Television
Black & white
Jeffrey Bernard
I've been watching television from a hospital bed for the past ten days—fade in gipsy violins—and the black and white portable set I've been looking at has distorted everything. You just don't appreciate colour and size until you go without it and my mini set has made everything look so old that sometimes I've felt that I was in the Everyman Cinema, Hampstead. Angela Rippon is looking like Arletiy and Coronation Street is looking like Le Jour se Leve. There are exceptions to this rule: and unfortunately Derek Nimmo still looks like Derek Nimmo.
The World of Ivor Novello (BBC2) probably gained from this illusion. Black and white seemed right. The programme was introduced and narrated by Ian Wallace and we picked him up on a village green close to Novella's old weekend house. That didn't ring true for a start. Somewhere like the Ivy Restaurant would have been more like it. Novello was a Londoner and Mr Wallace looked more at home talking about him as he wandered aimlessly and pointlessly through the empty foyers and stalls of London theatres. Some of the outside filming on this sort of programme is as ineffectual as Big Ben behind a political correspondent. Anyway, Wallace enthused whimsically as he took us down the lilac lane. He said that Novello made £15,000 out of writing 'Keep the Home Fires Burning', 'A colossal sum of money in those days,'—isn't it now?—and that he made two solo flights in the Navy Air Corps at the end of the First World War. He didn't say whether they were with or without an aeroplane.
Then we were treated to a few minutes back stage with a group of ageing romancers, including Alan Melville and Sandy Wilson who told Novello anecdotes. One of the master's old stars sang a song and they moved off to the circle bar in a very informal and unrehearsed way, not forgetting to stand on his marks. Melville seems to be an extraordinary man: a true amateur and one who isn't frightened of getting paid for it. I've never seen Sandy Wilson before and I was surprised that the man who wrote The Boy Friend should look so well fed. Wilson said, `If Capra or Lubitsch had got hold of Novello he could have been a Cary Grant.' At least they didn't overrate Novello and while I was
wondering what would ,and
happened to Cary Grant if Novello had got hold of him, Ian Wallace was off again to visit Olive Gilbert, Novella's leading contralto, in her Aldwych flat.
It's odd how retired stars all seem to have the same flat. Cosy, old-fashioned with friendly armchairs in floral upholstery and polished tables covered in photographs of co-stars framed in silver or tortoiseshell. Miss Gilbert was, of course, very nice about the master, although when she said, referring to those country weekends, 'He was absolute master in his own house,' I squirmed at the idea of the organised fun they must have had. How odd the Welsh are. The only country in the world that has never invented an alcoholic drink produced Ivor Novello. Before Ian Wallace bade us farewell from the village green someone sang 'We'll Gather Lilacs' and three teenage nurses dropped their hypodermics and bottles and stood transfixed around my bed watching with tears in their eyes. For someone who will never be allowed sugar again, the programme was a super send-off.
The next night I took my first look at Terra Firma (BBC 2). I should have thought that if a few people sat around a table discussing ideas for a magazine programme and someone said, 'What about pieces on Fyffe Robertson and the groundnut scheme, shepherds and sheep, scavenging coal from NCB tips, disc jockeys and local transport in Tyneside?' he would immediately be promoted out of harm's way. Apparently not. I haven't often wondered what ever happened to Ned Sherrin, but now that I know, I'm going to try and forget. He looks very pleased mind you.
But there are worse things than Terra Firma. In fact, I've just discovered the worst show on television. It's Happy Ever After (BBC 1) and it's so bad you can't switch it off. Have, a look at it sometime when you're worried about feeling inexplicably happy, or use it as an emetic. What's sad is that someone as good as June Whitfield should be involved with Terry Scott and such a common and vulgar script. Up till now, I'd always thought that Love Thy Neighbour followed closely by Till Death Do Us Part in its more recent episodes were rock bottom, but this man Scott is it. The one I saw was about Scott and Whitfield's son bringing a Chinese girl home. Dad slanted his eyes with his fingers and talked using l's for r's. After the first two jokes it became utterly offensive. They tell me that light entertainment people in television are looking for new material. I wonder where they're looking. Certainly not in front of their noses where there's masses of potential like the comedians in Read All About It and Under Bow Bells.
One reads almost anything in hospital and I haven't made exceptions of the TV Times and the Radio Times. If anyone at the Radio Times has got any ideas that it's eventually going to be read—or more important bought—because its features are largely written by Drabble, Bakewell and Bragg, not a firm of solicitors but three very serious writers, then they're sadly mistaken. What's wanted is good programme notes. Of course they're a bit better than those in the TV Times but there's still a lot of wittering from Phillip Jenkinson, for example, about people like Busby Berkeley when he should be talking about the film in question rather than rabbiting on about the history of the cinema. At least the TV Times isn't pretentious and last week's feature 'Why I'll Never Have a Baby Again' by Mary Rand is at least as bad as its equivalent in Cosmopolitan, 'Why I'll Never Have An Orgasm Again' by Deirdre McSharry. For bad, of course, I mean riveting.
How the Radio Times choose who to do their Preview spot is a bit of a mystery. It seems to keep coming back to Kenneth Griffith, yet another Welshman obsessed by being a Welshman. If it isn't him then it's back to Bakewell. Perhaps the features editor has lost his contacts book.
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