Television
New age
Richard In grams
I have refrained from crowing at all over the departure of Mr Humphrey Burton who last month resigned in inverted commas from his job as Head of the BBC's Arts and Music Department. We are assured that this move was entirely due to Mr Burton's understandable desire for a change and had no connection whatsoever with certain controversies concerning the weanng of two or even three hats, some of which have been aired in this column from time to time over the last five years. I couldn't help thinking of Mr Burton on Sunday night when, returning home after a long journey, I switched on the telly to find the beaming figure of Itzhak Perlman playing Elgar's Violin Concerto with Gennadi Rozhdestvenski and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in The Sunday Prom (BBC1). Maybe this was all fixed up long ago by Mr Burton before his euphemistic resignation, but never mind. The splendid playing of Mr Perlman and the noble melodies of Sir Edward, the only really outstanding performance I can remember seeing on a televised Prom, seemed like an augury of a new age marking the end of Mr Burton's expensive opera productions imported from Los Angeles and the lugubrious quartets of the late Bela Bartok so beloved of Prof. Hans Keller and Mr Bruce Bernard (relation). No doubt I'm speaking too soon.
There was good stuff too on The Editors (BBC1) which had a long-overdue go at the IPC's magazine department for selling semi-pornographic tat to teenage girls in the shape of magazines that encourage them to think that there is nothing more to life but getting a boyfriend and going to bed with him. Mr John Sanders, the Assistant Managing Director of IPC Youth Magazines, put up a predictably depressing defence of his company's products — 'Look, Mr Morgan, I don't like these magazines any more than you, I'd much prefer to be publishing Lorna Doone, I myself blame the breakdown of the parent-teacher axis, we're only giving these people what they want'. Mr Sanders got the worst of the argument and a pretty severe wigging from two young ladies, one from the Sunday Times, the other from the Brook Advisory Centre. His only support, not altogether wholehearted at that, came from the doyenne of the Agony Aunties, Marjory `Marj'Proops', who said the magazines were mostly fantasy material. It was not pointed out that Mr Sanders and Miss Proops both work for the same organisation — the 1PC. On the whole I thought 'Organ' Morgan did a good job as chairman, though he tends to say 'sorry' rather too often. I can't see either why they go on calling the programme The Editors when there are hardly ever any editors on it.
Tuesday marked the centenary of the birth of Mr Cecil B. de Mille who wks commemorated in one of Mr Barry Norman's entertaining Hollywood histories, Ready when you are, Mr de Mille (BBC1). The good thing about Barry Norman is that he does not approach his subjects with the boring veneration of the film buff, a fault that marred the recent Granada series on Hollywood. De Milk, when all is said and done, was not a very edifying or distinguished figure. His biblical films were a mishmash of religion and sex, which proved to be a very profitable formula as it has been before and since. Norman, carefully dressed in casual denims, pointed out too that from his early days in the silent films, there was always a strong element of sadism in de Mille's films. Unfortunately, most of those called upon to reminisce about the de Mille they knew betrayed a regrettable streak of sycophancy. Anthony Quinn was the most appealing, telling an amusing story of how he secured a part in a de Mille western by posing as a Cheyenne Indian and talking to the great director via an interpreter who could not speak Cheyenne either. Eventually Quinn was no longer able to control his anger at the crass way in which de Mille was directing a particular scene with Gary Cooper and shouted at him in English 'It's a silly scene!' Though initially surprised to discover that -Quinn was not a Cheyenne Indian, de Mille accepted his criticism of the shot and did it a different way, thus showing he was not after all the terrible old tyrant that many people took him for.
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