TELEVISION

Facts & fictions

GEORGE SCOTT

Question: When does a film report become a documentary? Answer: When you take longer and spend more money on it than you would ever get away with on This Week or Panorama.

A coarse distinction intended to illustrate how loosely the term 'documentary' is used. It can cover anything from a straight- forward factual compilation to an essay in imagination by Ken Russell. There is no shortage of models to study. Last week, for instance, there were at least nine pro- grammes I would have called 'document- aries' and another three which could have slipped easily into that category.

Captain RN, from Yorkshire Television, was a good example of the journalistic documentary. It did not try to do too much but what it did it did well. It was a nicely observed, almost affectionate, portrait of Captain John Templeton-Cotill, who is in

command of the Commando carrier, 'Bul-

wark: (By coincidence, he was the man and that was the ship in the news over the

Gibraltar exercise.) Captain Templeton-

Cotill looked the traditional part, but he did not always sound it. I cannot imagine any RN captain that I ever saluted quotme Hoggart and de Tocqueville at me, or refer- ring to the 'candy-floss society'.

Here was a gentle man—'I'm not a shouter'—exercising his absolute power ‘sith sensibility. But he knew how to play his part when the time came. To the rating who was 240 hours 'adrift', he said, 'You can't get away with it—you've got to hoist that

in. You can't just bugger off and get xwae with it.' I cannot think why Yorkshire hired

a professional actor, Sebastian Shaw, to narrate the commentary. That may be justi- fiable when the script is rotund and rhe-

torical and the subject worthy of CBES all round. Here, the commentary by Jonathan Aitken was feature-Wage slick; he should have read it himself.

Until Armageddon, on Bac 2, was an example of the documentary as investiga-

tion. It was presented as 'a report on the Jehovah's Witnesses' but, for my taste. it was too heavily loaded and too contrived.

It had to be contrived because the Witnesses themselves refused to cooperate when they discovered the Bac were having dealings with Witnesses who had ceased to practise.

So the reporter, Esther Rantzen, and the producer, Peter Chafer, had to try to recon-

struct the activities of the Witnesses by employing the apostates. Those men and women did their best. They did not sneer at the beliefs they had now rejected. But we were left with a most unsatisfactory second-best.

It was all too painfully clear, from Miss Rantzen's opening statement to camera to the concluding sentiments, that we were to be warned against the Witnesses and their evil practices. I resent a report which tells me how to make my mind up before I have

seen the evidence. It is precisely because I share the view that the Witnesses are evil-

doers that I could have done with more in- vestigation of the mental attitudes of those who join up. As it was, the style was more suited to an expost of switch-selling.

Michael Frayn's contribution to the One Pair of Eyes series was a precarious piece.

'Precarious', because it teetered the whole time on the edge of whimsy and, finally, in the last shots of Frayn himself lolloping through a junkyard of old cars and tyres.

toppled over. Before that happened, how- ever, his illustration of the theme that we have become enslaved to travel—travel, not for the sake of getting somewhere, but for its own sake—was an exciting mixture of fantasy and reality. One was forced into a recognition of one's own addicted state and shared with him the loss of identity which is a concomitant of jet-age travel.

It would be easy to quibble over particular images—'airports are our cathedrals', for instance—but far better to welcome the efforts of a man who seeks to extend the boundaries of television.

The last of my models calls for charity. but it is not going to get any in this column. The aim of the series, Through Other Eyes.

another Bac 2 innovation, is to show us. the British; as foreigners see us. Or as a few extremely peculiar foreigners see us to judge from the three I have seen—about the Church of England, the English Gentleman and, now, the British Woman. Memories of the eccentricities and stilted techniques of

the other two were banished by the in- vincible banalities of Gaio Fratini, a bald, roly-poly Italian who was discovered at regular intervals, energetically ogling the dollies and, what was worse, seeming to suggest that Englishmen lacked his own sense of appreciation. A couple of quota- tions will demonstrate the quality of Mr Fratini's perception. Of weekend traffic pouring out of London: 'a never-ending stream going towards the seaside, the National Parks, Scottish castles.' The Englishwoman is the most sporting and most unpredictable in the world.' 0 Docu- mentary, what outrages are committed in thy name.