30 JULY 1983, Page 29

Television

Questions

Richard Ingrams

The Irish psychiatrist Dr Anthony Clare has built up quite a reputation on radio as an interviewer who probes the parts that other interviewers cannot reach. When myself was selected to be one of the subjects for his new series, done for the first time on television, there were some friends who ad- vised me against exposing myself to the Doctor's apparently remorseless analysis for fear of what 1 might reveal. In the event 1 was spared any ghastly ordeal and in fact was pleasantly surprised by Clare's ap- proach and the way in which he managed to avoid the usual Freudian clichés which so many psychiatrists go in for. But the ques- tion does arise —4 and I asked it myself when agreeing to be interviewed — on what basis does he select his subjects? What, with this series called Motives, are the inter- viewer's own motives? The public can't help thinking that being a psychiatrist he will choose people whom he considers to have problems or hidden depths or at least something that he will be able to probe in a Way that ordinary interviewers would not. And this thought may also inhibit the inter- viewee, who cannot help thinking, as I Myself did: Now why did this shrink want to talk to me? Obviously he thinks I'm some kind of nutcase in need of assistance.

The first two subjects, George Best and John Stonehouse, are slightly different from the rest of us — i.e. myself, Beryl Bain- bridge, Petula Clark etc — in that they are both 'cases', people, that is, whom the Doc- tor could easily have come across in the course of his professional work. In the case of Best, who opened the batting on Mon- day, this made for a slightly ambivalent at- mosphere as one couldn't help wondering how Clare's approach would have differed If Best had come to him as a patient and to what extent he thought he could help him and if not why was he doing the interview on TV at all, unless it was to gratify the Public's liking to view a man when he's down. The interview started cautiously, rather in the manner of a business lunch when two people know they have come together to discuss an awkward topic but feel obliged to have some general conversa- tion first. In this case the awkward topic

was drink, the simple one-word answer to what has caused George Best's decline from being the golden boy of football to the sad figure he is today.

But there is limited fun to be had from listening to a drunk even if at the time he is sober. After a little while I felt an over- powering sense of sadness, and that foretaste of death which often emanates from boozers, watching Best trying to account for his decline, while apparently blind to the real reason; which made me again uneasy about the rationale of the in- terview. There is after all something a bit pointless in talking to a drowning man. All you can do is to offer him a rope.

In spite of my assurances that it is a load of absolute bunkum, the female members of my family seem to be absolutely hooked on the Piers Paul Read story A Married Man (C4). However I think that even they may have been somewhat appalled by this week's episode when the story, which on one level has hitherto been a women's magazine saga of marital infidelity, lurched into the realms of total implausibility and a par- ticularly revoltihg double murder. Remembering the bits of Read's novels which 1 read some years ago, I suppose I should have seen this coming, he is a cold and humourless writer who has a rather unhealthy interest in sexual perversion and also crime and criminals. These two in- terests coalesced in the murder of poor Mrs Strickland and her lover — a gruesome scenario which the IBA might have spared us on a Sunday night. What is the point of banning Video Nasties when we can see the same kind of thing in so-called respectable and prestigious drama series by award- winning novelists? I am now thinking of writing to Channel 4 to ask if they would in future include a sick-bag in the folder of bumf which they send out weekly to TV critics.

'What is a sexual offence?'