Television
Hard work
Richard Ingrams
Ihave been trying to adjust myself to the thought of not being a television critic after nearly eight years on the job. I think the nicest thing I can look forward to is a more restful Sunday evening. It is normally at that stage that I begin to panic slightly about what I am going to find to write about. There follows a frenzied rootling through the mess of the Sunday papers, try- ing to locate the schedules. I suppose this is why I usually end up watching Did You See... ? It is an act of penance for not hav- ing watched any of the programmes and gives one an illusion of having done so.
Also on Sunday evenings at the moment is One Pair of Eyes which can be good, as with Beryl Cook, or bad, as with Peter Hillmore this week. (Unfortunately I miss- ed the one in between, featuring 'satirist and writer' John Wells, whose programme starred Mr Wells and a chimpanzee and was not by any means greeted with rapturous acclaim by the critics, I was sorry to see.) Poor Hillmore proved the point which I have myself learned from experience, that it is a mistake for journalists to be filmed be- ing journalists. It never works. Hillmore made the additional mistake of billing himself as a 'gossip columnist', something which he obviously is not. The gossip col- umnist is concerned most of the time with people's sex lives. But it is part of the hum- bug of the Observer that although it is filled with all sorts of smut it will not pry into private lives. This principle I suspect has a lot to do with the paper's deputy editor, Anthony Howard, who appeared on the Hillmore film giving a very good perfor- mance as a dynamic newspaperman leafing through his reporter's copy and rapping out abrasive queries. But it all made the film pitifully thin, particularly when the camera moved to Brighton to cover last year's Tory Party conference and our intrepid reporter was seen sloping round the smoke-filled rooms being given the cold shoulder by one and all. This was, after all, that wonderful party conference when Mrs Thatcher's vic- tory rally was ruined by the undignified resurgence of the Parkinson affair. But there was no mention at all of this amusing episode, which made the Observer and Howard and Hillmore all look very pom- pous and silly, which is what they are.
Did You See...? was graced with the presence of the mysterious Andrew Neill, a Scotsman with an Arthur Scargill haircut who for reasons which no one can under- stand is now the editor of the Sunday Times. Neill made an incoherent attack on the BBC and, apropos Hillmore, revealed rather smugly that he has done away altogether with his paper's gossip column. He didn't mention that he has also abolish- ed the television critic, no doubt in anticipa- tion of the day when people like himself and Rupert Murdoch take over the cable networks and we are all swamped with drivel of such low quality that it becomes pointless to employ a man to write about it.
It was a pleasure last Friday to welcome back, in Shroud for a Nightingale, Inspec- tor Dalgleish, Miss P. D. James's detective, following the success of the earlier adapta- tion by Anglia of Death of an Expert Witness. Both stories are of the traditional whodunit variety featuring the violent death of an unpopular person and the subsequent questioning of a host of suspects. But unlike Agatha Christie Miss James sets her stories in realistic settings. Death of an Expert Witness was based in a pathology laboratory while the new story unfolds in a hospital with a large body of student nurses and matrons forming the bulk of the cast. One of the things I liked about the earlier story was that although it dealt with murkiness of all kinds it was mer- cifully smut-free. I hope that this tradition will be maintained. Apart from that, I hereby give notice that I am engaged from 9 to 10 on Friday nights until further notice.
He was lucky enough to die of smoking and drinking just before the Budget.'
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