TT doesn't look as though the BBC's late Satur- 1day
night problems are going to be solved by Hot Line. It's very much the usual celebrity- conversation nonsense, only instead of Mr. Andrews asking such questions as `Do women dress to attract men or to please themselves?' or `What woman would you paint, Mr. Annigoni, if you were only allowed to do one more por- trait for the rest of your life?' these imbecilities crackle distortedly from the telephones of Wat- ford and Wakefield.
`Have you ever dreamt the one about mixing on easy conversational terms with p6blic figures you would never expect to meet in real life?' went the programme's blurb and the rest was as familiar: 'team of outstanding personalities . . . exciting weekly series .. . provocative . .. lively ... "live" in every sense.' Apart from the supreme trustfulness shown in the GPO—at least half the programme was in fact inaudible to the panel or the callers or both—it must be difficult to mix companionably with Mr. Randolph Churchill when your question has to trail the nervous, pleading, anguished and often frantically repeated utterance of your name and address, when your question is then misheard or misunderstood or allowed to squawk forlornly while the outstand- ing personalities chatter about something else, when you yourself have had no practice in broad- cast telephoning with the result that your enunciation lacks clarity and you are incapable of a quick emphatic follow-up, surely the heart of the matter, and when the innumerable tech- nical hitches have induced a mood of hilarious condescension, not to say contempt, on the part of the team (an odd word that). Furthermore, Mr. Churchill is likely to snub you by ringing off after a brief bluster—and, if he doesn't, the smooth, unflappable Mr. Jacobs will quietly dis- miss you in favour of a new call. What he wants is calls, not people. Easy conversational terms, indeed.
I suppose that this American game can be played with some degree of efficiency, but it is difficult to see that it could ever be more than mildly entertaining. In the Frost spot it is con- temptible. This week we are promised the 'out- standing personalities' of Baroness Gaitskell and Adam Faith. The very title 'Hot Line' suggests, like 'Miss Atom Bomb of Hiroshima,' an appalling cynicism.
Fortunately last week had warmer occasions, notably Russell Spurr's brave and curiously gay investigation of the Dominican revolt on This Week and Harry Carpenter's sunny portrait of Cassius Clay.
PATRICK ANDERSON
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