Television
Soured fantasy
Martyn Harris
Nearly everyone must have stayed at The Green Man (BBC1, 9.05 p.m., Sun- day) at one time or other. The food is pretentious, the wine is exorbitant, and the host is a 'character'. His wife is twitchy with the strains of keeping the show on the road and her husband off the bottle. You eat in a ticking silence, sleep with a lavender sachet, and drive away the next morning with a sigh of relief. John Cleese made a farce of it, and Kingsley Amis a ghost story. The Green Man is someone else's fantasy, gone sour.
Albert Finney apparently acquired the television rights to The Green Man from Amis 20 years ago — a depressingly accurate anticipation of Finney's own physical decline. Maurice Allington is held together by lust, liquor and cast-iron corsetry: an Amis-man incarnate, arrested somewhere on the long slide between Jim Dixon of Lucky Jim, and Jake Richardson of Jake's Thing. Intellectually impotent though not yet physically flaccid, he is fascinating because, like all Amis's later characters, he teeters between self- satisfaction and self-disgust; pomposity and panic.
Finney makes the most of his gut and grog-spots, and even executes a replay of the Tom Jones celebration on film of food as sex, when he lingeringly recites the menu to his mistress. 'Slender long points of asparagus . . . pigeon and grape mousse laid upon a bed of scented vegetables . . . a frenzy of dark and white chocolate in sheets of almond wafer.'
The word 'frenzy' here is well chosen, because Maurice's lasciviousness has moved far beyond a cheerful randiness to something dark and death-driven. He makes love to his wife like an overwound clockwork rabbit. He seduces his friend's wife while his dead father is still growing cold upstairs, and no sooner is this seduc- tion complete than he is proposing a threesome. His daughter-in-law, played by Josie Lawrence, would seem to be next on the menu, and there was a moment, when Maurice's rheumy eye flickered over her downy shoulder, that I wondered about his own 14-year-old daughter. But this is still the BBC, so surely not.
When Maurice begins to see ghosts we do not know if the spirits come from the vasty deep of his bottomless whisky bottle, but they are touchingly tawdry phantoms. A gnarled tree comes to life and dis- embowels a maiden; a grey lady brushes past him on the stair. Maurice needs a faith, a religion, a spiritual dimension to shore up his tottering world, but all he can summon to his Cotswold eaterie are the spirits of Hammer Horror.
In The Trials of Life (BBC2, 7.15 p.m., Sunday) there was spookiness of a diffe- rent kind as David Attenborough sha- dowed a troop of chimpanzees through the African jungle. The amiable, tea-drinking creatures of the Typhoo adverts were here revealed as a cruelly efficient hunting team cornering, then finally dismembering a monkey to hideous whoops of glee.
It was the most astonishing sequence of wildlife photography I have ever seen, and light years away from the cuddly anthropo- morphism of the early television nature shows. These were wild animals up there in the trees, butchering their prey and wiping the blood from their chops; but with their ingenuity, and co-operation they were also ourselves.
As an atheist and a Darwinist, Attenbor- ough is able to gaze into the heart of darkness with a grin of Boy Scout fascina- tion, where I, with Kingsley Amis, am still looking for a sheet to pull over my head.
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