Television
Low fliers
Martyn Harris
orld in Action this week (ITV, Mon- day, 8.30 p.m.) was based on a sensational interview with Brian Bash am, the sleazy PR man employed by British Airways to smear Richard Branson, and who now seems to have decided to bite the hand which fed him. The programme alleged that Sir Colin Marshall and Robert Ayling of BA had, contrary to assurances they gave the BA board, been personally involved in dirty tricks against Branson and Virgin Atlantic.
As we know, these included theft of data from Virgin's computers and attempts to portray Branson as a wacko. It was also revealed for the first time how BA had tar- geted another rival, Air Europe, which folded in 1989 after newspapers linked its boss, Harry Goodman, with sex and drugs scandals. There was no suggestion that BA and its private investigators may have been the source of those stories.
Branson is a smug, irritating and shallow man who has chosen to join the big boys in a competitive industry. His crusading rhetoric against monopolies and cartels is laughable and would evaporate the moment he had a monopoly of his own. It has been possible so far to regard the BA campaign as ordinary business trickery, but given the apparent bluntness of the sharp practice, it is hard to see how Marshall and Ayling can now avoid resignation. The moral of this story is, keep your PR man on the payroll.
It was a good week for documentaries,
with Naked Sport on Channel 4 (Monday, 9 p.m.) unpicking some of the myths of box- ing, like the idea that you have to fight people to be champion, while Panorama (BBC 1, Monday, 9.30 p.m.) produced a solid and moving report on the new British sport of granny-dumping. I don't know if the remarkable Sylvania Waters (BBC 1, Thursday, 9.35 p.m.) qualifies as a docu mentary, so we shall return to it another week, but Noelene Baker, obnoxious matri- arch of this appalling Australian clan, is clearly an early candidate for shoving off the back of the family Kris-Kraft.
For those of us who worry about missing the odd TV programme, Channels of Resis- tance (Channel 4, Monday, 10.55 p.m.) pro- duced the most dispiriting factoid of the week, which was that the American media machine now makes 20,000 hours of televi- sion a year, which is two and a quarter hours of TV time for every hour of real time we live. An episode of Miami Vice that cost $1.3 million to make sells to the French for $60,000 and to the Third World for $500 — an irresistible wave of financial and cultural clout. Earnest Canadians and bespectacled Belgians fretted over the impact of this imperialism. 'Do we want experimentation? If we want risks to be taken money cannot take too many risks.'
It is a myth of the marginal TV nations that US broadcasting is all middle-of-the- road mindlessness, but tfie idea stands little inspection. I didn't like it, but Twin Peaks was certainly risky, as are Cheers and The Golden Girls in their way. The early Dallas episodes with their windowless sets and dim cast lists of has-beens and never-weres probably cost less than Eldorado, and were much better in terms of acting, emotional realism and writing.
But I agreed with Bertrand Tavernier's fulminations against the 'two or three guys in Hollywood and New York who have more power than any politician'. Ted Turn- er of CNN has 75 million viewers world- wide for what is virtually his personal news programme. Figures like the billionaire Perot, who can buy up half-hours of prime TV time to push his crackpot views, show which way the tide is flowing. In 50 years
from now the planet will be ruled by broad- casting barons, as indifferent to nation states as Habsburg princelings. They will have satellites for their maces and anchor- men for their armoured knights, and their ammunition will be the homogenising cul- tural snowfall of the soap opera. It could be a lot worse, it really could.
Taki's 'High life' column has been held over this week for legal reasons.
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