Television
Cashing in
Richard Ingrams
Like boys returned to school, the old faces are back on the screen after their summer hols—Doctor Who, the two Ronnies and the smirking Michael Parkinson — 'My guests tonight are John Snow, Ben Travers and Jimmy Tarbuck'. I missed them all thank goodness, and if Parky can't produce a better trio than that to start his new series I very much doubt if I shall be staying up to see any subsequent instalments. So there.
One 'welcome returnee' to use David Frost's very wonderful phrase, was Jonathan Routh, back, after many years, in his old role as the Candid Cameraman. The poker-faced Routh is surely one of the great men of our time—author of The Good Loa Guide, naïf painter, practical joker and eccentric. Whether or not the ending of his association with that oil millionairess has forced him back on the telly in order to earn his living I do not know. We can only applaud his reappearance. The first programme saw him at Skegness dressed in Arab clothing trying to buy up 'twenty-four ladies from Mablethorpe' for an Arab sheikh, and then inveigling burly visitors to the Derbyshire Miners Holiday Centre into taking ballet lessons as part of the camp's 'Compulsory Leisure Activities', the only alternative being embroidery. The highlight was Routh accosting two women in the street and asking them through a megaphone how to get to Cudlipp Close. They didn't know.. Routh then told them in great detail. They explained patiently that they didn't want to know how to get there, it was he who had asked the way. Routh said that he was from the information bureau, and as they didn't know, he was telling them. Throughout this bizarre exchange Routh insisted on the ladies making use of the megaphone to address him, as well as using it himself.
Switching over to BBC 2 I found a man with a hairpiece and South African accent talking gibberish. The programme turned out to be 'Stop to Think', the Brains Trust compered by Malcolm Mug,geridge. 'We hear a lot about pollution,' an earnest young man with a beard in the audience said. 'I'd like to know just how serious it is'. Another man with a beard on the panel did his best to explain. 'Pollution involves us all,' he said. There was also a mountaineer and the statutory BBC woman. All of them, the audience included, would seem to have been did his through 'Rentabore'. Mugg his best to enliven the affair with a few jokes but he was obviously as bored by it as I was. The intention, which is to discuss 'serious issues', is a worthy one but it does not follow that one has to be serious about it. It is also a great mistake to put dons on the telly. With only a few exceptions like A. J. P. Taylor they are pretty deadly people on the whole.
The Duchess of Duke Street doesn't say much for the originality of the BBC's drama department. It is very much a case of Son of Upstairs, Downstairs—another lengthy saga of Edwardian kitchen sink melodrama. The BBC has even hired the same producer, John Hawkesworth, to mastermind the series. The story is based on that of Rosa Lewis, the celebrated proprietress of the Cavendish Hotel, who features in Vile Bodies. E seem to remember that there was a book about her published recently called The Duchess of Jet-tun Street—a surprisingly similar title to the BBC's. And yet there was no mention of the book in last week's lengthy Radio Tinte.s feature which emphasised how exhaustive had been the researches of the scriptwriters and all involved in making the series. (This may be another case of BBC piracy, which I shall investigate when I have a moment.) However that may be, the first episode was no great shakes. As invariably happens, when everything has been done to make sure that all the props are absolutely authentic, the only result is that the characters are made to seem that much more bogus. The Downstairs persons were all clichés, while 'Rosa', Louisa Leyton, was rendered as yet another Eliza Dolittle, a strikingly FannyCraddock-in-the-making with an armoury of colourful Cockney repartee; whereas her original was plainly a Dickensian grotesque and a terrible old snob to boot. The difficulty of turning such a person into the rOmantic heroine of a fifteen-part series has obviously not been faced and the whole thing will, I predict, fall flat on its face, which will serve everyone jolly well right for trying to cash in so shamelessly on the success of Upstairs, Downstairs.
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