Television
Anti-Auntie
Richard Ingrams
T am beginning to think my strong feelings of antipathy towards the BBC are caus- ed more than anything by a daily bout of annoyance with Radio 3. Every morning when I switch on the Music Programme there is an awful piece of junk music being played as if some sadist working at the BBC is saying 'Bet you've never heard of this composer before.' But what is more in- furiating is when you hear the announcer say, 'Our next piece of music is by Bach'--- and the heart leaps and prepares to forgive all — only to hear him add the proviso `played on the original instruments'. This Is the most refined torture of all, to hear good music, when it finally comes, rendered with the terrible scrapings and wheezings of Trevor Pinnock's or Christopher Hog- wood's museum pieces. It leaves me in anti-BBC mood for the rest of the day. There has been some further evidence of the BBC's debased standards this week to which my friend Henry Porter referred In the Sunday Times. Faced by the advent on ITV of the Paul Scott saga Jewel in the Crown, the BBC decided to try to sabotage it by putting on The Thornbirds, with the second part timed to coincide with the opening of Jewel in the Crown. The idea was to get everyone hooked on The Thorn' birds so that they would give Paul Scott a miss the following evening. This silly ploY meant taking off Panorama altogether. Aside from the general idiocy, it is just worth noting again that it is the publiclY financed BBC which is putting on the tripe, i.e. The Thornbirds, while a commercial company, Granada, is attempting some' thing worthwhile and ambitious, i.e. the Paul Scott, about which I will write next week. I had been intending to watch a bit of The Thornbirds but a few minutes was enough to show what rubbish it was. It was hard to see anyway why all the characters who were meant to be Australians spoke with American accents. Meanwhile I had become rather hooked on a mammoth two' hour documentary about Richard Strauss on BBC2 which went a small way to mitigate the BBC's disgraceful behaviour. Strauss is by no means my favourite com- poser but he is the ideal subject for a TV biography as there are still plenty of people alive who knew him and there is also,. It transpired, a great deal of film showing him not only conducting — an impressive figure who according to one witness indicated the need for a crescendo by going red in the face — but also at home with his family and friends. Not only this, but many of Strauss's operas were filmed, including Der Rosenkavalier which was even made into a silent film, an enterprise which not surpris-
ingly bankrupted the company concerned. One of the good things about Strauss was that his music made no concessions to the 20th century, even though much of it was unmemorable. His one really moving com- position was his Four Last Songs which he wrote just before he died, as if only at the very end of his life was he given a glimpse of what lay in store.
The major event of the week was the ar- rival of the Fraggles, once again on ITV. The Fraggles are the latest creation of that brilliant man Jim Henson, inventor of the Muppets, The Fraggles are obviously related to the Muppets but unlike them they live under a lighthouse on the South Coast along with another species called the Doozers. The Doozers are tiny, tin-hatted creatures who spend their time erecting complicated structures made out of scaf- folding which the Fraggles then eat. An in- trepid explorer Fraggle is meanwhile discovering the outside world of the lighthouse where Fulton McKay lives with his dog Sprocket. I shouldn't think it will turn out to be as good as The Muppets but anything Henson does is bound to be worth watching. To celebrate the coming of the Fraggles I have been persuaded to install a colour television set, about which I shall write next week.
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