Television
Chit-chat
Alexander Chancellor
'comea confession to make. I have rather 'come round to Michael Aspel. In the past I have tended to think of him as one of the most awful television 'celebrities' bland and dreary on the screen and yet the object of constant prurient interest in the popular press. In fact, although unexciting, he is rather brighter and perhaps even rather nicer than one might imagine. His chat show Aspel and Company, which goes out on Saturdays on BBCI, may not be anything to write home about, but it is certainly one of the better chat shows on television.
I prefer it to both Michael Parkinson's and Terry Wogan's, though Wogan is shortly to embark on a new series of thrice-weekly programmes which may turn out to be quite different from the rubbish he has served up in the past. One good thing about Mr Aspel's show is that he doesn't dismiss each guest when the next one arrives but lets everybody stay around until finally there are four people on stage taking part in a general conversation. Mr Aspel then seems quite willing to take a back seat. Last Saturday he didn't have much choice, because the guest of honour was Dame Edna Everage, alias Barry Humphries. Predictably, but nevertheless to what must have been universal satisfac- tion, Dame Edna laid into Claire Rayner, television's unspeakable Agony Aunt, comparing her in her long tartan skirt to a British Caledonian air hostess and deliver- ing various other veiled insults which I can no longer remember. But there is no way in which Dame Edna's victims can get back at her, because if they try to (Claire Rayner made a feeble attempt by asking her if she was going through the 'change of life') they are seeking to embarrass a person who doesn't in fact exist. I wonder why 2verybody continues to respect the fiction that Dame Edna is a real person? Instead of religiously asking her questions about her husband Norm and her son Ken and what it is like being a Superstar etc, why 'doesn't somebody say: 'Come off it, mate! Aren't you getting a bit sick of dressing up in those stupid women's clothes? When, Barry, are you going to think of something more interesting to do?' But I am afraid nobody does, not even my new hero Mr Aspel.
As for Michael Parkinson, his current series All Star Secrets (ITV, Saturdays) is one of the most pathetic shows ever de- vised. He says things like 'One of my guests once spent the night with a roast woodcock,' and the audience has to guess which one it was. There follows, to much hilarity, some ghastly anecdote about the unusual experience referred to. Not many of Parky's guests even qualify as 'stars'. Last Saturday, for example, they included former editor of the Daily Express, News of the World etc, Derek Jameson, who is quite a good egg in his way but hardly a `star' — not yet, at any rate. Mr Jameson, or 'Sid Yobbo' as this cockney-boy-made- good is sometimes known, was identified as someone who was tone-deaf yet had always wanted to be an opera singer. After which somebody put a cloak and a Spanish hat on him and made him sing the Toreador song from Carmen. Poor Parky! How are the mighty fallen!
For entertainment none of this can compare with Tele Journal, the French news bulletin which once a week until last Monday one has been able to see late at night on BBC2. An attractive and extreme- ly self-confident Frenchwoman called Chantal Cuer has been explaining in near- perfect but nevertheless ludicrous English what the news is all about in order to help people who can't speak French. Last Mon- day's news bulletin, read by a neat, middle:- aged French career woman in glasses, contained a superb series of cock-ups in which the wrong bits of film kept appearing on the screen. And wickedly it celebrated Mrs Thatcher's ten years as leader of the Conservative Party by showing an extract from the British satirical television show Spitting Image in which she and Denis are cruelly caricatured as puppets by Fluck and Law. The credit on the screen spelt the name of this programme as Fpitting Image. It was all tremendous fun and fed our anti-French prejudices. British television, of course, is the best in the world.
Previous page
