Television
Incubating
Joe Egg
Clive Gammon
Philadelphia, so travelled friends tell me, is the Wigan of North America. Just mention the place for an aUtomatic laugh. But on the evidence of Bunny (ITV Sunday) there is one Philadelphian institution that could, be held to burnish the City's drab and dowdy reputation, the Institute, in fact, for the Development of Human Potential. In typically cowardly fashion I had shied away from the notion of watching this film about a brain-damaged five-year-old made by the child's father, not wanting my delicate sensibilities ravaged, but I was ordered into the telly room by my oldest small daughter who was clearly fascinated, and quite unfrightened by the helpless child, not that much younger than herself, who at three and a half years had been unable to respond to any kind of stimulation, even by eye movements.
The callousing effect of television is well known. Cathy has to Come Home in a big way, Man must be very much Alive to break through. Could Bunny with much of the narration by the child's mother, with the film itself directed by the father, sufficiently avoid being so subjective that one's cynical (or not-wishing-to-be-movedat-all-costs), self-protecting instinct could comfortably reject it?
Yes, it could. Obviously, there were such subjective moments. Early on, the mother, Midge Mackensie, became speechless with emotion when she came to the point of having to say how, in the second year of her son's life, "nothing happened." There were other moments when the direction was plainly not as detached as it might have been in other hands. But in total this was unimportant. One became fascinated by the practical application of Dr Glenn Doman's theories — the necessity, for example, of Bunny having to learn to crawl even though he could, after a fashion, already walk.
The programme imposed by the DomanDelecato method seemed, at the level of immediate impression, cruel in part — the hanging of the child by his heels, the constant twisting of his head as he was encouraged to try to crawl. But Bunny laughed a lot as well, responded to praise and by the end of the progress that we saw on film could walk and use a limited vocabulary after an earlier prognosis in this country that nothing could be done for him. Tacked on the end of the film was a schoolmasterly warning that the Doman-Delecato method didn't have general medical acceptance but here was literally walking evidence that in this case at least it did.
The difficulties were perhaps understressed. It wasn't emphasised that these were parents with the time and plainly the money to carry out the rigorous programme imposed on Bunny which occupied the day from breakfast until seven in the evening. That could be easily deduced, though, and didn't detract at all from the film's considerable impact.
The impact, though, of an under-inflated beach-ball was what Thank God — it's Sunday (BBC 1, Sunday) had on me. John Betjeman's leisurely trip around London on the Sabbath I found somewhat precious and sadly relaxed to a point where I almost dozed off. An infinity of churchbells with a handful of tourists and a bit of anti-Vietnam war demonstrating thrown in was about our lot. The blank verse commentary, irreproachably delivered, was mannered. An old circus performance, I thought; the like of which I seem to have witnessed too many times before. Next week, catch Betjeman at the seaside if you want to know what Cromer looked like in 1935 (I'm guessing, of course).
Previous page
