Spectator's Notebook
MIME was when the Reith Lectures were a I great event. Now they are broadcasting's coelacanth; an extinct art-form kept going only out of a sense of piety. They could, it's true, be revived by a transfer to television, as Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper and Mr A. J. P. Taylor have demonstrated; but if they're going to be anything like the present series by Professor J. K. Gal- braith it would be better to let them die an overdue death. Galbraith, of course, is a highly experienced talker, and his technique repays study. His three lectures so far have consisted of long and boring statements of the mundane and commonplace laced with wisecracks—some amusing, most merely facetious—then a quick, bald, and usually fallacious assertion passed off as a conclusion, and then quickly back again to the safe pastures of the obvious. For the benefit of his British audiences, he periodically quotes British examples—such as the last lecture's reference to the Monopolies Commission—which chiefly illustrate his ignorance of this country's affairs.
Galbraith's thesis appears to be that modern technology has killed the market economy and made consumer choice an illusion, that planning must inevitably take and has taken the market's place, and that the principal agents of planning are not the state but the giant private corpora- tions, which control demand, prices and capital supply. The state's role is simply to plan those aspects of economic life the corporate giants overlook.
Put plainly like this the argument is exposed as the rag-bag of quarter-truths it is. No indus- trialist, however large, would be so arrogant as to claim that he can control both the demand for, and the price of, his products—even though, within limits, he can determine either one or the other. If the capital market is irrelevant, and retained earnings the source of capital supply in the modern economy, why is it that American corporations distribute more than half their profits? If the market is dead, and the con- sumer a back number, why is it that modern industry spends more and more on market re- search? But perhaps the most glaring flaw in the thesis is that Galbraith nowhere defines what he means by 'planning.' The nearest he has got so far was at the start when he claimed that 'all industrial societies must plan, which is to say they must manage the lives of those whom their industries are assumed to serve.' But the important political (and economic) question is 'how?' One would have thought that there was some difference between, say, the way in which the Russians 'manage the lives' of their people and the way in which Britain does. This lack of definition is largely what leads him to confuse two totally different activities—business planning and national planning. In fact, the greater part of his argument depends on this simple ambiguity or pun. You might as well argue that we live in a planned economy because we all plan our next move. And mine is to wonder what on earth made the BBC pay such a lot of money for such a load of old rubbish.
Cure, Not Kill While I'm on the subject of the BBC, a word about the Late Show, which, although of a somewhat higher intellectual level than the Reith Lectures, is still a big disappointment. I dare to write this, because I can add in all honesty that my colleague, John Wells, is the show's out- standing success. Barry Humphries, it's true, is showing promise and his Aussie mum is a gem; but John Bird is much less impressive now that he's lost so much weight and seems all too visibly oppressed by a sense of the programme's failure. Eleanor Bron has an extraordinarily limited range and is brilliant within it; but why is nothing done to encourage her to extend it? As for the two Americans, it's hard to see why either is there, and the short one is so bad it's embarrassing.
But the real culprit is surely the producer, Hugh Burnett. Never has television put so much performing talent so to waste. Come back Ned Sherrin; your Auntie needs you. At present the items are too long, much too much material is written by the performers themselves, and there's not nearly enough politics (profound social com- ment can't be done in haste, anyway. Improvi- sation is only excused by topicality). Indeed, the Late Show seems to the outsider not so much badly produced as not produced at all. I care about all this because I've always believed that a good political satire show is a highly desirable adjunct of a healthy democracy; and it ought to be on television because this is the medium the poli- ticians use themselves. But we haven't got one now. I only hope the BBC will have the sense to take the radical steps needed to save the show, instead of opting for the easy way out and killing it. Exhibition Whether Mr Robert Fraser reckons the fine, of £20, and fifty guineas costs, for presenting an indecent exhibition at his gallery to have been greater or smaller than the value of the publicity he received I don't know. What matters is that the pictures—a series of unrealistic drawings and collages of male and female genitalia by Jim Dine, for whom my colleague Bryan Robertson gave mitigating evidence of artistic merit—have been neither impounded nor destroyed. But the most reassuring aspect of the whole thing for those concerned about individual freedom that the police brought a charge not of obscenity (which can occur in private and public alike), but of indecency under the Vagrancy Act—a specifically public affair, which in this case hinged on the assumption that the pictures could be seen from the street through the gallery windows. It seems to me neither an unreasonable denial of freedom of expression nor an unacceptable form of censorship—however hypocritical—to demand that avowedly erotic art should be exhibited, like most of the more obvious aspects of sex, in camera.
Death-wish
So the minority of MPs who bothered to turn up at all have rejected the idea of a discreet and private experiment in televising House of Com- mons debates by one vote. There seemed to be a widespread fear that, if TV came, members of the public would get a misleading impression of their elected representatives. But what sort of impression, for heaven's sake, does anyone imagine the public has at the present time? Political sociologists of the future will, I suspect, see last week's misguided vote as final proof of the Commons's death-wish—for the most obvious effect of televising debates would be to redress, in some small measure, the eclipse of the legisla- ture by the executive and of the back benches by the front. Nor was this the only death-wish present. For probably the last time ever the Liberal party was in a position to make a major decision on a matter of public importance. Its twelve votes were more than enough to decide the issue. And what happened? Six Liberals voted for the experiment, two against, and four didn't turn up.
But perhaps it was all a plot. For now the House of Lords, already committed to a tele- vision experiment by a large majority, will be able to make its way into the homes of the nation untroubled by competition from the Commons. Two peers' heirs voted on Thursday night. Had even one of them supported the motion it would have been carried. But both the next Earl of Crawford and Balcarres and the next Baron Strathclyde resolutely voted against.
Economical Now that the well-known, long-established, naughty but on the whole public-spirited practice of giving cheap wines false and more expensive- sounding labels is apparently to come to an end, what is the impecunious youth out to impress his girl friend going to do? Buy the labels separately, I suppose. I hope, at any rate, he won't have to resort to what the Larousse Gastronomique calls, with admirable frankness, 'Boisson economique': four litres of wine to fifty-six of water, two kilos of sugar and a sliced lemon, left for eight days (stirred daily for the first five) and then decanted into bottles. Enough to drive a man to drink.
NIGEL LAWSON
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