Cod on the box
Clive Gammon
It may be no news to travelled readers that in Iceland beer is a forbidden drink, but I hadn't realized that until this week. Oh yes, they have whisky and wine of the best, as the old song goes, but beer, no. There is no easy accounting for this curious law but, when pressed, well-heeled Icelanders offer the theory that it is to Prevent the labouring classes getting smashed at lunchtime. Since whisky costs £1 a shot there's no danger in that!
Which brings me inexorably to another connected fact. Here in Iceland there is no television on Thursdays (or in the month Of July either, but that's a different matter). Screens are blank on Thursdays because no drinking at all is allowed on Wednesday, except for wine served with a meal. You take my drift. After a dry Wednesday under the wet skies of Reykjavik, Who is going to hang around the telly When he could be out on the booze?
This week I had hOped to describe to You the interestingly different service put out to a tiny population (a little over 200,000) by Icelandic Television, a public corporation independent (like the BBC) of the Government, financed by licences (Icelanders pay E12 a year for black and White only) and limited cotnmercials whiCh are not permitted to break into programmes.
And it is an interesting time to be in Iceland, of course, with Bobby Fischer only lust having left (he kept the plane waiting 45 minutes as a final gesture) and with the cod war, quiescent as I write, liable tO flare up at any time. From the television centre this week I could look down into the harbour and see a whaling vessel berthing. Her function is now changed. For the emergency she will be assisting the gunboat Eigir in cod war patrols, which at least is good news for whales. For People who go on about conservation so loudly, the Icelanders certainly seem to have a blind spot where whales are con cerned for they still have four whalers °Perating in the North Atlantic, the only nation to do so. Come to that, in Reykja
s main street you can buy stuffed Puffins (like the other auks, a dwindling
!pecies). And stuffed ravens, too, if you 'alley one to go on top of your telly. Very suitable for re-runs of "The Fall of the House of Usher:, . BY now you will be wondering how long it is possible for me to rattle on before ctually getting down to the programmes ve seen, so I had better explain my difficulty. Last night we had "A Family at War Part 21," "The Flintstones," "The Power Game" and "A Man Called Ironside " are promised for later in the week, but what everyone is really looking forward to is "Please Sir," currently Iceland's most popular programme.
With only twenty-five hours of broadcasting this does not leave much time for anything else, but Iceland Television does originate a newscast each evening at 8.00 p.m. It was all endearingly cosy the other night in the studio, a slightly smaller setup than the BBC has in Cardiff and it was hard for me to remember that only a few hours previously I had been slaloming in a Landrover down a mountain track in some of the wildest country in the world.
At this point "global village" stopped being a cliche as the young producer in front a the monitoring bank conjured up the paranoid features of General Amin, on this particular evening the Ugandan situation taking preference over even the cod war, though they soon came back to it. Daily Telegraph, I caught, out of the ruck of Icelandic commentary. What had it been up to, I wondered.
But here the news is the only programme I can't follow. Guess what we have tonight? Rolf Harris, with subtitles.
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