Television
As usual
Richard Ingrams
Icontinue to marvel at the fact that tele- vision is so unnecessarily boring. On Sun- day night, for example, I found I had mark- ed Ralf Dahrendorf in the Radio Times and Simone de Beauvoir in the TV Times as be- ing of possible interest, but in both cases I ended up wondering what on earth these people were doing on the telly and, more to the point, what on earth I was doing watch- ing them. Dahrendorf is a shy, mustachioed German don currently in charge of the Lon- don School of Economics. For some reason he was given five separate programmes by the BBC last week, each 50 minutes long, to sound off about the State of Britain Today. There has been quite a rash of this sort of thing recently, recalling to old hands like myself the great days of the Sixties when `What's wrong with Britain?' was the ques- tion on every pundit's lips. From the little bit I saw of Dahrendorf he could have been Sir Geoffrey Howe doing a party political broadcast. In other words, it was the usual stuff about the need to modernise our in- dustry and stand on our own two feet. As somebody noted on Did You See . . ? the professor seemed mindful of the possibility that as a German his remarks might be taken in the wrong sort of spirit, and there- fore he prudently kept them moderate in tone. (Incidentally, I was gratified when the speakers on Did You See . . ? confirmed my low opinion of Anyone For Denis?, Bill Deedes summing up the general view with the single word `Disashtroushr Simone de Beauvoir was given the Melvyn Bragg treatment on the South Bank Show and again it was hard to see why, ex- cept on the Barry Norman principle that it meant a nice trip over to Paris for everyone. Madame de Beauvoir, dressed up like an old-fashioned French housekeeper, came across as a stern and unsympathetic old body. Whatever the pleasures of life with the late Jean-Paul Sartre, it was hard to im- agine that they had many good laughs together. Precisely the opposite, in fact, to Mr and Mrs Alastair Sim who, it seemed from Tuesday's affectionate portrait of the late comedian on BBC], never once stopped laughing during their long and happy mar- riage. Sim with his wonderful Dickensian face and huge eyes lives on in those count- less British comedy films of the type which are sometimes shown by the BBC on Sunday afternoons and which are so much better than anything made nowadays. An instant- ly recognisable figure, even in drag, Sim was one of those actors whose appearance makes you laugh even before he says anything. This BBC portrait followed the standard and not very satisfactory practice of film- ing a lot of people talking about Sim, then cutting up the interviews in little snippets and interspersing them with clips from the films. Few people are able to say anything interesting about the dead, actors least of all. On this occasion, Ian McKellen with typical Old Vic hyperbole described Sim as 'one of those great eccentrics who straddled time', but there was no evidence that I could see in the programme of any ec- centricity on Sim's part. He seems to have been a man of simple tastes and retiring habits — a rather conventional figure, in fact. Peter O'Toole gazed into the camera like a man under hypnosis and vouchsafed that the 'peculiar quality of Alastair Sim' was — huge pause — 'indefinable!' It would have been better to have skipped a lot of this fanciful actors' talk and given us more of Mrs Sim who spoke very percep- tively about her husband, and also George Cole who, it emerged, had been virtually adopted by the Sims at the age of 15, and who paid tribute to his genius as a teacher and an inspirer of the young.
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