Television
Condescension
By PETER FORSTER
The first was In the Good Time by A. M. Kit- termaster, whose name is more attractive than his title, presented by A-R, and it came only five days after another Africa play in which Mr. Sammy Davis, jr., conferred upon us a straight performance as a Lumumba-type politician. rhe settling of In the Good Time was Somewhere Up- Country, where the DC is coping with a native uprising. There is a good, wise, handsome, kindly and cultured black politician who must endure the sadness of arrest (as Mr. John Freeman might put it) and who abhors violence. There is a drunken, beastly white Major who is for open- ing fire. Also the DC's memsahib. wife. Also a pretty white girl adored hopelessly by an African lad. The plot turned on whether the whites could be persuadc .1 to release the politician so that he could attend a meeting that might help his people Onwards.
. I suppose at this late stage in the day it is hope- less to explain why there is a would-be sympathetic way of depicting Africans which carries every bit as much implicit condescension as the attitude of some colonial Canute. Nor do I imagine that those who think this kind of play serves some purpose can see that little set-piece speeches by all concerned, explaining the difficul- ties of their positions, reduce the characters to half-human stereotypes. But what depresses me more even than this is the confusion of good intentions with bad play-writing. The white girl suspects that her young African admirer has stolen a rifle. 'Look, Joseph, you must understand this puts me in a difficult position.' He hedges, so she carries on : 'Things aren't altogether easy for me either.... Oh, if only I knew what was going on through that head of yours!' To which he says: 'I love you, Miss Mary!' And is she offended? 'Every woman likes to be told that she's loved . . . as time goes on it will be less important . . . eventually it will seem like a dream.' Cannot Mr. Kittermaster, or A-R's script consultants (if any), see that no amount ,of sincerity makes this anything other than dread- ful, dreadful dialogue?
Likewise David Mercer's Where the Dillerence Begins, over on BBC, showed what happens when a big theme is tackled with, to be blunt, insufficient talent. This was spawn of Look Back in Anger, about the dilemma of working-class sons who have gone up in the world; but whereas the strength of Osborne is in the freshness and feroe' ity of his dialogue, Mr. Mercer could manage no more striking moralising than 'Slums come down and rocket sites go up' and 'Where do we go? And at the end, the railwayman father in drink rounds on his snobbish son in lines like 'When I leave this house, it'll be in a wooden box' and 'Working chaps'll never' be better so long as fel- lows like thee go over to t'other side.' Again, can- not some script editor see that this just will not do? Social consciousness is a vast, magnificent, unending source of drama, but that is no excuse for bad plays. I realise the temptation for script departments, faced with demands for more good plays than are written, is to let through a lot of mutton dressed as lamb in the hope that surfeited palates will not mind. They also have difficulties like censorship---. as can be seen from John Bowen's striking article in the current Contrast. (This second quarterlY edition is much better than the first : immensely well worth anyone's 3s. 6d.) And doubtless there is constant pressure to produce broadly popular plays. But art has nothing to do with ratings, and any script editor who thinks it has is holding his job under false pretences.
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