Television

THE subconscious typist is very often the best part of one's critical equip- ment. The other day, for instance. I found myself about to refer to an ITV

thriller serial called International Defective, and not long ago I had to retype in order not to say that a certain dis- tinguished and ebullient personage had been tak- ing part in Too Tight to Reply. I hasten to add that no reference was intended to the weekly forum conducted by Mr. William Clark, Old Sobersides himself. (I actually heard .somebody refer to him recently as which seems about as lese a piece of majeste as 1 have met since the man who spoke of Mr. T. S. Eliot as 'Torn.)

But some weeks ago, on the eve of my visit to America, I was so hustled and fussed over finger- prints and blood-tests (the difficulty with going to America is that they treat you as if you intend to steal it) that I inadvertently paid a glowing compliment to Mr. John Morgan of the Tonight team. Far be it from me now to take the smile off Mr. Morgan's face: he is a very competent reporter, who has come on a great deal since he started, even if the sing-song student manner could do with a little variation, so that all the problems he tackles do not seem of exactly equal complexity and perplexity. But in fact my bouquet towards a man who should (and here, after all, is a rare thing on television) be listened to rather than looked at was meant for Mr. Gwyn Thomas. This Falstallian figure confined in a lounge suit effloresces on an average one a fortnight, offering a torrent of words, be they about Oxford or the Don Juan legend or Tenby beach, which are of a rhetorical richness unlike anything currently on television.

Film illustrates his words, but he is essentially an incomparable broadcaster. Sometimes, 1 gather, he does in fact; talk on sound radio, though for the most part that marooned hulk has long since closed its hatches to novelty. (Now and again it does perversely produce something tele- vision ought to be featuring—as in the Speaking Frankly devoted to Gracie Fields, the best of its sort I have ever heard. a most moving and candid self-assessment by that amazing woman, and infinitely more revealing than her recent appear- ance on This is Your Life.) Indeed, one can't help feeling that in the BBC, plus ca Change, plus c'est la Incline show—what with the return of that dreary and discredited per- ennial Top Town, which may please the relatives of those performing, but for the rest of us exists mainly as a reminder that all amateur variety is even worse than most professional. (Incidentally, anybody wanting to snap up star material should consider little Miss Sally Smith, who was in an ATV Saturday Spectacular the other week, and give her the full break on whose edge she has been hovering deliciously for too long.) Then again, from time to time• word reaches the outside world of an upheaval within BBC TV news, but it still seems like a limp, official handout compared with ITN. A small example is typical: ITN reported that Nehru twice refused to shake Chou's hand at Delhi airport, until per- suaded by photographers, whereas BBC re- ported something in the nature of a distinctly coda reception. I put it to you--which shows the more vivid news sense? BBC men always resent the 'Auntie' image (though they might occasion- ally look at some of the women in the Corpora- tion, and ponder why the image was never called 'Uncle), but in such an instance as this it is hard to resist the suspicion that some bulletin-writer still felt round his shoulders the mantle of war- time quasi-official responsibility, and decided not to exacerbate Sino-Indian relations with tenden- tious reports. As for the news department's weekly round-up, News Extra—the highspot last Friday was a documentary showing garbage dis- posal in various European countries. That, and Robert Dougall too. . . .

Cinema

By the Book

By ISABEL. QUIGLY Cone of Silence. (Odeon, Leicester Square.) -- Wake Me When it's Over. (Carlton.) A FRIEND of mine, who is a first-rate cook, thinks that the stomach--as well as the soul needs its days of abstinence, and now and then makes' a whole meal off something as un- likely as porridge. Well, it was that sort of week at the cinema, and the best thing about it was a British film with exactly the sterling qualities of porridge, well cooked. Nothing soggy, lumpish, or unattractive about it: just a sort of implicit abstinence. Ten or perhaps twelve years ago I can imagine it would have suited the national mood well enough. What has changed? Us, taste, fashion, films, their audiences, the world, the lot. Everything, in fact, but British film-makers. George Moore's Unfilled Field. a volume of stories written, under the heady inspiration of the Gaelic League, to be translated into Irish, seems to have supplied subsequent generations with the Overcoat out of which to crawl. His 'Home Sickness,' with which Mr. Iremonger's selection opens, sets the theme of thwarted inno- cence that hovers, however uneasily, behind most of the others in this book. Bryden comes back-to his native village after years in America, gets himself engaged to a local girl, funks it and takes flight. He runs from the poverty and the 'pathetic submission of a primitive people' to the clergy; but, an old man back in America, he yearns for 'the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes about a, and the greater lake in the dis- tance, and behind it the blue line of the wander- ing hills.' Nostalgia for lost, 'innocent' prospects. a sense.of the moral restrictions and disillusion- ments brought by growth to manhood in a country ridden by religious orthodoxy—these are the conflicting elements that shape the bitter- ness of Sheehy's 'Prothalamion,' O'Connor's

