Television
More deadly
Richard ingrams
1 had hoped that recent strikes in Independent Television would consign to oblivion certain best-forgotten programmes, but it was not to be. LWT apparently thought so well of their silly series A Question of Sex introduced by Clive James and Anna Raehurn that they preserved the last of the series and showed it on Sunday. This was a thoroughly confused and boring programme the blame for which, were I a male chauvinist, I would place firmly and squarely with the producer, an obviously confused and woolly-minded woman called Jane Hewland. Clive James is a well educated fellow, familiar, I imagine, with the works of Dostoievsky etc, so why does he subscribe, when discussing the question of whether men are more aggressive than women, to such silly nonsense as 'We are driven back to the psychologists'? Why should he fall into the modern trap of thinking that psychologists and 'experts' like the woman who appeared on Sunday from 'The Contemporary Violence Research Centre' can tell us anything that we don't know already? I can only assume that James, who suffers from a fatal urge to be considered fashionable, thinks that this sort of stuff is all the rage. He pointed out, inter alia, that there is no female TV equivalent of the Incredible Hulk, no 'Incredible Hulkette' as he put it. Has he never seen the terrifying sight of Esther Rantzen on the rampage with gleaming teeth bared, her two tame male acolytes trembling in the background? Kipling, who had been out East and seen a thing or two, said it all when he made that observation about the female of the species being more deadly than the male.
I do not at all regret my refusal to be interviewed on Person to Person by David Dimbleby having watched his performance last week with Peter Cook. It was certainly pleasurable to see the little extracts of old sketches from Beyond the Fringe and The Establishment. Almost all of the early Cook material, I understand, has now been destroyed, including most of the Not Only But Also series and a BBC film of Beyond the Fringe, Messrs Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett not wanting to preserve for posterity a reminder of youthful indiscretions. (Not but what, when I catch a glimpse of the Doctor treading the boards, I always think how much better he managed as a clown than as a boring biology lecturer.) Dimbleby started with a preconception of Cook which he seemed unwilling to abandon, namely that the great satirist was the victim of an unhappy childhood and that his experiences at public school turned him against Authority. As Cook politely pointed out, his humour is by no means directed against Authority. In my own experience it is more to do with Huge Bees, not to say Gigantic Snakes, 'many of them millions of miles long'. Sigmund Freud or even Dr Jonathan Miller might be able to make something of this strange obsession with the world of insects and reptiles but it is a far cry from the attitudes of a public school rebel, which in any case Cook is not, as emerged from his account of relatively happy days at Radley.
Meanwhile one is sorry to learn that Cook's partner, the diminutive Dudley Moore, has fallen a victim to the love of Hollywood, at any rate for the time being. It is surprising how the American cinema industry continues to exercise its spell. One of the good things about Barry Norman who introduced his new series of Hollywood Greats (BBC 1) last week is that he does not idolise film stars in the same childish way as Michael Parkinson does. Most old films now look fairly comic and I found myself last week roaring with laughter at the bits of Thirties gangster movies featuring Edward G. Robinson, the first of the 'Greats'. On the whole Norman has selected his subjects well, choosing stars whose private lives were as genuinely dramatic as their film performances were bogusly so. This contrast makes for a certain poignancy as well as allowing a lot of good old-fashioned gossip which is something you seldom get on telly.
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