Television
Pilate at the Helm
By PETER FORSTER Last week, for example, when all the news pro- grammes were scurrying around to get hold of people who knew either Margot Fonteyn or Panama in order to present them in the usual way as 'authorities,' Tonight produced' a Mr. George Pendle, who explained convincingly that the present trouble was a dispute between two wealthy power-blocs in a land where the peasants must struggle to earn a bare living. Two hours later This Week unearthed a splendid, jolly, Carlton-Browne-like old buffer who had once been Our Man in Panama. Ah, yes, charming little place, charming people, no intellectuals there, knew the President well, charming man, very quiet, for once HM Government gave a good entertainment allowance, sure it was a gay little revolution, no hanging-by-the-neck-until-dead kind of stuff. Trying to keep a straight face, Ludovic Kennedy then asked whether Panama was a democracy. At once a crafty look crossed the wide, genial features : ah, yes, this was the kind of question you interviewer chaps always asked, well, if it meant did the chaps at the bottom have the same chance as the chaps at the top, the answer was (long, long pause) very nearly ! After which presumably a good many viewers (like HM Government before them) thought they had heard the truth about Panama. Unimportant? Possibly, but to let dubious state- ments pass unchallenged as facts is the thin end of a 'wedge that could .become dangerously thick. In the. Budget debate Mr. Harold Wilson made a gaffe in getting his facts wrong, duly repeating his false assertion on television. In the House he quite properly apologised; there was no retrac- tion on television, and most viewers must have assumed that he had got his facts right. One helpful safeguard in this tricky field which might be employed more is to establish references. The more I know about a speaker, the better I am able to judge his words. Dr. Stafford-Clark does an extremely tactful job on the BBC's ad- mirable, if sometimes almost too harrowing. Lifeline programmes, but when he takes the kind of Roman Catholic line he did in the recent pro- gramme on abortion I want to know whether in fact he is a Catholic. Likewise I want to know a man's party if he is supposed to be putting me in the picture politically, and which paper he writes for; it might help if Tonight announced that all outside journalists would be from the Observer unless otherwise stated.
In the more straightforward' department of news bulletins, the BBC could really shake off a few cobwebs. They show the news sense of an old-fashioned, half-illustrated magazine. Last week I compared two bulletins: ITN immediately picked out Macmillan's no-early-election hint at Preston, BBC heavily summarised the speech; ITN had film of a Soho robbery, BBC a verbal mention; ITN gave film of Dame Margot in Miami, BBC showed a long item about heart specialists off to Moscow; ITN showed a photo- graph of the Dartmoor escapee, BBC described him. And twenty-four hours after ITN had met her, BBC sent to see Dame Margot's mother a reporter who came back with the most appallingly conducted interview since Woodrow Wyatt went around asking Liberian natives if they were really happy. This is not a question of BBC setting its sights higher than ITN, simply that it makes less of the same material.
ITV's extra liveliness also gave Ludovic Ken- nedy's interview with Mountbatten the edge (as well as half an hour's start) on Dimbleby's. The former was direct, brisk, incisive, and his Lord- ship, dressed overall, responded in an impressive quarterdeck manner. The BBC tried a This Is Your Life approach by confronting him with film from his past, whereupon he repeated exactly the same facts and opinions he had offered to Ken- nedy. As for Mr. Dimbleby, he is clearly a very pleasant man; he exudes good will; like Polonius, his eyes purge (hick amber and plum-tree gum; his voice is a verbal genuflection. If only he, and his men, would be sharper, brighter, quicker.
An offbeat half-hour of a kind worth doing often was Denis Mitchell's A Soho Story, about• Mac, former doorman of the Mandrake Club in that falsely glamourised slum north of Shaftes- bury Avenue. The narrative devices were pon- derous and some of the sets unconvincing, but several of the local eccentrics were marvellous catches and Mac himself excellent value CI can't stand British popular religious paintings—Christ always looks like Leslie Howard !'), proving yet again what a good bet is your extrovert Celt when it comes to the unselfconscious monologue.
Previous page
