Television
Show some respeck
Martyn Harris
In his twenties a friend of mine once bought an MG sports car that he was very proud of, and parked it outside the pub for the rest of us to inspect. 'Well, it's very nice Phil,' said another friend — an urbane, Jewish non-driver. 'But tell us now, because we are all your friends here. How long have you had these sexual problems?'
I was hoping as I watched Lynda La Plante's documentary on men and guns (In The Firing Line, Channel Four, Monday, 9.00pm) that she would have something similarly crushing to say to the parade of inadequates she interviewed. The paunchy bank clerk wotj a cellar full of Kalash- nikovs; the perspiring mummy's boy deep into his smutty relationship with a 9mm Stirling para-pistol: 'now this is the most fun you can have with your clothes on. And this is 44 magnum — it's all true what they say about barrel length'. Nhyarr, nhyarrh. They were all pathetic, but some so pathetic they became alarming like the mumbling halfwit from a south London gang who bragged: 'If I can't get duh per- son I am after den I get 'is mum, 'is sister, or 'is wife. It's all abaht survival. Dis is duh reality.' Given the current police propagan- da campaign aimed at securing shooters for every bobby on the beat there should per- haps have been a health warning. at this point, with words to the effect that Halfwit was clearly 90 per cent fantasist. But La Plante just smiled sweetly and allowed Halfwit to bury himself in his own inanity. When you 'aye duh balls to use duh gun, everyone's gonna know you and everyone's gonna respeck you... ' Now tell me Phil, because we are all friends here. How long have you been worried about the size of your penis?
If Mary Whitehouse were a reader of this magazine, she would certainly be writ- ing to the editor about that last sentence, such has been her amazing capacity to seize the wrong end of every media stick (The Mary Whitehouse Story, Late Show, BBC2, Monday, 10.50pm). The ex-chairman of the National Viewers and Listeners Associa- tion never could quite decide what she was attacking: sex, violence, satire, bad lan- guage, or blasphemy. Ai various times she aimed her darts at TW3, Till Death Us Do Part, I Claudius, The Singing Detective, The Wednesday Play, even Richard Dimbleby's broadcast from Belsen. The real trash passed unscathed, for she had, as Michael Grade observed, an unerring instinct for selecting the very best television for her disapproval, an instinct more reliable than any TV guide. If Mary hated it then it must be good.
Her TV campaign lacked coherence because, as this rather good and sympa- thetic profile showed, she wasn't criticising television — which she rarely watched but the great wave of social change which rolled through the 1960s and of which tele- vision was the avatar, not the cause. She failed finally, and fortunately, because she made her allies with the political right who have tended, for some reason, to inherit more of the libertarian attitudes of the Six- ties than the left. If a new Mary White- house wanted to mobilise sexual priggishness, and cast-iron self righteous- ness these days it would be to the old New Left - the disappointed primary teachers, witch-hunting social workers, passed-over polytechnic lecturers and part-time Wood- craft leaders she would turn. But thankfully it is too late now, for Whitehouse was always a one woman show. Ham retirement.
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