NSMAPMAWOL
By CHRISTOPHER BOOKER First, there is the fact that, as the creator of TW3, one of the few real signs of new life in the BBC for two years, Ned Sherrin has been looked to as the one remaining blue-eyed boy who could save the skins of the BBC in general and the Talks Department and Donald Baverstock in Particular. And so far Not So has been the Godot that failed. Second, has been the inevit- able comparison with TW3 itself (somewhat un- fair in view of Sherrin's fierce determination to 'get right away from TW,' 'keep the temperature down,' etc., but still for all sorts of obvious reasons, inevitable). But third, of course, is the fact that Not So Much A Programme is by far the most ambitious attempt so far to produce that currently super-fashionable panacea to all Programme planners' ills—an entertaining pro- gramme based largely on unscripted conversa- tion.
Earlier this year, in the course of a dissertation Oil American television, I commented that NBC and CBS seemed to have overcome their despair at filling the endless, remorseless programme conveyor belt by putting on more and more Programmes that needed no preparation—but just a few cameras running in front of panel games or chat or discussions which wrote them- selves as they went along. I added rather sourly that we could soon expect the same thing here— and so it has proved, with a vengeance. First the amazing revival of panel games, ever more Pointless, on all three channels, then Three After Six, and now the great otitgrowths all over the weekend—Not So Much A Programme and The Eamonn Andrews Show. For years it has been rather sophisticated in this country to yearn for 'a sort of Jack Paar Show'—now we've got two fully-fledged 'sort of Jack Paar Shows' and everyone's ...wondering vaguely what's missing, and why the formula's not working.
One of the answers as to what's missing is Jack Paar. For all that he's not the mast wonder- ful man in the world, he does at least dominate his show. And one of the great failings of both these English equivalents is the lack of a strong, dominating figure to act as a focus. With The Eatnonn Andrews Show, Which is pretty un- ambitious with its small grout of guests steadily rambling from bad pun to tasteless joke to boring anecdote to miming singer, this does not Matter so much. The entertainment value of the show (and surprisingly often, it is entertaining) depends on the presence of strong personalities among the guests (such as Laurence Harvey and Bob Monkhouse) and on seeing them back- chatting each other as they might at a showbiz Party. But without the rigid framework of a What's My Line?, Andrews himself is too obviously ill-at-ease to make much of a contri- bution, and too often the conversation is simply allowed to drift.
On Not So Much A Programme, with all its disparate elements, the lack of a strong, focusing anchorman is far more glaring. This sort of democracy (vide Tonight, which now has every- one being their own Cliff Michelmore) just doesn't work on television. The result is an im- pression on the screen of total chaos. One must have the paternalistic figure, as was shown by Richard Dimbleby (whose masterly perfor- mances over the various election nights proved, if nothing else, how good Panorama could still be if he were given the material to back him up).
Basically, however, the most important thing that the lack of a focus to Not So Much A Prog- granune illuminates and accentuates is the lack of a central purpose, the confusion of intentions and the failure of the different elements in the show to fuse. Instead of a relaxed progression from sketch to chat to song, everything jerked and hardly anything worked.
Now TW3 was not just a simple, uncompli- cated formula—once it had tortuously been ar- rived at. It also had one clearly defined purpose, which was to reflect the week in one great splurge of joke and song. In sprawling itself over three nights, Not So Much A Programme not only loses that definition, so that no one is quite sure on which night they are meant to reflect which part of the week, if at all, but Ned Sherrin has further set himself the incredibly ambitious task of creating the first programme in television history to combine the flexibility of discussion with the rigidity of revue. Can such a mixture ever work? To the extent that it obviously has more, in theory, to offer than just a straight one- hour discussion (and the extent to which Sherrin could not, for obvious reasons, just revive TW3 as a straight one-hour revue) then his apparent reasoning is fair enough. But to what extent has Sherrin's real reason for aiming at such a mixture —an artificial determination to progress from the l'W formula at almost any cost—resulted in an over-artificial manage d'inconvenience?
For the fact is that, at the moment, the pro- gramme is falling, between the two stools. By sticking to the tight‘ revue formula; the discussion element is never allowed to get under way. The guests are always under a fatuous pressure to produce quick wisecracks rather than take their time as when Frost remarks: 'Scottish MP's— got any jokes on that Gerald?' And if this is the intention, then why not get back to a script which at least ensures the maximum supply of wise- cracks in the minimum of time that is apparently available? If one does want conversation—then it must be given 'air' to breathe in.
Furthermore, a lot of the lesser faults of the programme—the general sacrifice of bite for whimsy, as in the 'news photographs of the week,' Wak, the joky 'biographies' of the guests (Not so much an Eamonn Andrews Show, more a This Is Your Life) which are all the more embar- rassing for recalling the formula in which TW delivered some of its most trenchant personal attacks—stem from these central confusions of purpose, and would fade away if the fog were cleared.
One of the most interesting side reactions to the programme has been the general lack of delighted bitchiness at its failure, and the sort of baffled goodwill of thousands of people who really want a good programme and feel they've been caught up, as someone put it to me, in 'some kind of a hoax perpetrated primarily on David Frost and the BBC.' This good will gives Sherrin time to define his ambition more clearly—but both he and the BBC must be brave. If the programme is to be given the relaxed atmosphere it needs, if the discussion and the sketches are to bed happily down together—then a two-hour Vrogramme on one night a week would, I suggest, see Sherrin's large and admirable ambition more easily realised.
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