Television
Putting Up a Black
By PETER FORSTER Character-drawing was vivid but far from starry-eyed. No suggestion of Sammy as the under-privileged man crucified by economics: the plain inference was that he was too big for his mental boots and ethical understanding, that by nature he was childlessly ruthless beneath the sometimes amiable manner, that in fact he had been hurried into circumstances of emancipation in a way to make matters worse for all around. Everything your dyed-in-the-woolliness liberal
likes to deny about coloured people was incar: nate in Sammy. Personally I found the portrait as convincing as powerful : after all, it amourit5 essentially to no more than that black can be as black as white. But I couldn't see Gran0 putting on this play. Admirable direction 11 Philip Saville, and to-the-life performances 15) Johnny Sekka as Sammy and Leo Carreras as the landlord, whose very moustache was an are ment for rent control.
Afterwards it so .happened that over 0t1 Monitor two well-known West Indian write" Edgar Mittelholzer and George Lamming. were, interviewed by Huw Wheldon, whose report° remark in the Sunday Times about editing the programme—'You cannot do it unless you at prepared to accept pre-occupation'-1 am 011 trying to understand. Mittelholzer was kali; hatchet-headed, crew-cut, like a van Gogh sell. portrait with both ears: no desire to return te the West Indies. bored by politics, contemptue of certain human beings 'who should be treat as vermin,' obviously odd-man-out. fifty Year' old and author of sixteen novels. Lamming 0.5 odd-man-in, handsome, with a strikingly beatt. ful bass voice, gregarious, thirty-three, and 13( more predictable, thoup no less interestiniPt consciously the 'voice of a community silent for two to three hundred years,' reacting agaths the English novel which formerly 'was writtent by middle-class people for the middle class.' I, would have been instructive to hear their cool ments on Douglass's play, though I 0,11 guess which of them would be more 11) sympathy.
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