IN

-BERRY

LONCE--AGO

The story

of an Irish Childhood

`Uprooted,' even of Maurice Kennedy's strange little parable 'Vladivostok,' where a knowing factory girl fails to seduce a boy in a deserted seaside town. The sense of sin lies behind the sense of failure that touches village and city dweller alike. The educated clerk in James Plunkett's 'The Eagle and the Trumpets,' with his sardonic Dedalan literacy, gives up his eagerly awaited weekend with a girl almost without pro- test; it is a pointless story unless you bring to bear on it the weight of hopelessness implicit in the others. 'Sure what did anybody ever get out of the land but poverty and hard work and potatoes and salt?' protests the young man, off to America in the morning, in Liam O'Flaherty's `Going Into Exile.' Alt yes,' says his father, 'but it's your own, the land, and over there . . . you'll be giving your sweat to some other man's land, or what's equal to it.' Perhaps, but what is there for the young Irish writer to do now, one feels, closing Mr. Iremonger's admirable volume, but get out, as Joyce did—cultivate some more fertile garden?

JOHN COLEMAN

Traces of Burke

The Correspondence of Edmund Burke. Volume II. July, 1768-June, 1774. Edited by Lucy S. Sutherland. (C.U.P., 90s.)

MUCH has been written on Burke's political thought. and not enough on his personality and political career. Until Professor Copeland began the collection and publication of his letters the material was lacking -(the volumes published in 1844 represent only a selection, with the emphasis on the later period of Burke's life). The present book includes almost all the letters from 1768 to 1774 between Burke and his political chief Rockingham and important ones from Dowdeswell. the Duke of Richmond and other members of the Rockingham party —essential material for the study of Burke's activities in Parliament. It contains 253 letters. 185 by Burke (all his known letters for this period), sixty-five addressed to him and three in- cluded for the light they throw on his activities. One hundred and thirteen letters are printed for the first time, including fifty-five by Burke. The book is admirably edited: Miss Sutherland's notes and commentary are precise and her knowledge of this period of Burke's life is un- surpassed.

Of comparatively humble origin. Burke in the prime of life moved in the highest political circles yet never sought to be assimilated to them. He rarely visited the Whig country houses, and made no attempt to enter fashionable London society. The country estate he purchased in 1768 was not for political influence but to enjoy his favourite occupation, farming ('he proved,' writes Miss Sutherland, 'a most practical and successful farmer'). In the House of Com- mons on April 2, 1770, he made a passionate defence of the novas honto—`abilities cannot be settled with your estate,' he told the country gentle- men. But 'rising merit stamped with• virtue' must seek to better itself 'under the wings of established greatness' (social rather than intellectual). Two years later, to the Duke of Richmond„,he wrote:

You people of great fainilies and hereditary trusts and fortunes are not like such as I am who. whatever we may be by the rapidity of our growth and of the fruit we bear . . . yet still we are but annual plants that perish with our season and leave no sort of traces behind us.

The defender of the novus how) was also the advocate of the divine right of property; and he ended his life fighting Jacobinism, 'the revolt

'The belief . . that he dominated his leade.r, inspired the party and controlled its destinies le the House of Commons, gains no supportfann, his correspondence, writes Miss Sutherlao Burke was outstanding for. intellectual power, oratory and debating skill; yet lacked the ablhq to lead or conciliate. His aggressiveness, ellergY and pertinacity were checked only by the inertia and timidity of Rockingham, whose will Pr" would never gainsay. 'We are now come to great crisis,' he wrote to Rockingham on Augesi 13, 1769, 'and much of the future colour Of a! public affairs will depend on your Lordship' conduct at this time. Be that conduct what I ltd may. 1 shall easily persuade myself that it tr right.' Rockingham's caution was often beta", tactics than Burke's impetuosity. as the coilt spondence in this volume about the Yorkshire petition of 1769 shows. Burke. an Irishman with little understanding of the English political scene, never realised the essential independence of the English freeholder: that no landlord, whateve! his acreage, could mobilise his tenants for Ph- tical action like a feudal lord his retainers. In early youth Burke imbibed a Catholic atain; sphere without accepting Catholic doctrine and his outlook remained hierarchical and aulh°ri; tarian. He never understood the Protestant an% individualistic nature of English society. Perhaps„ that is why his career in British politics WaS 3. failure. . Politics for him was not a profession but itfli t service, demanding the highest standards . morality, and he was the constant foe of corral)" tion and jobbery. The friendship of such Men, as Johnson and Reynolds testifies to the respect in which his character was held. It is diflictill to reconcile this picture of Burke with the 3C'

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