SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
J. W. M. THOMPSON The saddest thing I have read for many a day was Mr J. B. Priestley's protest against the imminent ruin of Upper Langstrothdale, in Yorkshire, by commercial conifer planta- tions. As it happens, I know that part of the Yorkshire Dales, and I share Mr Priestley's anger at the plan to spoil it which has been hatched by some unpleasant entity called the Economic Forestry Group. But the most painful part of Mr Priestley's cri de coeur was not the particular complaint he made but the general statement with which he supported it. 'England,' he said, Is still our home, not something taken over by a development company.'
Is it indeed? Only a natural optimist like Mr Priestley could utter that sentiment with such confidence. There might be some dis- pute about the precise term 'development company', of course, although it is as good a label as any. But whether the Economic Forestry Group and its multifarious allies up and down the land are instruments of private profit or state exploitation is not im- portant. The truth is that every inch of this country, which Mr Priestley wistfully speaks of as 'our home', might more accurately be pictured as so much raw material await- ing processing. A certain sense of shame, plus our national talent for whitewash and hypocrisy, encourage us to disguise this truth with a bureaucratic paraphernalia of 'plan- ning' and 'preservation'. But it is all a sham. When there is a genuine conflict 'develop- ment' must always win in the end. The 'development company' is supreme.
On the day of Mr Priestley's appeal I also saw news of the rape of the Chilterns by a motorway; of the proposed destruc- tion of the Manifold Valley; of yet another Welsh valley doomed to be drowned; of the despoliation of the Dartmoor 'national park'; and there was, no doubt, much else of the sort which I didn't notice. All this on one day. It was, I suppose, a fairly typical day for these grasping and ugly times, when we are witnessing the final _destruction of the English countryside. Not that any of us wishes to see this, of course. A force more powerful than ourselves—Mr Priestley's development company, or what Cobbett called 'The Thing', or what others might see as mere greed—dictates what is to happen.
Rich man's table
The amusing argument over Mr Wilson's party for Herr Willy Brandt has died down but I don't suppose many people are much the wiser for it. Was it (as the-critics said) a vulgar affair with pop figures brought in for electoral gain or (as Mr Wilson's fans seemed to be claiming) the most dazzling and historic social event since the cele- brated ball at the Duke of Richmond's house in Brussels on the eve of Waterloo? The peasantry, looking on bemused at the conflict of opinion among the new upper classes who actually attend such gatherings, can hardly have reached a definite conclu- sion. I wonder no one at 10, Downing Street thought of publishing the full list of guests for their benefit. In fact, I wonder this isn't done as a matter of course after all such assemblies. The present custom of secrecy smacks of an eighteenth century disdain for the rabble outside in the streets. Letting them know which of their_ betters-are being
entertained by their rulers would be a courteous and instructive way of permitting them to share, in a humble degree, in these splendours. At the moment they are com- pletely out in the cold—except for paying the bills afterwards, of course.
Royal purple
One aspect of the royal family's present tour has already come home to observant news- paper -readers. The high baroque days of royal reporting are clearly over. It was plain during the investiture of Prince Charles last year that a new spirit was at work among the descriptive writers: one looked in vain for the white-hot prose and cascading ad- jectives of yesteryear. And in the past week, :he terse records of the royal progress through Tonga and on to New Zealand have stirred scarcely a memory of the palpitating, ecstatic dispatches which filled the slim newspapers of the postwar period whenever British royalty stepped on foreign soil.
How different it was then! There always seemed to be, in those days, delirious wel- comes from cheering local crowds meeting in non-stop session at every point on the royal route. Whole populations (so we gathered) were swept up in an unparalleled fever of pro-British passion. Potentates in distant palaces and villagers in mud huts alike lost their heads in orgies of goodwill and admiration. When royalty went to New York it was, I remember, reported that the very skyscrapers turned handsprings with excitement. It was a breathless business al- though, presumably, reassuring to a country that had lately won a war and become poor and weak in the process. But it must have been fearfully tiring work for the royal re- porters. For everyone's sake, it is a relief that things seem to have quietened down a bit abroad.
Low note
What tends to be overlooked, in all the vociferous campaigning to protect the stand- ards of sound radio programmes in the future, is how awful a great many television programmes already are. When I was im- prisoned in my house by the Great Snow recently I found myself watching the box at an hour when I am normally safely out of its range. It was a gloomy experience. We're all so used to hearing people ponti- ficating about Tv's incalculable influence for good or evil, its power to mould opinion etc etc, that it's easy to forget the precise nature of what Tv is actually doing for much of the time.
What it was chiefly doing, on that after- noon when I came upon it so to speak in- advertently, was showing a programme in which a fat man waylaid a number of girls as they emerged from a Tube station and asked them how often they had their bot- toms pinched while travelling. He even tried to catch a passing nun by the arm
to only the question to her: but she was the only woman accosted to be free enough of the spell of the TV camera to evade him. I shall try to remember this moment of dismal vulgarity next time there is an out- break of pretentious tosh about Tv's 'service to the public': an interviewer pulling women in fi ont of a camera to ask them about having their bottoms pinched.
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