice to know that not all the cream goes to the top.
On Monday night I sat whittling a pit prop while I watched Panorama (BBC 1). Margaret Thatcher frightens me. I've met many women who looked and spoke as she does and all of them have either been reluctant to become my mother-in-law or they've stuck needles into me or told me that doctor will see me now. Facing Robin Day she spoke with all the authority of a trainee traffic warden trying to give a parking ticket to a Rolls-Royce owner. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Ronald Reagan, warming up for the New Hampshire primary, looks to be safely held on past form for the big race. Actually, he's not safely held on past form alone but by his very awful appearance—who still uses hair cream apart from Len Fairclough ?and on his own admission in answer to a question as to his suitability for being President that 'I've always been very interested in foreign affairs.' President Ford came over as being a frighteningly simple man and the few close-ups of the audiences showed them to be terrifyingly simple. Of course, the only 'real' people in America are The Waltons (BBC 2). This continuing story of a deeply simple and wonderfully philosophical, complicated and ordinary American working-class family in a barely noticeable depression is probably produced by a man who had to walk to Harvard without any sneakers to his feet and who had to live on pop-corn. At this very moment he is probably sitting in P. J. Clarke's wearing a denim suit with a light meter around his neck and hanging on to a dry martini and saying that anyone not born on the East Side is an idiot. The Colin Welland of New York, he is probably planning a television series about a lovable mining family from Pittsburgh.
Back in England, Peter Hall, a sort of intellectual con-man, did his Aquarius (London Weekend) on erotic art in the Eastern world. There was a lot of quasiarty, intellectual, cultured chat about sex having something to do with inner peace, inner radiation and how it makes your aura burn bluer but I wasn't fooled for a minute. I know it feels nice too. I watched the programme with my five-year-old daughter who hit the nail on the head when she said, 'They're pretty pictures, but he's a silly man.' Yes.
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