29 OCTOBER 1983, Page 36

Television

Sylvia's farewell

Richard Ingrams

4 -no you really want to see Russell Harty

twice a week? How keen are you to see more plays about hospitals, heart transplants, senility, mental instability, varicose veins or other ills of the flesh?' With these and other questions, all expec- ting the answer No, or Not at all, the distinguished Daily Telegraph critic Sylvia Clayton this week took her leave of her readers. She is retiring to Somerset, suitably shattered by her experiences and the thought of the BBC gradually increasing its output until it churns out rubbish from ear- ly morning until late at night.

Ms Clayton's eloquent farewell article in the Telegraph has made me wonder about my own position. For what she is really say- ing is that the BBC in particular has forfeited the right to be taken seriously by critics of a high calibre, such as myself and Ms Clayton. How is it possible to have anything other than contempt for an organisation that regards Russell Harty as its flagship and promotes sad old Yester- days's Men like Desmond Wilcox and Bob Monkhouse who smiles wanly out at us from the front cover of this week's Radio Times? The fact is, as Ms Clayton rightly implies, that the game is up for the BBC. It has lost any sense of direction and it is not surprising that it is now losing its audience — the latest figures being the worst ever.

Meanwhile ITV and Channel 4 are put- ting out the few programmes that are worth watching — to take the programmes of the

last two or three weeks; Rumpole (ITV); Brahms Violin and Viola Sonatas played by Pinchas Zukerman and Mark Neikrug (C4); John Piper on the South Bank Show (ITV); The Bounder, with Peter Bowles and George Cole (ITV). The recent William Trevor play Mrs Silly (starring Maggie Smith) was also on ITV. The situation can only be reversed by a mass purge of all the BBC's senior men, notably Alasdair Milne, the Director General, and the equally un- distinguished Aubrey Singer and Brian Wenham. But these men are as firmly ensconced in their jobs as Moss Evans and Clive Jenkins. In other words things can only get worse and Ms Clayton is quite right to go.

Another little example of the BBC's decline is the decision to put out its new book programme Bookmark once a month, as opposed to the Channel 4 programme Book Four which goes out weekly. In the old days it would have been inconceivable that ITV would devote more time to books than the BBC. However with the people currently running the Corporation's Art Department it is not all that surprising. I have yet to see an edition of Bookmark, which was on the air again this week with a programme on the Booker prize. Judging from reports, however, of its debut, it has made no effort to rise above all the publici- ty stunts and 'hyping' that have become an established feature of the book scene. So the opening programme featured, predic- tably, tripe-writer Shirley Conran and Dr Jonathan's pop-up book.

Not that the Channel 4 programme, presided over by the infuriating Hermione Lee, is very much better. Here we are in the world of the Sunday paper pseuds, with the Booker Prize contestants all being taken tremendously seriously as major figures on the literary scene. Not being myself a reader of contemporary novels, I realise that my credentials are non-existent, but I was always greatly impressed by the fact that one of the very few novelists whose books I did enjoy, the late Barbara Pym, had one of her novels rejected by the egregious Mr Tom Maschler of Cape and as a result gave up writing altogether for a number of years. That sort of thing makes you wonder about the books that get accepted.

Certainly it would be impossible to im- agine someone like Barbara Pym winning the Booker Prize. Auberon Waugh recently named a number of writers like Mollie Keane whose merits he preferred to the rather dim collection of dons and eggheads who formed this year's lucky six. If Book Four was any good it would have invited someone like Waugh, or for that matter Graham Lord, another pretty acerbic critic of the prize, to attack the way in which the thing is organised. As it was we had Michael Holroyd, the Grand Panjandrum of the Booker Circus, novelist Margaret Forster, and Martin Amis, all to a greater or lesser extent members of the official book world. A great deal was said both for and against

the six contenders on the short list but nothing that made me for a moment want to go out and buy any of the six books. You got the feeling that the judges had chosen not what they liked but what they thought they ought to be seen to like.