Television
Soft news
Martyn Harris
Anerican network news has moved steadily over the last 20 years from provid- ing information to reassurance. The grey- ing warhorse figure of the anchorman plays father to the nation and to his team of young reporters, while an attractive younger woman, as trophy wife, is chosen to front the softer items.
The new-look News at Ten (ITN, Mon- day, 10 p.m.) was clearly modelled along these lines, with the avuncular Trevor Mac- Donald as anchor to his team of younger bloods like Julian Manyon, of Death on the Rock repute. When MacDonald, sitting before a distractingly busy background of TV monitors, introduces an item it is no longer 'So-and-so reports' but 'Greg Wood has that story', which is altogether more comforting and contained. A new 'Britain in Focus' section, which this week looked at mortgage repossession, was topped and tailed by Julia Somerville in a trouser suit, for no reason that I could see other than to reassure the anxious viewer that her brain is now better. The wince-making 'smile story' at the end has made a comeback, with a report in this first issue on baboons robbing tourists in South Africa. This could have featured on any soft travel show, but added to the illusion of nasty and random events painlessly packaged, while an item on digital cassettes was a re-run of the expensive Philips commercial which occu- pied the mid-point advertising slot.
Advertising overlap had also infected the new David Nobbs series, The Life and Times of Henry Pratt (ITV, Monday, 9 p.m.). The shameless glow of a Hovis com- mercial illuminated the first episode as young Henry walked beside his flat-capped `Da' through a landscape of golden corn- fields that were mysteriously contiguous to his back-to-back home where Mam was making tea of brawn and gravy. 'But I don't like gravy,' young Henry complains.
'In life, Henry, tha'll have to eat a lot of gravy tha doesn't want,' says Da, who wearily accepts his wife's gravy output as a substitute for sex. In Thirties period dra- mas an idyllic scene in a glowing cornfield is the inevitable signpost to impending war and, sure enough, Henry's dad has decided to join up. 'There'll be war soon, lad. T' world is changing.' Henry is evacuated to his aunt's farm, his father loses an eye and his mother falls readily under a bus — leav- ing Henry in the hands of a spivvy uncle.
David Nobbs is the creator of the dreary Bit of a Do, and of Reginald Perrin, whose appeal has always rather passed me by, but there were some nice lines in Henry Pratt, as when daft cousin Billy urges Henry to work hard at school. 'But I want to grow up to be a half-wit like you, Billy.' In fact, of course, Henry is destined for better things, as perhaps is this series.
George Formby, another northern lad made good, was the subject of the South Bank Show (ITV, Sunday, 10.35 p.m.), though, as it emerged, Formby started rich and simply got richer. His father was a music hall star, and when he died young his son, who had been training as a jockey, was literally thrust into his shoes by a pushy mother, who handed over dad's act, clothes and even his advance bookings. George Junior's only rebellion was to marry, at 19, a tough clog-dancer called Beryl Ingham, nine years his senior, who rapidly took over the role of bossy mother, giving George five shillings a day pocket money and ban- ning him from kissing his leading ladies on the lips. Such at least was the image which Formby himself promoted, though it seemed from the evidence of relations that the marriage was a good deal more equal, and that Formby used Beryl's supposed tyranny to keep bores and spongers off his back and groupies from his dressing-room. `How did a hapless, grinning Lancashire simpleton become top British box office star of the 1940s?' we were asked, and the unsurprising answer, of course, was that he was never anything of the kind.
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