Television
Death warrant
Richard Ingrams
Ican never see Russell Harty now without thinking of the late jailbird Frank Norman and his generous offer once made to me to come out of retirement and bump him off with an old shotgun. It is not just that he deserves assassination. You feel it is the on- ly way of getting rid of him, such is his aura of indestructibility. These latest murderous thoughts on my part are prompted by another potpourri of highlights, The Best of Russell Harty (BBC2), shown on Mon- day, featuring a selection of great moments of bad taste and embarrassment. A normal person would hope to suppress certain nightmarish incidents such as the 50ish Diana Dors, glowing with peroxide and bulging with flab, being escorted into her swimming pool by two slim male acolytes to the strains of bump-and-grind music. But Harty revels in this type of obscenity and can't have enough of it.
The only good thing to be said about the Russell Harty Show is that at least it is live and therefore has some feeling of spon- taneity. Most other chart shows are record- ed days in advance and so have any blemishes removed. A new show, Private Lives, on BBC2 is of this pre-packaged variety. It is hosted by Maria Aitken, sister of TV-am's Jonathan, a toothy, rather gushing actress who talks in a clipped Noel Cowardy kind of way. Apparently inspired by the Master's quip about the potency of cheap music, Ms Aitken's idea is to probe into the private lives of her guests by asking them to talk about a particular smell or meal or an article of clothing. I can't im- agine who thought this was a good idea. It might just about make a feature in Harpers Queen. In the opening session, the guests, seated in a kind of art nouveau junk-shop set, were the well-known Earl of Lichfield and the not so well-known (to me at any rate) Tracy Ullman, described as a come- dienne and pop star. Both came obviously well prepared with their little stories about smells and so forth and the show was conse- quently over-rehearsed and boring. Apart from anything else, it has to be said that Lord Lichfield is not the most scintillating character in the world. It is a great mistake to think that celebrities are interesting.
One temptation involved in being host of a chat show or quiz game is that, unlike the guests, you have a chance to prepare your own remarks in advance and can therefore be fairly sure of trumping whatever they may come up with. Clive James, who has abandoned TV criticism in order to appear on the box in person, cannot resist trying to outsmart the guests on his Channel 4 chat show The Late Clive James — an unfor- tunate title, I would have thought, consider- ing the way some fellow critics have recently written him off. John Mortimer, who open- ed the batting on Saturday, was ill at ease, anxious to provide his fair share of jokes in order to keep up with the restless, wiscrack- ing James. The chat was interspersed with some weak attempt at topical satire reminis- cent of the early days of D. Frost. One idea — translating into literal English the comic stories about the Royal Family that appear in the Continental press — we used in Private Eye in about 1966.
The Conservatives kicked off with the party politicals on Tuesday. They have wisely decided, so I read, to limit their pro- grammes to five minutes on the grounds that five minutes is the most that most peo- ple will stand for. The first Conservative effort went right over the top with shock horror scenes of life in Callaghan's Britain in 1979 — the dead unburied, cancer patients sent home from hospital, rubbish piled high in Leicester Square. I was surprised not to see the picture of the rat which one newspaper printed on its front page at the time. It is hard to say whether people are influenced by this kind of propaganda or not. Despite the sen- sationalism, I find it less offensive than the list of the Government's achievements which comes next. You can't help noticing the way in which the Tories when con- fronted by the rise in unemployment blame it on circumstances beyond their control, the world recession etc; but when things go right, e.g. when interest rates fall and infla- tion comes down, they say that it is all due to their courage and so forth. But what has brought the rate of inflation down is the fall in mortgages and the fall in the price of oil, neither 'of them things which the Govern- ment has any control over. Yet we shall spend the next three weeks listening to Government spokesmen telling us that it is all thanks to Mrs Thatcher.
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