Television
Degradation
Richard Ingrams
After a brief respite spent in a house with no telephone and no television —surely the best Possible recipe for the prevention nervous breakdowns — I rescued my duties in a new spirit. Could it not be that the increasingly jaundiced eye with which I have been watching my flickering screen during the last few months was due to overwork, worry, stress and all those other things one reads about in the leisure pages of the Sunday Times? Regretfully I have to report that this is not the case. Returning once more to the little box I am struck with renewed force by the crudity and vulgarity of it all. Perhaps it was a bad thing to jump in at the deep end by switching on the new Bruce Forsyth show on London Weekend. I thought it would have been impossible to Produce something more degrading than The Generation Game but somehow these People have done it. Then there was parky on the BBC, this time engaging in one of his bouts of gerontophilia with an eightyfour-year-old mulatto night club owner and chanteuse who goes by the mysterious name of Bricktop. It is fairly sickening at the best of times to watch Perky oiling up to boring showbiz People. Most nauseating of all is to see him flirting, if I can use so innocent an expression, with someone old enough to be his granny. Apart from that Parky has yet to learn a lesson that I might best express in a Poetic form: The fact that she is eighty-four Doesn't stop her being the most terrible bore, The little old thing sang 'Miss Otis Regrets' rather sweetly in fact, but like many singers when they begin to talk rather than sing, could mouth only banalities and drop names: 'What is money, Michael?. • • I like English people . . Noel was a very, very great friend of mine'. She was joined by Robert Morley, shamelessly plugging some 'book' he has compiled for Lord weidenfeld, and the two young perpetrators of Iesus Christ Superstar and Evita. This show, I should remind readers, is the kind of thing the head of BBC 1, Mr Bill Cotton, would like to see on the screen every night. Sunday came and, inevitably, there was a man with a beard photographing wild flowers in the Dordogne, followed by the latest LWT soap opera Lillie, based on the life of Lillie Langtry. I didn't manage to see all of it but you could gauge the quality of the writing by this bedroom exchange between Mr and Mrs Langtry: Airs L Not now. I'm tired. Mr L (resentfully): You're always tired. One half expected to see at this point a commercial for Sanatogen. Once again the character of the Prince of Wales appeared on the screen, this time played as a goateed smoothie by an actor called Denis Hill. Now everyone knows that the Prince of Wales spoke with a thick German accent and looked exactly like Clement Freud. A production that shows such complete contempt for historical verisimilitude needs no further comment from me.
When I was a young lad living in Cheyne Row, next door to Robert Robinson — whose new programme Word for Word, I shall subject to the most terrible savaging next week—the young curate at the Catholic rectory across the road was Father Peter de Rosa, a good-looking highly intelligent man, the darling of his congregation of old ladies. Subsequently I'm sorry to say Father de Rosa left the priesthood on some slightly feeble pretext and has now come to my attention as the script-writer of an LWT comedy series called Bless Me Father starring Arthur Lowe as Father Duddleswell, a joky Irish priest who, I'm glad to say, bears little resemblance to de Rosa's one-time Chelsea superior Canon de Zulueta. This series is a cut above the average. The jokes, though many of them are old, are quite funny and Arthur Lowe, as always, is a great pleasure to watch. What de Rosa has funked is what one might call the Godfactor. Low is dressed in all the priestly garb but you get no sense that he is a priest.
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