TELEVISION AND RADIO
TELEVISION this week—my last as a critical viewer—kept putting on the kind of pro- gramme it does best: the public event while it happened, sport, a magnificent sample of Aidan Crawley's Viewfinder series (civil avia- tion this time), an Ustinov play that flopped commercially but never deserved oblivion, and best of all (though nastily staged and atro- ciously lit) Antonio. A bunch like that is enough to send any television critic into retire- ment purring.
Princess Margaret's arrival on Thursday morning was not, as public events go, particu- larly spectacular, but we were watching at the time it was happening, knee-deep in airport mist with the sun above us, and one up on the newsreel and the evening papers at noon. There was not much to show, but what there was it showed very well, with less commentator's burble to fill the gaps and more plain pictures than usual; though 1 can never get over the uncomfortable air of indiscretion that peering so persistently in our millions always gives me on something of a family occasion like this.
I could never get worked up over diving on television (and we had two evenings of it run- ning, which was one too much); but skating, no doubt about it. is television's gift. The size of the screen, that chops divers up in mid-dive, and loses the scale of so many athletic per- formances, seems to make no difference to skating: you forget it, the highest compliment. Wednesday's programme from the Streatham Ice Rink made me wonder how long show skating will stay classed, in highbrow estima- tion. with pin-tables and zooty-suitings and the dogs. There it sits, for all its brilliance, plumb at the bottom of the social ladder.
While Antonio is in that dizzy and danger- ous position, the top rung of all. Television is no substitute for his presence, nor did it try to be; it was something different and valuable, a lesson in technique. like slow-motion films of show-jumping. You could argue that the camera's selection, its concentration on detail, is out of place with dancing in which, as in no other, the whole body must be taken into account at once. But this programme televised virtuosity more than performance, perfection of technique in the dancer rather than the dance itself. Feet, hands, the face in mysteri- ous close-up, a heel drumming no more em- phatically than a watch held close to your car, the almost spluttering noise of castanets at their softest—these were what came across best, and quite unthcatrically. Television, though it prowled too close to catch the move- ments as a whole, did manage a faint whiff of the intimacy of Spanish dancing outside the theatre, something of the closeness of audience and performers, the sense of being caught up and trapped in it, claustrophobically; almost the fug. For which surprising piece of conjur- ing I take off my hat to it.
But, with my hat firmly on my head, one general remark that applies to this programme and to a number of others. What was the designer up to when he prepared the set for Antonio? A large and hideous window, neither round nor square but faintly rhomboid, flanked on one side by a sadly looped-up curtain of the sort of zigzag pattern that ends as a remnant in the January sales: every time Antonio went near it you landed back in the studio with a bump. That is the trouble: they are not just harmless and dull, these sets, like so many in the theatre. You cannot ignore them : they interrupt. They scream at you, past the best acting on earth, with bad taste. There was Fay Compton on Tuesday in a cottage, seeing ghosts. Now the cottage was important, everyone in the play remarked how cleverly she had fixed it up. Yet the Ideal Home Exhi- bition was nothing to it. It might have been put together as a horror-comic for interior decorators. Was it a Lime Grove joke?
It seems to me more charitable to suppose a joke than to think these village hall efforts at decor come out of Lime Grove with everyone's blessing. But it seems odd that, in a visual medium, while the matter is often excellent the design is as often atrocious; from the lettering to the occasional drawings, from the women announcers' dresses to the tacky back- cloths of the Children's Television plays. Fond though 1 have grown of many of the Lime Grove antics, I think a large broom could sweep salubriously through the studios, a broom pushed by someone who realises that, whether people sit up and take notice or not, what they see repeatedly modifies their eye- sight, educates or injures it, one or the other. It may be a small thing for one viewer to be appalled by the zigzags of Antonio's back- cloth; but multiply that by millions, night after night and year after year, and it comes to a tidy total.
ISABEL QUIGLY
Mr. John Irwin takes over next week for a spell as television critic.—Editor, Spectator.
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