Television
Shapeless
Richard Ingrams
On my way up the escalator at Piccadilly underground station I pass a poster advertising Madame Tussaud's. It shows Winston Churchill, Lenin and Queen'Elizabeth I and none of the models look remotely like the characters they are supposed to represent, You can only tell who they are because of the props — Lenin's cap and beard, Churchill's cigar, You would think it might put people off going to the famous waxwork show, but not at all. There is always a long queue outside the Tussaud's building in Marylebone Road, thus proving that people find something compelling about the sight of great historical characters brought back to life however incompetently. I cannot myself explain this phenomenon and pass it on to Christopher Booker for possible analysis at a later date.
There was a Tussaud's atmosphere about Ian Curteis's nearly three-hour-long historical reconstruction, Churchill and the Generals shown on BBC-2 on Sunday. The so-called play, with the actors only halflook ing like the characters they were portraying, was a shapeless affair, like the author's previous dramatisation of Rudolf Hess's unexpected flight to Britain in 1942. It is not enough to piece together historical events from the memoirs of statesmen and generals and serve them up raw. Yet television persists in doing exactly this. The results always look a bit like those Russian propaganda films about Lenin and Stalin. The alternatives are either to use the successful technique invented by the BBC some years ago to tell the story of the first World war, and subsequently copied many times, in which contemporary film is mixed with the reminiscences of those who took part in the events; or to hire a writer with some imaginative gift and give him a fairly free hand to adapt the historical material to dramatic form. It is noteworthy that the only successful series of this type was the recent abdication story which was adapted for Thames by Simon Raven from a readable book by Frances Donaldson.
Raven was helped by the fact that the abdication story is complete in itself having a clear beginning, middle and end. But Churchill and the Generals seemed to be completely formless. Curteis ploughed remorselessly on through the history of the war whereas someone like Shakespeare or even possibly Simon Raven would have set himself a dramatic limit. With the American entry into the war, Churchill's importance declined. It might have made better sense therefore to have ended the play at that point or possibly with the victory of El Alamein which finally secured Churchill's position for the duration of hostilities. It was only thanks to Timothy West's performance as Churchill that I stayed awake for as long as I did. He did manage to bring the old boy to life though the play was a twodimensional affair.
There was something very Churchillian about last week's Labour Party political broadcast although I have heard the main speaker, Neil Kinnock MP, talked of in some Labour Party circles as a future Prime Minister and another Lloyd George. I know him to be a nice fellow who seems open and ingenuous in comparison with many of his colleagues — though one can never be quite sure with these Welshmen, many of whom are as devious as hell while looking as innocent as lambs. Kinnock appeared in the company of Wendy Mantle, whom I also know as she is a partner in Bindman & Co., Private Eye's brilliant firm of solicitors. The viewers, however, were not told this and I imagine many of them wondered who she was. Both Kinnock and Mantle banged on in a rather old-fashioned way about how the Tories are only concerned in helping the rich to get richer. I would not deny that there is some truth in this but if Labour is to resurface now it will have to do better.
I felt with Kinnock that he was looking over his shoulder at his own rank and file whereas if he is going to be another leader, as his admirers predict, he ought to be able to sound a less partisan note and learn to 'speak for England'.
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