Television
Original Crime
By PETER FORSTER 'Om prisons are teeming, crammed with a great army of inmates.' The leaden mediocrity of phrase, the curiously toneless timbre of voice, so like Peter Brough (not to mention Archie Andrews) were unmistakable: Mr. Christopher Mayhew, MP, was back on television, this time making an 'In- quiry' into Crime, in his own happily inimitable manner. The personality is not beside the point, because in a sense the personality is the point. Really, when all is said and done and claimed in terms of prestige and effort and serious purpose, what does a programme like the first of the series achieve? Were some authentic, enlightening understanding of the problem conveyed, it might not jar to hear Mr. Mayhew talking of 'all the chaps I met in prison,' and conducting interviews inside with such a sympathetic smile. Do I mean that he should always scowl at prisoners? No, simply that somehow he managed to strike a jarring note of goodwill. After all, people in prison may well be victims of society, but they are hardly its friends.
Even leaving aside the basic fact that a majority are rightly inside because of wrongly anti-social behaviour (which the programme did not really face), I fail to sec the usefulness of the exercise. Its effects were so obvious: the easy juxtapositions of impenitent swindler and sad swindled, of basher and bashed. The one daring effect was the weirdly tasteless and insensitive device of making three different lines of prisoners represent the increase in crime statistics since the war. The most imaginative shot—prisoners being herded round in a close circle for exercise—was the very first.
For the rest, television did here nothing that radio could not do as well, or print better. The sad thing is that the original question is of vital importance: why has crime increased under con- ditions of national prosperity? An extremely capable-seeming Chief Constable of Birmingham turned up in the studio to answer subsidiary ques- tions about detection and the way in which cars enable criminals to cover the country. An expert of a scarcely specified kind, Mr. Wilkins, trailed a fascinating coat with mention of the relation of crime to younger age-groups, but still the Mayhew technique was, as usual, skin-deep. Shortage of time or subsequent programmes can- not be pleaded as a get-out. If you are to touch upon a question, why not try to answer it there and then? For instance, if the generation born during the war provides most criminals, why not pursue to the extent of inquiring whether the expert meant that crime actually starts in the cot? Original Crime? It is high time this idea that war caused a nation-wide moral breakdown was given a fuller, fairer airing. Quite a lot of people, after all, were behaving better than they have ever done before or since.
Again, if the jumping-off point is a photo of a neighbourhood, with the simple, rather amateurish aim of breaking down national crime statistics to what happened in one place, surely the place must be specified? Or is it suggested that all neighbourhoods were/are like this? A shopkeeper said he had been robbed forty times —is he supposed to be taken as a common example? Admittedly, Mr. Mayhew seems to have next to no sense of place, as his last series on class distinction showed, but somebody ought to have considered the relation of the crime to the circumstances.
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