Television
Royal wit
Richard Ingrams
Elollowing the undignified but very amus- ing departure of Jay, Rippon and Ford from TV-am it remains to be seen whether the company can survive at all. It would of course be wonderful if the whole thing packed up. At the moment hardly anyone is watching it, and from the IBA's point of view, it has dismally failed to do any of the things it said it would and therefore you might think the Authority should step in to shut up the shop. On the other hand, I tend to think now of television in the same way as the dirty bookshops of Soho. When these first started to proliferate there were a lot of people who said that they would soon come a cropper, there being only a limited de- mand for that kind of thing. Well, it hasn't worked out like that and I suspect that TV- am may prove to be equally indestructible.
You would have thought that the BBC might be capable of putting on a decent programme about Brahms to com- memorate the 150th anniversary of the great composer's birth. Not so. Johannes Brahms (BBC 2) turned out to be the usual kind of mishmash that we have come to ex- pect from the Corporation's rotten Arts
and Music department. Whereas they think nothing of spending thousands on going to America to film some unheard-of novelist- talking about his work, it seemed that in the Base of Brahms they could only afford to buy up an Austrian film showing bits of his music being performed by an assortment of orchestras. This was then interspersed with the now over-exposed Richard Baker, film- ed in a variety of German and Austrian locations giving us some titbits about the places where Brahms lived during the course of his life. I hope that Baker and all the technicians had a nice trip but for all the illumination we got they might just as well have stayed at home.
The May Day Bank Holiday has always been a depressing affair and if this govern- ment had any sense they would abolish it altogether. The miserable weather is usually matched by the miserable quality of the TV programmes. On Sunday I watched a tasteless film called House Calls, starring Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson. There is something about this Spartan woman with her hard and unappealing voice that is extremely depressing. The following day (Bank Holiday) ITV's main offering was an equally tasteless American extravaganza about Jackie Kennedy (played by a former Charlie's Angel) which tried to render the ill-fated President and his lanky mate as the characters in a romantic fairy story, when, as we all know by now, Ken- nedy was a compulsive lecher and Jackie a grasping shrew who was as much attracted by the Kennedy wealth as she was by JFK.
I switched over halfway through to see Russell Harty interviewing Princess Alice, formerly Duchess of Gloucester. This turned out to be one of those interviews like the famous Kenneth Harris/Duke of Westminster affair, in which the inter- viewer, having read the interviewee's memoirs, which are being plugged, tries with increasing desperation to get him or her to repeat one or two of the anecdotes in the book which the author in the period between writing the book and appearing on the telly seems to have forgotten. Russell Harty has two acts: (a) the obscene and (b) the obsequious. Here it was a case of (b). Referring to the Princess as 'Ma'am', rubb- ing his hands like Uriah Heep and laughing hysterically at the slightest indication of the 'Royal Wit', he did his best to create in- terest out of a life that seemed uneventful to say the least. As it happens, I have always been interested in the Princess's late hus- band, the Duke of Gloucester, ever since Claud Cockburn told me his immortal reply when somebody asked him if he had ever read Wuthering Heights — 'Yes, indeed. Jolly funny.' But on this occasion no clear picture of the Duke emerged. He remained a walk-on character in a lot of old British Movietone newsreels. There was no hint of that jai de vivre that once prompted him to say, when at an official banquet the British ambassador in Rome produced a huge bombe surprise made out of ice and special- ly created in his honour — 'I say, Bill. Have you got any cheese?'
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