Television
Worse Confounded
By PETER FORSTER
REALLY, a most confusing week, 'elwhich has left me unsure whether I am suffering from critic's palsy or snow-blindness, what with all those indefatig-
able AA spokesmen prophesy- ing dire weather conditions which immediately improved. Then for a time my screen seemed to show nothing but a wedding in Romsey at which, I gather, Princess Anne got married. And last Friday I watched that grand old character actor, Francis Williams, in immense form as the subject of Press Conference (BBC), only to learn at the end that the guest had been the famous Arthur Christian- sen, formerly of the Daily Express. All very puzzling, like the hidden city of Katmandu, to which we are always told very few travellers penetrate, but about which a new film seems to turn up on BBC almost every Saturday nowadays. There were the German travellers, and last week Colin Rosser. He certainly provided the pleas- antest shots of the week—a couple of Nepalese urchins playing a wonderful game knocking down a row of bricks, and a birthday procession for an old couple who were dragged round Katmandu to the strains of the local band playing 'Auld Lang Syne' and 'Colonel Bogey.'
But my head was still reeling from interpreting the humour of Para Handy (BBC), which Duncan Ross has clearly unearthed from some early Gaelic drama (involving Duncan Macrae as a skipper like a panto dame in a peak cap), when I was con- fronted by Conflict at Kalanadi. This I naturally took to be by Ouida, or possibly P. C. Wren, some melodrama mysteriously brought back from a long-lost limbo by a medium—but not television. To my plea of justification I must add that I turned on a few moments late, and this was one of those plays so old-fashioned that the credits come before the middle of the action, However, Radio Times stated firmly that it was by Arthur Swinson and from BBC West Region.
The Amritsar-like theme supposed a British Brigadier who orders his troops to fire on the mob in an Eastern town, and is subsequently recalled.
No fewer than 253 people are said to have been killed, and 500 wounded, which seems a very
handsome testimony to the effectiveness of the five soldiers we saw, bunched together to keep in camera, firing away rather languidly with re- volvers and sten guns while papier mache stones bounced daintily off their helmets. I am bound to say I recognised little of what I was once taught at the School of Infantry about 'duties in aid of the civil power'-1 seem to remember, for in- stance, that we were told if possible to get written consent from the civil power before taking over, which nobody did here, though the civil power, in the person of John Phillips, was pushing in all over the place, trying like mad to give his per- formance. But then he was hindered by the per- petual presence of a pretty girl giving no perfor- mance at all, and on the one occasion I ever came near to having to use my instruction on this sub- ject, we suffered from a dreadful lack of pretty girls in the company oflice. I still think the play was conjured up by somebody's Ouida-board. After all, if a really worth-while treatment had been wanted of this theme they could have adapted Gerald Hanley's The Consul at Sunset.
Next evening BBC TV drama again fell into its old error of not announcing the date of a play's action, rather like radio drama, which has long since learned to bring confusion to a fine art by failing to specify time-lapses between acts. Anouilh's Colombe needs its date, being in part a parody of a theatrical period and its types, in this case the Bernhardt-type monstre and the Rostancl- type cher maitre. For the rest, the story of the
flower-girl married io the great actress's son, who eventually becomes yet another actress herself, is one of this author's most coruscating pieces. If you protest that the theme of love's evanescence is well worn, the answer is that the author's voice is marvellously individual.
The voices of the actors, alas, were no less individual but far less marvellous. Dorothy Tulin brilliantly came near to disguising the fact that Anouilh's shallow minx, the moth round whom the candles flutter, is outside her natural range, and for the rest we have accents in search of a style, what with a wooden Irish Julien, and that superb actress, Francoise Rosay, unable to muster sufficient vocal variety in English. The whole pro- duction seemed to me appallingly inept—badly lit, clumsily photographed (we saw as much of Peter Sallis's back as almost anyone else's face), and poorly pointed, so that the subtle confronta-
tion of the two half-brothers, when Julien realises that Paul is Colombe's lover, went for nothing, and even the flashback at the end (Anouilh's recognition that there was love once) became all cloud-swept flim-flam. Final credits gave author- ship to 'J. Anouilh. Translated by DENNIS CANNAN.' The marvel is that as much of Anouilh came through as it did.
The most telling playlet of the week was, in fact, on Alfred Hitchcock Presents . . . (A-R) about a man• contemplating suicide from a skyscraper window-sill. The group of teenagers below taunt- ing, 'Jump! jump !', the taximen taking bets, the irritated police lieutenant—this was savage-eye observation of a kind that wins accolades in feature-films and rivets audiences at home. That many of ITV's half-hours are contemptible cheap 'quickies' should not blind us from the realisation that some are intelligent, competent, adult.
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