Television
Distracted
Richard Ingrams
I am beginning to think that it is not intended for me ever to watch Gay Life (LWT) and this is probably just as it should be. The programme would only upset me and provoke more than usually uncharitable thoughts. What happened on Sunday was that I did actually stay up till 11.30 p.m. to see it but this time I got distracted. There had already been a puff for the programme in the New Standard, something about a mother saying how shocked she had been when she first learned that her son Marvin was a homosexualist, but that now she regarded it as the most natural thing in the world and if only all parents could be as tolerant. Part of the trouble, as so often happens when television companies leak information about their programmes to the newspapers in advance, is that having read the puff you don't feel a great urge to watch the programme. Anyway, to while away the time before 11.30, I started watching BBC 1 and there was my friend Miles Kington wearing a black suit and bow-tie and playing his double bass in a group called Instant Sunshine, the other three members of which are doctors — Peter Christie, a paediatrician, David Barlow, a venereologist, and Alan Maryon-Davis whose medical qualifications eluded me, owing to the lateness of the hour. There was something so unaffectedly jolly about these four amateur musicians and their half-hearted attempts to get into big-time show business that the urge to switch over and watch Marvin's mother telling us how happy and contented she is when you know jolly well that she isn't, began to slip away. The trouble with Gay Life is that in contradiction to all the rules that govern the rest of independent television it is propaganda, and propaganda is always boring to watch. You know in advance what everyone is going to say, even when you haven't read it beforehand in the paper.
Richard Leakey came to the end of his seven-part series, The Making Of Mankind, rounding it all off with a fanfare of platitudes. When scientists begin to talk about anything other than science you quickly realise what dolts they are. Leakey felt it incumbent on him by way of summing up to deliver a little homily about the future of mankind etc. He started off by attacking some famous old South African bone-collector who had propagated the idea of the cave man as he is seen by cartoonists, a muscle man with a thick club dragging his wife around by her hair. On the contrary, says Leakey, all the evidence suggests that the man in the cave was a peaceful chap similar to the sort of hippy you might see at a pop festival. Like some of the dottier ecologists Leakey seems to think that we have a lesson to learn from the supposedly pacific ways of those noble ancestors of ours, but this idea in itself runs counter to the spirit of Darwin and his doctrine of the survival of the fittest. The Kalahari tribesmen of Africa are becoming extinct because they have no means of defending themselves against their aggressive neighbours in South Africa.
All Leakey's sermon amounted to was that the more sophisticated human societies become, the more they are prepared to fight for what they or other people have got. But if you want to stop wars it doesn't do you much good to contemplate the ways of a supposed peace-loving cave man ancestor to see what lessons may be learned. Ironi cally the only likelihood of recapturing the fine spirit of the primitive society would come in the wake of a nuclear war, the very thing the professor is rightly anxious to avoid.
An interesting report sent to me from The Media Institute in Washington con cludes that as far as American television is concerned two out of three businessmen, as opposed to homosexualists and cave men, are portrayed as 'criminal, evil, greedy or foolish', and 'most big business men are portrayed as criminals'. The new Granada Sunday morning series on business deci sions seemed to confirm the Institute's view. A group of .top business men were cajoled by the always engaging Dr Charles Nesson, associate dean of Harvard Law School, into confessing how far they would go to bribe potential customers. It was difficult to see why business men should be especially singled out when bribery of one kind or another goes on in most walks of life. I couldn't help wondering, too, just what fancy perks Granada Television Limited had laid on to get all the business men into their studio.
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