5 MARCH 1983, Page 5

Notebook

The number of people who watch tele- vision has apparently dropped by 12 per cent in the past year. Fewer people are i also going to the cinema as well, and t is said that the video is responsible for these trends. But I doubt whether this tells the Whole story. Several of the popular televi- sion programmes lost about two million viewers during 1982; the figures which I have seen, from the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board, do not indicate whether fewer people are also watching the news Programmes, but the overall decline sug- gests that this may be so. It is hardly sur- prising, given the poor quality of, in par- ticular, the BBC news bulletins. The news- readers, as our television critic, Richard Ingrams, commented again last week, are Wholly unsuited to the job. But I find Myself even more irritated by some of the regular reporters — by their voices, their faulty and sloppy pronunciation, the lack of authority which they give to their reports. (I would single out Christopher Morris, who has the habit of swallowing the endings of words and, in his recent reports on the mass exodus from Nigeria, totally failed to convey the significance and the tragedy of What was happening.) Now we learn that the commercial 'breakfast' programme, TV-am, has made a disastrous start and is less popular than its BBC rival because — Or so the Peter Jay team thinks — there is too much news on TV-am. I haven't watch- ed either breakfast channel, so cannot com- ment on their merits or otherwise, but I do not believe that the answer is to trivialise even further what is already said to be in- consequential and of little interest to anyone getting dressed in a hurry in order to go to work. It is clear that TV-am is just fl?undering about, with fewer than half a Million viewers, David Frost, who 'gets in the way of the news', as one advertising agent put it, has been given a well-earned rest; and the Head of News, Robert Hunter, has resigned in protest at the deci- sion to devote more time w 'features'. The conclusion must be that people are quite rightly dissatisfied with the presentation of news on television, in the mornings and at night. All of which, if correct, is good news tor newspapers, and for weekly journals. Ever since, some 20 years ago, I spent ia few days at Loch Ness with a group ",' People who were investigating what they lked. to refer to as the 'unidentified animate °bJects which they hoped to photograph in rquhart Bay, I have always believed in the _monster. Or rather, in the existence of a s cies of

creatures which were trapped in the loch millions of years ago and which have continued to breed there — the loch is 700 feet deep in places. Having listened to the testimony of the water bailiff at Fort Augustus, who told me of the day he saw this 'terrible creature' pass underneath his boat, any doubts which I had were dispell- ed. But it is not always a good idea to boast about believing in the Monster: you are likely to be regarded, not always sym- pathetically, as the sort of person who belongs to UFO societies. In 1960, a scien- tific officer at the British Museum, Dr Tucker, lost his job because he had trumpeted his view that there were Monsters, in Loch Ness and other deep lakes, which were marine reptiles of the plesiosaur family, supposedly extinct. Now it seems that we are getting a lot nearer to proving the Monster's existence: sonar equipment has recently produced positive data from the depths of the loch 'consistent with the presence of large animals'. The signals given were apparently not from fish (too deep) or from tree trunks. Those in- volved in the project say that they have the technical means to confirm, within a year or so, what the signals do come from. It is all very exciting, particularly if Dr Tucker and I and many other believers are proved right. We shall then know a little of the pride which Professor Smith, the South African icthyologist, must have felt when he found the coelacanth, a fish believed extinct for millions of years. He claimed to have iden- tified one, caught off East London in 1938, but was ridiculed by the scientific establish- ment and had to wait 14 years until he was able himself to confirm this amazing discovery by tracking the coelacanth to its natural habitat off the Comores Islands.

'This is what we call higher advertising 1. strategy,' said Mr Frank Giles, editor of the Sunday Times, welcoming the eight- page supplement of the Times which was in- serted into his paper last Sunday. It was a digest of what the Times presumably judged to be the most important and interesting news which it had published in the past six days. The idea, of course, is to attract more readers to the declining Times. 'The Times puts it all into focus,' the supplement an- nounced. 'It is the national authority.' 'Here is a selection in eight pages to give a flavour of what you missed.' Part of the 'flavour' was to be found at the top of the letters page — 'just, about the most famous part of the paper, to which many people turn first'. The letter began: 'Rectal and vaginal examinations ... are akin to rape.' Turn back one page and there, under 'Medical Briefing', was an item about a woman's `G' spot, which I would rather not describe in this more sensitive family newspaper. Elsewhere in the supplement, we read of Miss Jill Bennett 'finding a friend to live with and love', and Miss Joan- na Lumley writing about the thrill of ap- pearing on breakfast television. If this is to be the focus for the new Times, how many of its readers are going to give up the paper which I used to be proud to work for? 0 tempera, 0 mores!

How many polymaths are there working in the transport services? Following the success of Fred Housego, the taxi driver who won the Mastermind contest a couple of years ago, a driver on the London underground Piccadilly Line, Christopher Hughes, seems set to do the same thing this year. He had no trouble winning his Mastermind heat on television last Sunday (special subject: steam engines). I like to imagine both of them to be Spectator readers, although a recent survey of our readership by MORI did not turn up much hard information to support such an assumption. However, we do know that the Spectator has a number of readers in this socio-economic group in New York. Any contributor to the Spectator, or indeed anyone carrying a copy of the paper, on ar- rival at Kennedy airport can expect to be welcomed and whisked through the entry formalities by one of, apparently, seven im- migration officials who are known to be devoted readers. And our correspondent Christopher Hitchens tells me of Mr Thomas Dubose, a New York taxi driver who last month asked him his name and which paper he worked' for. When Christopher Hitchens replied that he wrote for the Nation, he was told: `Oh yes, I read your stuff, but you write much better for the Spectator. That's the one 1 like.' It was something of a surprise not to receive an entry from Mr Dubose for the Treasure Hunt.

Simon Courtauld