Television
Images
Richard Ingranns
The most interesting point in Melvyn Bragg's rather incoherent letter in last week's Spectator was his last. He disowned, a bit plaintively it seemed to me, the lines 'Don't fret William. Just read me some of your poetry. That's the best tonic,' which were put into the mouth of the dying Dorothy WOrdsworth. 'One of the facts of life about writing a script for Ken Russell,' Bragg explained, 'is that he encourages you to write what you want and then he does what he wants with it.' This is a revealing glimpse of the relationship between script-writers and directors which has grown up. I imagine that Bragg is not the only poor writer who finds his work distorted and mangled by the all-powerful man behind the camera. But the consequence of this state of affairs is that power is put into the hands of those who are quite incapable of wielding it. I am not saying that Bragg's Wordsworth script was any good, but it was probably even worse by the time Russell had got his hands on it. What always strikes me about Russell is that he is not a man of any perceptible intel ligence. He has an obvious flair for creating striking images but when it comes to understanding what people like the Wordsworths were about — which does not actually demand any great intellectual powers because they both wrote very simply — he falls down lamentably. In a sensible world Russell would be the servant of the writer and be kept in his place behind the camera. But in the crazy new system it is he who gives the orders with the dreadful results which we have recently witnessed.
Meanwhile the BBC is about to submit its plans for an increase in the license fee. The colour license could go up to as much as £30 a year and my own black and white a proportionate amount to about £12. Viewers, I imagine, will soon be thinking on the same lines as subscribers to the London Library who must now pay £36 p.a. to belong, a sum probably in excess of the value of books taken out by most members during the course of a year. Such disgruntled reflections come naturally at a time of year when we are already into the Repeat Season, when both channels consider it quite in order for them to forego original material for the space of about two months and serve up a variety of old stuff like Anna Karenina which, despite the slamming it got when it was first shown, begins a re-run on Sunday.
One absence which will be welcomed however especially by me is that of Esther Rantzen whose programme That's Life will not be back till January, thank goodness. To make up for the long Estherless months ahead the BBC provided a real bellyful of the woman on Sunday. At the end of That's Life you just had time to switch over to BBC-2 for a special elongated edition of Portrait featuring La Rantzen and her over-publicised baby Emily being moulded in clay by someone who was described as the 'world-famous sculptor' Fiore de Henriquez. I took some convincing, first that this person was not Mike Yarwood or Dick Emery and secondly that it was indeed a woman. For although boasting what Boswell would have called 'a bosom of more than ordinary protruberance', the lady hurled lumps of clay about like a professional shot-putter and spoke with a deep bass voice which would have stood her in good stead for the Commendatore in Don Giovanni. One could see why she has achieved success in her field for she produced a very flattering mother and child, refusing to listen to Esther's doubts about her teeth. `Do you sculpt ordinary people?' La Rantzen asked her in the course of a rather desultory conversation in which she once again voiced her doubts about combining motherhood and a career. Anyone would think, from the way she talks about her work, that she was some sort of genius who was reluctant to deprive the community of her wonderful contribution to its spiritual well-being. She doesn't seem to realise that we would all be only too happy to see the back of her and her toothy grin and would be reassured that she was spending her time fruitfully bringing up her baby.
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