Slow but pshaw
TELEVISION STUART HOOD
Unlike the programme companies, the BBC likes to feel that there is a rationale for its choice of programmes. Watching Kenilworth I have found myself wondering what in this case it might be. Then I remembered that the endless serialisations from the classics used to be excused on the ground that through them the public would be lured into actually reading the classics: Eng. Lit. by television. Perhaps, I thought, there was at this very minute a queue for the book of the serial at the public libraries and a run on the secondhand bookshops. I reached for my Waverley Novels and took down Kenilworth—bought 1899, it says on the flyleaf in my father's thin copperplate—and opened it. I had not had it in my hand to read since I was fourteen or so.
It is difficult to convey how bad the book is. The style is costive; the dialogue a lot of fustian tushery. Characters say `Pshaw'—not once but frequently. Queen Elizabeth uses a monosyllabic interjection written 'Soh!' The Earl of Leicester has words put in his mouth which sound like excerpts from radio drama in the bad old days. 'Ha, Will Shakespeare,' quoth he (my quoth), 'Wild Will, thou hast given my nephew, Philip Sidney, love-powder, he cannot sleep without thy Venus and Adonis under his pillow ! We will have thee hanged for the veriest wizard in Europe.' The book was written in just under three months. It is a great hunk of automatic writing. Anyone wishing to read it today would require what one of my lecturers used to call a biological interest in the history of the novel.
It is true that in the course of condensing it into four episodes Anthony Stevens has subbed out some of the more ridiculous passages. Even so the lines put into the actors' mouths make Robin Hood rate as a world classic. No wonder my Lord of Leicester has some difficulty with them. The style of acting is sub-Shakespearian. The old men dodder as they do only in Eliza- bethan costume. The rustics mum away. Drunks are stagily paralytic. Foreigners have impossible accents. The goodies are broad of brow and clear of eye and do not flinch when uttering improbable dialogue. (But where is Raleigh's Devon burr?) If Gemma Jones stands out from among them all it is because she portrays the Virgin Queen in a style best described as heightened Christmas Message.
I suppose the project might have been bear- able had someone thrown away the book or had the producer been able to wring from the Bac film instead of television cameras. Then one could have envisaged a drama of cape and sword with some sort of visual excitement and a touch of pageantry to cover up the inade- quacies of the original. Instead the director, being a victim of the BBC's electronic policy, had to use what someone described to me re- cently as 'these crude daleks,' the studio cameras crabbing their way across the floor and among the actors. The result on the screen is a convention of visual presentation which is at its most inadequate whenever there is a scene of some potential splendour.
In the last episode to be screened there were two such scenes: the Queen boarding her barge. over Raleigh's cloak and the council chamber confrontation between the Queen and her favourites, Sussex and Leicester. Both called for film and movement if they were to come to life at all. Instead what we had was a kind of cramped shorthand with cutaway shots of a 'couple of extras to indicate a retinue. No wonder directors are beginning to think that the electronic method of recording drama is intolerably clumsy, that the conventions have ossified or that writers feel unduly constrained. Unfortunately the days of the daleks are far from over. There is too much money tied up in them. Too many vested interests wish to per- petuate their existence. In the case of the BBC there are too many union problems to allow a change to film.
The same goes for the classic serial. It, too, has its vested interests, its money invested. We shall see more adaptations of unreadable novels. It looks good in the annual report. It has very little to do with good television.
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