Television
My kind of guy
Simon Hoggart
Idon't like using this column to whinge because there's an awful lot of good stuff on television. Take Harry Hill (Channel 4). As a huge fan of Hill, I was worried that his rich and painstakingly crafted scripts would not transfer to television, or would simply be gobbled up by the cathode-ray maw. As it is, there's some padding (a few of the extra characters, like Finsbury Park, don't really pull their weight) and some routines are familiar from his stage act.
But none the worse for that. Like all the great comedians, Hill invites you into a sort of secret society in which only initiates and illuminati find the material funny. Once you've joined the brotherhood, so to speak, everything seems hilarious. Some fraterni- ties are huge, such as the Python and Faulty Towers fans. Some are much smaller. Does anyone find Hale & Pace funny, or is their act the equivalent of the asylum where inmates laugh at being told 'Number 47'? .
I'm in Harry Hill's club. I love his amia- bility, just this side of being simple, his demented mnemonics (`Chocolate Malte- sers, Norman St John Stevas. Extra-strong mints, Artist formerly known as Prince yes, you've got to have a system!') and his surreal fantasies, such as last week's about his granny cheating at Scrabble (she had a tiny kiln under the table, and kept firing new tiles. She won with 'Mississippi river- boat disco'), or his plans for London traffic (release baboons in Regent Street, where they will snap off everyone's aerials). After three shows, we fans can relax — it's going to be all right.
Unlike Predictions (LWT), which was one of the worst programmes I've ever seen and certainly the worst I've been on. When I was first asked to appear, before Christmas, I assumed it was just another canter round the coming year, and was too hurried and too greedy to find out more. At the filming a month later there was much flummery involving sealed docu- ments and safes, and like an idiot I went along with this. Why? Because you don't want to bugger up everything for those nice people in the crew.
The show itself was mainly the usual ran- cid collection of hucksters, seers, astrologers and naifs, accompanied by a studio audience who almost made the guests in Kilroy look normal. To cliched whoo-whoo music, the prophets made their vague predictions, all no doubt heavily selected. Worst of all, the presenter was Philip Schofield, who excitedly informed one savant that, if he'd put £10 on his pre- dictions, he would have won £50,000! Sadly, the seer was less gullible than Mr Schofield, and had failed to back his own analysis of the stars.
I was lucky. My ten-second appearance included the line: 'I think Tony Blair will win by a bigger majority than most people expect.' Less astute forecasts were left on the cutting-room floor, or are locked inside an 'Avid' editing computer somewhere. Still, I feel real shame at having been involved in this farrago of half-truths, this wretched attempt to manipulate the audi- ence rather than inform them, and have handed over my fee to cancer research, which means that some tiny shred of good has come from the wreckage.
`I think you've crossed the line, Alphonse, from seasoning to herbal medicine.' Breaking The News (BBC 2), first of a four-part series about the growth of televi- sion news was television as it ought to be and, thank heavens, still quite often is. It began with a surprisingly poignant moment as one of the first NBC newscasters in New York in the 1940s held up to the camera still pictures of the newly born Prince Charles, and ended with the old Tonight programme, to which I felt they were a lit- tle unfair: surely it was better than the clips of Alan Whicker (Excuse me, would you like to have quins?') implied.
There were some marvellous moments. The old head of BBC radio news, who told one of the television news boys, 'Don't let anyone ever tell you that stills don't make good television', and there they were, still pictures: 'This was the scene in London, this morning.' The Soviet newscaster: 'I wanted to show people their positive potential, to make them happy, to make sure the news came over as positive, not tinged with tragedy in any way.' How very like so many modern Western news broad- casts, except that we have learned that tragedy sells just as much detergent as hap- piness does.
Then Ed Murrow, and his devastating hatchet job on Joe McCarthy. Murrow pio- neered the habit of looking away from the camera, down or to one side, for at least half the time he was on air, a tic which has been copied by every single American newscaster since. Altogether fascinating, revealing, and excellently scripted.
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