Television
Twinkle, twinkle
Peter Levi
elevision is famous for creating stars who would not be stars of anything else. The thought that the next election may be won or lost on the television screen makes my blood run cold. Sometimes one observes star quality so intense that it sizzles on the screen without the star himself appearing. John Mortimer has it, so did Evelyn Waugh. We can all expect great pleasure from Paradise Postponed, though I am not sure the pleasure has any proportion to the millions of money that the BBC have spent on this series. I am not even sure I would not have preferred more Rumpole. The best actors shine like stars as much on television as in the theatre: Laurence Olivier, for instance, and Peggy Ashcroft. But characters like Frank Muir can glow gently without acting at all. Even newsreaders have their fans, though I can never tell which is which. They all look like Alastair Burnet to me.
Nearly everyone on My Music (BBC2), which in principle is a fairly deadly parlour game, has a discreet stellar quality, but Frank Muir is the effortless master of this kind of programme. He is like an infallibly funny uncle, always engaging, always un- demanding. I only wish the BBC could contrive circumstances in which he might burn more brightly, since his only fault if any is performing too comfortably within the limits of his range. But the heavenly bodies of television often do beam with a mild, comforting light, because one of the purposes of the little box is to tranquillise. Even the news is often calmant, if not stupefiant. After the terrifying ITV series This Week, which made Northern Ireland seem the battlefield of a full-scale civil war, the bad news of the day had an old- fashioned ordinariness. It was the day the Dow Jones Index fell by 86.61, but no one was jumping off skyscrapers. We were breezily assured the collapse of the market was accentuated by the use of computers.
Channel 4 is livelier, but enough of it is enough. After nearly an hour of The Man, the Myth and the Maker, theological argu- ment seriously conducted though not with- out bizarre patches of silliness as you would expect from theologians, I lacked the stamina to watch Holy Meat about the pros and cons of ritual slaughtering, which ended after midnight. Why was it shown so late? It might interest as many people as Bodymatters on infertility on BBC1 at 8 p.m. or a documentary about North Sea
Oil (Channel 4) also at 8 p.m. In the theological programme only Don Cupitt was a parody of the modern theologian. Hyam Maccoby lost my confidence early on by invoking Mithras and Attis to ex- plain St Paul, and by failing to notice the relationship of the Passover Haggadah to the Christian Eucharist, but later on he recovered it. Dick France was very good indeed, like a sane man at a Mad Hatter's tea party. But he was much too sensible to have star quality. Only the dotty Don Cupitt had that. Perhaps they will make him a bishop; Emmanuel College Cam- bridge has not yet been struck by lightning.
My only grumble this week is hardly the size of a man's hand. I am not liking Howard's Way (BBCI) quite as much as I did before. The more glamorous and ghast- ly characters seem to be taking over and the values of soap opera are becoming obtrusive. I am still hooked, but the hook is working loose. The story represents a world that must, I suppose, exist, but I prefer the world of Frank Muir's parlour games, which does not. There is something particularly refreshing about his long career: one does not want the blazing of a comet every day.
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