W itivr about marryin g your g odmother? Droppin g in last week on
Our Man at St. Mark's (Rediffusion), a series I had missed until then, I found this vaguely Freudian concept pro- viding the twist to the plot. Young man objects when Vicar reads the banns: 'She doesn't love him, she loves me!' dirt disagrees and is soon submitting to predatory embraces from fiancé who doesn't belong to the parish but pops down from Birmingham (which sounds sinister) and betrays a go-getting sexiness combined with a mother-complex and a strong propensity to sulk (foibles of the Midlands, no doubt). Vicar dis- covers that girl and objector were once unofficially engaged but that there were quarrels. Chief point of disagreement turns out to have been that boy refused to get married in church. Vicar thinks this odd; boy is habitual churchgoer. On in- vestigation boy admits, shyly, that he has never been baptised. Like Wilde's Dr. Chasuble, Vicar says that that can be fixed right away but he'll need a godmother. Girl takes on the part (only churchgoing bird he knows?). Fiancé catches them together on the way to the font; altercation ensues; fiancé pouts, turns on his heel and sulks off to Brummagen and Mum. True love wins. Only the decor seemed reasonably authentic but even here the Vicar's bookshelf contained those rows of bound volumes of the Illustrated London News interspersed, one guesses, with Emerson's Essays and The Poems of Mrs. Brown- ing which crop up everywhere—'Literature means leather !'—as one of the clichés of television. Not even an Honest to God. A different cliché, that of the portentous studio setting, is currently demonstrated in A. V. Coton's series The World Dances (ATV) of which last week's episode concerned The Rites of Spring. This haunting, beautiful and indecent subject deserved something less distracting than Michael Eve's travel-bureau decor. Mr. Coton is an endearingly amateurish performer, with a blurred voice and a good deal of rigidity to his evident earnestness and benevolence, and one can imagine his being more at ease in his garden or his study. Instead he was positioned at the usual large desk, in front of a blown-up photo- graph whose subject I missed, and which for the rest of the programme was reduced to a strand of telephone-wires bisecting his fine head and leading in the direction of a sort of aerial bundle which might have been a dead crow, while in front of him a globe rotated throughout, pre- sumably symbolic of the world-wide nature of his subject and useful also as a frame for porthole- view glimpses of dancing at opening and close. His single interview was positioned against a wall of indiarubber bricks stamped with an embryonic Greek key pattern. Why? Perhaps its not surprising that we never slowed down and focused sharply on this fertility business. The film sequences were busy and fuzzy, with one exciting Mexican scene. The comments grew more and more avuncular until they lingered on a little girl tripping fairily over a lawn like any Brownie in Sussex.
PATRICK ANDERSON
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