Television
Play the game
Martyn Harris
Casting about, as we must, for the roots of our national decline, I point the finger at the explosion in management training courses, particularly the outdoorsy sort which involve kayaks, building bridges, splat guns and abseiling. When historians demand what happened to our industrial leaders in the years after 1950, they will find they were all out in the woods of Sur- rey, dressed in camouflage jackets and playing at soldiers. Cutting Edge (Channel 4, Monday, 9 p.m.) looked at one of the most extrava- gant — a week-long, £25,000 outward- bound course laid on by John Ridgway's Adventure School for the executives of Rockwater, an underwater engineering firm, in the wastes of Sutherland. It opened with Ridgway reciting from Henry New- bolt's 'Vital Lampada', that classic of good- bad poetry:
There's a breathless hush in the close tonight Ten to make and the match to win....
It is a bad poem because it is trite, senti- mental and metrically plonking; good because it appeals to atavistic instincts of patriotism, group solidarity and nostalgia which are embarrassing but authentic. Like the public school culture from which it sprang, it was an attempt to systematise a national success which had taken the nation by surprise and left it in possession of an enormous empire. Godliness and organised games; Greek verbs and team spirit: these were taken, retrospectively, to be the magic ingredients of empire build- ing, regardless of the fact that the actual empire builders — Clive, Hastings, Rhodes — were rabid individualists of dubious morality, shaky constitution and frequently no education whatever, least of all the pub- lic school variety.
Ridgway put his middle managers through the usual torments: chain-smoking Eric with his chronic vertigo had to climb a 70-foot mast; pot-bellied, non-swimming Kevin had to haul himself under the keel of Ridgway's boat, in an icy loch. Only the non-English managers, like Peter Van Riel, seemed sufficiently grown-up to instinctive- ly reject the Misbegotten military metaphor of what management is really about. 'I am an adult, not a child. And I think I am good already. I don't need changing.' At the end the Rockwater men had developed enough team spirit to refuse their last ordeal: swimming to shore in their under- pants, with their clothes in plastic bin- liners. 'We are a team,' they proudly explained, 'and as a team we refuse to do something stupid' — which ignored the fact that when the initial premise is stupid everything which ensues from it is reason- able.
The South Bank Show (ITV, Sunday, 10.50 p.m.) inspected another Victorian hangover in the shape of the Dracula leg- end, most recently revived by Francis Ford Coppola. This film is apparently closely based on Bram Stoker's original text which the star, Gary Oldman, described as, 'Moist and wet and hot. It's, y'know, horny stuff.'
It is a commonplace that the blood exchange of the vampire was, for the Victo- rians, an acceptable metaphor for the sexu- al exchange, but Professor Christopher Frayling of the Royal College of Art was articulate on the way in which Stoker's 'sec- ond division' novel 'in an unselfconscious Way touches on all sorts of fairly deep things that psychoanalysts have looked at throughout the 20th century — making it available to endless interpretation'. I doubt if Stoker was as naive as Frayling supposes, but certainly the book taps some dark fears: of unbridled female sexuality; of Miscegenation; racial hatred and the spread of venereal disease (remember the rats flooding ashore from Dracula's ship as grounds in Whitby). The Victorians needed vampires as a coded language for sex, but the question is why, in this explicit age, we need them now — unless to restore ambiguity, menace and shadow to activities that have become too mechanical, too explicit, and even dull.
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