Enduring
Richard In grams
T must say that every time I see John 1 Osborne on the telly I warm to him. One or two of his plays may be bloody awful but at least there is some life in the old boy, and unlike most people he shows signs of becoming more interesting and more interested as he grows older. Melvyn Bragg, who interviewed him on Sunday's South Bank Show, spent too long, I thought, picking over the pieces of his last play for the theatre, A Sense of Detachment, which looked like a terrible heap of rubbish, though Osborne loyally stuck up for it on the grounds that it had 'not broken faith with bad taste'. There have been two Osborne TV plays more recently, both of which I enjoyed very much. It would have been better to give us extracts from these. Melve harped, too, on Osborne's attitude to his mother, as if that might give us some kind of Freudian insight into his state of mind. I thought Osborne was commendably honest about his feelings for his mother and I'm sure she is a terrible old bat, as he maintains. All the same it is a bit much to go on about her in front of the millions of viewers, and one can only hope that Osborne will work this animus out of his system before long. Whatever his faults, he has a good strong Orwellian distaste for pseuds, pansies and trendies, which is admirable. I wish he had been around to throw a few brickbats at the SWET, Theatrical Awards for 1980 ceremony, shown on BBC' on Monday. This backslapping beano at the Cafe Royal was its usual awful self, though it is always quite useful to be given a run-down on all the West End hits just to make quite certain there is nothing one wants to see.
Meanwhile, nominations for my own Worst Television Play of 1981 are being accepted. Until recently the front runner had been Mr William Douglas-Home's You're All Right — How Am I? which the BBC actually repeated at the weekend. But last week a hotly tipped newcomer, Miss Angela Huth, entered the race, threatening to pip Mr Douglas-Home at the post. Her play, Virginia Fly is Drowning, was shown last Friday on BBC2. It starred Ms Anna Massey as a virginal schoolteacher living with some highly improbable parents somewhere in the green belt. Miss Fly has an American pen-friend and a music professor called Hans who takes her out to concerts. Then suddenly she is selected by the computer to appear on television and be interviewed on what it is like to be a virgin. This she does and describes a strange fantasy she has of being ravished in a cornfield by some lusty farm labourer. Then the American pen-pal turns up, eager to see the Tower of London, Harrods etc and takes Virginia to an hotel and ravishes her. But over the continental-style breakfast the following morning he proudly takes some snaps of his wife and kids out of his pocket to show her. This comes as a shock, as he has not mentioned anything about them before, and she says, 'Goodbye and thank you', and takes her leave. Meanwhile, her TV performance has been much admired by a stout, middle-aged pantomime actress called Mrs Thompson who asks her out to a drink along with a young man called Ulick who wears cufflinks which Mrs Thompson greatly admires. Ulick is an enigmatic character who has a large collection of unused shirts and whose fridge contains a bottle of champagne and one egg — though why this should be so we are not told. When Ulick and Virginia go to bed together, it transpires that he too has a wife when she comes storming into the bedroom. 'Oh, I should have told you I was married', says Ulick thumping the pillow with his fist. But Virginia says only, 'It wasn't relevant to the situation', and again meekly leaves. Eventually, to cut an hour-and-a-half story short, Miss Fly gets married to the professor whom she doesn't much fancy. End of play.
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