Television
Worthwhile farewells
Alexander Chancellor
`S o, Farewell, Brian Walden'. This was not E. J. Thribb, the Private Eye poet, speaking. It was an ITV announcer mark- ing the end of Mr Walden's last appearance on Weekend World on Sunday. Such is the influence of Private Eye!
It was, however, a genuinely sad farewell. Mr Walden has been by far the best interviewer on British television for a number of years. This is not to underrate others: both Sir Robin Day and Mr David Dimbleby, for example, are excellent at their jobs. But Mr Walden is exceptional. He has a way of pinning down his inter- viewees that nobody else can match. For a start, he always seems exceptionally well briefed. But in addition to that, he has a foolproof technique for unsettling his guests. This is to pretend astonishment at the importance of what they have just said, however boring or banal it may be. He re-interprets their remarks in his own words, giving them a quite unexpected significance to which, panic-struck, they are bound to respond. The result is that they almost always end up saying some- thing interesting and even, occasionally, important.
Last Sunday's edition of Weekend World was a worthy farewell. This was as much due to the guest, Mr David Steel, as it was to Mr Walden. I always fail to understand why Mr Steel is portrayed in cartoons (and in Spitting Image) as a little wimp whom Dr Owen bosses around. I find him formid- able and rather frightening. He looks to me as if he rather enjoys being thought wet, as he waits like a cobra to pounce on Dr Owen at the appropriate time. That time is not yet, but he is warming up for it. On Sunday he managed to present his own dithering on the nuclear defence issue as a sign of strength — and to identify Dr Owen's clarity on the subject as a symptom of misguided Thatcher-worship. Mr Steel's performance was underminded only by LWT's make-up department, which made him look orange and sweaty. Anyway, it is sad to lose Mr Walden. The pity is that for all these years he has been on the air at the worst possible time — at midday on Sunday, when nobody wants to watch television or can do so without a feeling of guilt. I hope that, after a bit of a rest, he may be persuaded to take up interviewing in the evenings. I enjoyed BBC2's Nature Special last Sunday which was devoted to the fashion- able subject of whales. It was something of a relief to discover that, despite the uncon- trolled slaughter of the beasts that has been going on for centuries, no species of whale is in fact facing extinction. Now whales have a chance to increase their numbers, not because of the campaigns conducted by environmentalists but because whaling is no longer commercially very interesting. We will, however, have to keep an eye on the eskimos, who seem to be less interested in the commercial side of it than in what they regard as their cultural heritage. This involves massacring whales just for the hell of it, in the way that Spaniards kill bulls. After the whales came 'Amazon Odys- sey', a programme in the World About Us series that was particularly creepy and horrible. It was about an American faMilY called Little who had emigrated to a remote corner of the Amazon rain forest hi search of the simple life. It was all the idea of Harry Little, clearly an odious, egotis- tical and sadistic man, who for pseudo- religious reasons made his blind wife Jan and their 20-year-old daughter accompallY him to this miserable, infertile hillside in the middle of nowhere. After four years they were struck down by a tropical dis- ease. Harry and his daughter died. Jan, although blind, managed to survive and several weeks later was rescued. Back in America, she regained her sight and decided to go back to the scene of these horrors to look at it for the first time. The BBC was with her in the form of an awful middle-aged boy scout in shorts whose name, fortunately, I did not catch,. Together they returned to the 'homestead and a very depressing place it was. Tile entire interest of the programme lay 11?`' curiously enough, in the miraculous surviv" al story but in the wickedness of dead Harry and his widow's transparent loathing of him.
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