Television
Impinging
Richard Ingrams
Another week has passed and still I am in mourning for my old television set. The trouble is that anything remotely interesting on Independent Television does not get a showing on Southern. Monday night for example, saw the return of Eamonn Andrews on Thames, compering what I presume is a revival of the old Sunday-night special on which in days gone by showbiz celebrities like Zsa Zsa Gabor made asses of themselves in such a way as to induce a smug and drowsy euphoria in the viewer. Alas, I am in no position to say whether the old magic is still potent after the lapse of many years.
Instead I was reduced to the usual state of apathy and despair by another of Humphrey Burton's specials, an Arena programme on BBC-2 devoted, like the recent Susan Sontag Omnibus, to the subject of photography and featuring a highly irritating old Frenchman in a wig called Jacques-Henri Lartigue who goes around snapping beautiful young women and putting on record ludicrous aphorisms of the type that one expects from a wrinkled old French pseud who is taken seriously by Humphrey Burton — e.g. 'Happiness is not an elusive bird. Happiness is an element which like the air is everywhere.' To be fair to Burton and his minions, Roman Vishniac, the other photographer whose work was shown, is obviously an exceptional man.
Whether or not the return of Eamonn Andrews is responsible I do not know, but the Head of BBC-1, the egregious Bill Cotton, has now officially announced his nightmarish scheme, first hinted at last June, for a nightly Parkinson 'chat show',which will begin in the autumn. Parky, we are told, will start the ball rolling and may then hand over to Barry Norman.
Meanwhile, the miserable, long-suffering Tonight will be shunted on to BBC-2 and reappear under the new title Nightly Report. It is noteworthy that the Current Affairs department of the BBC will be responsible for the new chat show, though what conceivable connections with or experience of current affairs these two old showbiz hacks Parkinson and Norman have has not to date been revealed.
As for Tonight, it has been allowed to go quietly to seed. I noticed on a recent visit to the studio with Peter Cook certain symptoms of decline. The producer, whoever he was, did not deign to appear at all and then the whole of the interview had to be reshot becuase someone had made an elementary howler in his research. (This was ironic, as the point being made was that Private Eye does not bother to check its facts.) Dennis Tuohy, who I have always thought was a very good interviewer, though not in the class of Brian Walden, seemed more than cheesed off with the general set-up.
These melancholy developments are taking place at a time when so-called current affairs are definately impinging, if that is the right word, on our lives. Not that Mr Michael Foot, who appeared with Brian Walden on Weekend World (LWT), gave the impression of a man greatly impinged upon. He looked exceptionally fit and healthy and produced such a fine flood of waffle that Walden was left floundering. In Foot's mind there seems to be a conviction that there are two ways of dealing with the industrial crisis: one is for intelligent reasonable men to sit round a table and try man intelligent reasonable way and hammer out an intelligent reasonable solution to the many formidable problems that confront us; the other is a rather far-fetched concept which conjures up visions of the firing squad and the guillotine.
The alternatives in the Lord President's woolly mind are either to shoot trade unionists or to sit round a table with them. Yet in 1974 when the Grocer took his famous stand against the miners it was Foot who, after the ensuing Labour victory, was wheeled on to give them everything they wanted. In other words the choice is not between talking or shooting. It is between paying up or not paying up.
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