Television
Sickening
Richard Ingrams
What with my Melvyn Bragg obsession I had forgetten all about Russell Harty, a society for the extermination of whom I once proposed in this column. At the time there was quite a good response, in particular an engaging letter from Frank Norman the cockney playwright offering his services as a hitman. There is a job there still to be done. Apart from anything else Harty is getting more and more camp in his old age. Confronted by the massed ranks of Great Train Robbers on Friday (ITV) he was quite overcome with excitement. 'You're a seductive lot in many ways', he cooed, 'there are many beguiling things about you'. This would have been a good moment for hitman Frank to pop up at the back of the audience and let fly with his sawn-off shot gun.
'Whatever you put on the screen you glamorise it' Harty said, as if to forestall any hostility towards his fawning posture in front of the robbers. Of course you do, if you go in for massive quite uncritical book-plugging operations. In this case we had a new book about the train robbery by Piers Paul Read, also in the studio, from which the .robbers were getting a cut, how much we were not told. In order to sell the idea of yet another book to publishers W H Allen they had come up with an apparently convincing tale that the robbery had been organised by the former S S Colonel Otto Skorzeny. Read, with the help of Ronald Biggs, soon exposed this as a hoax. On television, however, the robbers stuck to their storY about Skorzeny. If the programme had been serious Read would have demolished them then and there. But as he wants people to buy his book, he kept pretty mum and unattentive viewers may
have been left with the impression that there might be something in the idea of a Nazi 'Mister Big' after all. I said last week that a good television programme would have exposed the pretensions of
Herbert 'von' Karajan. Similarly, this artful promotion by Read, W H Allen and the train-robbers needed a thorough hammering. Instead of which it was treated to a sickening puff. Even 'Buster Edwards's claim that the injured train driver 'received his injuries when he fell went unchallenged. Altogether a disgrace;
Peggy Makins, formerly 'Evelyn Home
of Woman, was asked by her fellow hackette 'Mary Grant' of Woman's Own on Cross Questions (BBC1) how she advised women who found it impossible to like their husbands, children or mothers' in-law. As someone who professed to be
religious, did she try to instil precepts of right or wrong? Miss Makins, who seemed to be a very wise old bird, replied With a firm no. You couldn't, she said, make human beings love one another from a sense of duty. All you could try and do was to persuade them to `do justice' to their pet hates. I wonder why men don't feel the urge to write letters to Evelyn Home? Perhaps in these days of sexual equality they do. I would have liked to ask Peggy Makins how to overcome my irrational hatred of Esther Rantzen who had preceded her on the air. Trying since to do her justice in accordance with Miss Makins's advice, I Fan think of absolutely nothing to be said in her favour. As a measure of my dislike I can only say that when Esther and her grinning acolytes Worship and Prendiville boasted how some con-man whom they exposed for the nth time had finally been sentenced to prison for two years I felt quite indignant and sorry for the poor fellow. The sight of these self-righteous Vigilantes crowing over their success in getting a small time crook behind bars Was quite as sickening as Harty fawning over 'Buster' and his crew.
As much as I hate Rantzen I love kumpole who made his final appearance on Monday (Thames). Not since Reginald Perrin has there been a TV character I felt so able to warm to as this struggling barrister who looks like a Rembrandt self-portrait and spouts bits of Wordsworth as he plods wearily through the inns of Court. I hope for everyone's sake that his creator John Mortimer is doing as badly at the Bar as the old sweetheart himself and that he will therefore be forced to write some more scripts. Without Rumpole or Kermit the months ahead are going to be lean indeed.
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