Television
Wizardry
Richard Ingrams
I suddenly realised last week that it is insomnia and not ambition that driyes men into politics. People who complain about our poor MPs having to stay awake during all night sittings miss the point. That is the way they like it. This inspiration came to me while watching the marathon by-election Bore-ins on BBC and ITV while at the time
keeping a third eye on Bernard Williams talking about linguistic philosophy to Bryan Magee on BBC 2.
The BBC started their coverage at 11.20 and the result did not finally come in until 1.10 when on the other channel Alistair Burnett uttered the traditional, 'Well, something seems to be happening now at
the Ilford Town Hall so let's go over to Ron
Pargs etc . . In the Kenneth Moore Theatre, Ilford we had Dr David Owen (Lab), Norman St John Stevas (Con) and David Pcnhaligon (Lib) being cross examined by the insufferably jocular Robin Day. Oh, how they talked! It was like one of those stories you read in the local paper about a man playing the piccolo all night in order to raise money for charity. Penhaligon spoke of his love for Cornish pasties, Stevas said — actually I can't really remember anything he said; and David Owen said that the rest of the world had been 'pretty shocked' by events in Ilford during the last weeks. I wondered which of his foreign friends he had been talking to. Robert Mugabe, possibly.
As for talking, Bernard Williams and Bryan Magee weren't doing too badly on BBC 2. Magee wisely pointed out that whatever its limitations linguistic philosophy was a useful training for young minds. I thought of this later during some film reports on the canvassing in Ilford when both the National Front Chief Slug and Mr Michael Heseltine used the expression 'the British people' as though it meant something distinct from immigrants. Magee and myself, with our philosophical training, would have questioned the logic of this. Other speakers waffled away about the decline in educational standards caused by immigrants. But ironically earlier that evening ITN had shown coloured people in Maida Vale conducting special evening classes for their children to teach them all the things like multiplication tables which they don't get taught in the wonderful local comprehensive school. Sometimes you get a feeling that the only respectable, i.e. church-going, table-learning, nonGeneration Game-watching, 'British people' left in this country are the coloured immigrants.
Another man to use the expression 'British People' was one of the chief wizards of
the Ku Klux Klan, Mr David Duke, who appeared with Dennis Tuohy earlier this week. I was very disappointed I must admit that the self-styled wizard turned out to be an insignificant looking young man with a moustache who could easily have slipped into Britain disguised as an assistant sales manager from W. H. Smith returning from a package holiday in Majorca. It is very tempting of course for the media folk to put a real racist on the air. But trying to get the better of such people in a rational argument as Dennis Tuohy did never works and in the process of banging on about the pure white race I imagine Duke succeeded in making quite a few converts to his dreadful cause.
So much money is vainly spent by both sides on trying to create suspense that it is nice to be able to acclaim Thames's fourpart thriller Rachel in Danger, a gripping if at times slightly implausible story about a little girl caught up in a terrorist plot to assassinate the Queen. Written by John Bowen and directed by Waris Hussein, Rachel was at times as good as Hitchcock, relying like the maestro not so much on traditional devices such as creaking doors and unearthly screams but on horrible things happening suddenly in quiet peaceful surroundings. A stranger joins a man on a bench in St James's park opens a box of sandwiches and stabs him to death, all to the sound of a band playing Gilbert and Sullivan in Buckingham Palace garden. Funnily enough the last time I was given a whiff of pleasurable horror by the telly was also in a play by John Bowen when an odious BBC Anthony Hopkins-like music man was lured to a caravan somewhere in the Midlands, paralysed by a glass of herbal poison and efficiently garrotted by a fiendish old witch.
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