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Richard Ingrams
A certain amount of moral indignation has been expended about the huge sums of money which Richard Nixon has gained itntil his series of interviews with Frosty, the first of which was shown last week. This seems to me misplaced. Crooks, con-men and all manner of dubious characters are Profiting every day from our desire to be entertained by them. Earlier last week the famous forger of Samuel Palmers, Tom Keating, had appeared on BBC1, and I presume he was paid a handsome sum for his Pains. In this case, however, the money was well spent. To begin with Keating, unlike Nixon,oi is an entertaining character. ('Liars are bearable if they are amusing' Hugh Kingsmill.). A chuckling Cockney in a duffle coat, Keating resembles one of the less sinister pirates in Peter Pan. In his better moments he acknowledges that his a"es, or 'Sexton Blakes' as he calls them, aren't any good. 'It's easy to do something LIAr hen it's been done before,' he said. The ungus side of him came out in his not very cc al °nvincing claim to act as a sort of medium tor dead painters. The sobbing and sighing as he worked apparently in the grips of a Paranormal passion had a rather phony air about it. On the other hand anyone who e, xPoses all the sharks of the art dealing nosiness deserves our support. _ The producer wisely allowed Keating to 'amble on and did not attempt to catch him This was one of Frosty's major errors ;with N —xon. Once a man has ceased to make a clear distinction between fact and fantasy, sn°tInng is gained by trying to pinpoint Peeific untruths. Even more disheartening, 'f!ot to say grotesque, was Frost's effort to Oree the former President to make a general confession to the American people. . The resulting dialogue would only have interested an audience well briefed in the .!Vatergate story. I myself was quickly lost in me turgid debate as to who said what and to ,1,1cmil on March 23rd. The fact is that ;va. tergate now seems a rather insignificant hiPisode, deserving of only a footnote in the ; istnry books. At the same time the intrigu'tlit.g questions, like why Nixon recorded all the tapes in the first place, or why, once 'tn._e trouble started, he didn't simply throw in the fire, went unasked. Altogether three interviews a sorry affair, and I presume that the sorrier interviews still to come will be even o in(rir.ier. If moral indignation is out of place, th Ignation about waste of our money by • e BBC would seem to be more than Justified. Ever since I can remember, the BBC, under the aegis of this irrespressible Hans „,eller, has been trying to make us like the
uSlC Of Schoenberg. On Sunday it was the
turn of the telly with a ninety minute(!) programme, the first two, introduced by Alexander Goehr, and featuring many painful extracts from the Schoenberg oeuvre accompanied on the screen by a succession of unpleasing images frightened woman running through forest, whirling shapes, expanding blobs. Introducing one of Schoenberg's songs Goehr said: 'The poem itself is about a sick lily that raises its translucent petals to the sky.' The Goehrs and Kellers don't seem to realise that nobody likes this stuff. It is now over seventy years since poor old Schoenberg wrote his major works and since then there has been a singular and constant lack of enthusiasm for them. It is high time that the missionaries gave up their ill-conceived attempts to convert the heathen.
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