Television
TALL STORY CLUB demonstrates again to what lengths the Lime Grove gentlemen will go to put a barrier of baloney between inter- esting people and the audience. I'm all for the basic idea, as old and simple as a.ceilidh: by all means let's have some characters along to tell us some stories. But why do we have to clutter them up with all this paraphernalia of is - it - true - or - isn:t - it - well - Sir - M iles - ha - ha - what - do - you - think - ho - ho? Television's determination to turn everything into a parlour game is as stubborn as it is dreary.
There was determination too, on August Bank Holiday : this time, of course, to make us enjoy our dreary selves. Outside variety broadcasts called Spirit of Holiday Ball from places like Southend are usually fiascos; this one was fiasco-er than usual. Miss Douglas, whose pencil-sucking on one of those panel games apparently entitles her to behave like a queenly gym-mistress, chivvied a lot of holiday-makers in fancy dress from one side of the Kursaal ballroom to the other with merciless gaiety. Mr. Peter West was embar- rassed and embarrassing in cowboy costume and the inevitable starlets tried to fuse the cameras with their teeth. Beauty queens sim- pered, undrilled dancers diddled, an Alderman White did conjuring tricks. The programme was about as hilarious as a hangover.
Before that we had Potash and Perlmutter.
Two interesting individual performances by Mr. Harry Green and Mr. Meier Tzelniker were ruined by a supporting cast whose Jewish-Aderican accents were interesting indi- vidual performances too.
Still, we had a world record from Mr. Chataway to brighten our Saturday"afternoon; another of the delightful Andr6 Sarrut car- toons; a splendid Disneyland trailer for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, so slickly and unabashedly done as to be a pleasure; and the nostalgic joys of a century (with two sixes!) on the first day of a Yorkshire and Lancashire match. These fundamentally decent ingredients of the week were necessary, every one, to counter-balance the indignity of This Is Your Life. This nauseating programme is as un- representative of American television as the idiocies of Something to Shout About, say, are of the British blend. Why we had 'to be exposed to it I still don't know. And this supreme unpleasantness is only part of a lesser but wider unpleasantness. The camera looks at our condition of life and shows us to ourselves. We are tall-story-tellers; we are getting cross in our fancy dress in the Kursaal; Potash and Perlmutter we are, and record-breakers and century-makers—and even poor, dissected Mr. Eamonn Andrews. The giftie's been gie'n us. And it's important that the picture we see should be somewhere near the truth. The more it slides away from the truth into the falsity and sentimental indulgences of This Is Your Life or Ask Pickles, the more our idea of ourselves is warped and our truthfulness to ourselves weakened.
What I mean is : in Southend people have fun; a restless, rough, juke-box and Bass fun, but fun that's alive. The Spirit of Holiday Ball type of broadcast is a contrived and conceited exercise by small show-business people in dolling-up and deadening-down that fun to the level of a tennis-club dance in a particularly nasty suburb. We saw nothing of the real Southend, the real spirit of August Bank Holiday; all we saw was minor talent bullying people into a producer's idea of how they should behave. This insistence on interference. on production, reaches its ugliest point in This Is Your Life or Pick lesiana; but it's also inherent in the whole parlour-game presenta- tion obsession. There's some clean thinking needed if we're not to get a more and more distorted picture of ourselves on the screen.
Poets! METCALF
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