Television
Rapping with Muffin
Wendy Cope
You think you'll remember but you never do, unless you keep the cutting or write something down. In some newspaper article somewhere it said why BBC 2's new youth slot is called DEF II but the informa- tion seems to have gone in one eye and out the other. My own guess had been that DEF is what you move on to after ABC. That didn't explain the II and anyway it turned out to be wrong.
Stephen Fry, who introduced the first two programmes on Monday and Wednes- day of last week, said a viewer has written and asked about the name. His answer was, 'Why on earth not?' Last time I saw Stephen Fry on television, in a programme about computers, he wasn't funny. This time he made a much better impression.
'My name's Wendy Carson,' he announced. 'Welcome to what I'm sure will be an appropriately young, thrusting, virile, urgent, pulsing programme.' The first offering, fortunately, wasn't like that at all. Mysteriously entitled 'Babylon 2', it was a selection of clips from old children's programmes, including the time when they invited an unruly baby elephant on to Blue Peter. This has been shown over and over again but it can't be shown too often for me. What could be more delightful than the spectacle of a dumb animal running rings aroung three bright young television people? I'm only sorry it doesn't happen more often. It's fun to imagine what it would be like if a giraffe stumbled into the Question Time studio or a family of sur- prised penguins waddled on to Thinking Aloud.
Back to DEF II. The second half-hour was the urgent, pulsing part — an item on black music, complete with fast-moving Network 7-style captions. I went fast- forward on this until I spotted Lenny Henry doing a send-up of a rapper. He was performing a number called 'I'm Bad' and it was hilarious. After I'd been enjoying the performance for several minutes, it dawned on me that it wasn't Lenny Henry at all but a real rap artist called LL. 'LL is dissed by rappers like Just Ice,' the caption read. 'They say he's not hardcore.' We live and learn.
After the pop music came something completely different — an edition of Open to Question in which young people talked with David Alton about his Abortion Bill. Though some of them were clearly angry with Alton, he kept the temperature down, remaining calm and cogent and making no attempt to dodge the questions. It was an impressive performance.
In Wednesday's slot there was more pop music, an episode of Battlestar Galactica, and Animation Now, 15 minutes of arty cartoons. The first cartoon, 'Your Face,' was clever but horrible to watch. The other one, an award-winning German produc- tion called `Seiltanzer', was even more ingenious. It featured two men, a rope and a square and, true to the claim in Radio Times, it challenged perceptions. To begin with I thought it very boring but in the end decided it was only moderately so.
This week the programme-makers have found another good presenter in Harry Enfield, who is, I believe, a pop singer. Watching Monday's selection from old children's programmes I wondered if it could really be of much interest to teen- agers who weren't born when the series was first broadcast. How many 14-year- olds want to watch a scene from a black- and-white programme starring a glove- puppet? For me, though, Sooty is still utterly captivating. Just about the only thing I'd like better, in a nostalgic mood, is to sit down and watch Muffin the Mule. Sadly, this isn't possible because they have hardly got any Muffin left in the library. As I may have mentioned before (because I am very proud of it), I can still sing some of the songs. This one, for example: 'Oswald the Ostrich,/Isn't he absurd?/Have you ever heard/Of such a ridiculous bird?/ Oswald the Ostrich,/When he tries to fly/He can't go very high,/He frightens the sparrows all up in the sky . . I could go on but that's probably enough. Funny what one does remember.
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