Television
Holy Postcards
By CLIFFORD HANLEY
formalised affair. On television, it is reduced to a picture postcard of a formalised affair. It seems more hopeful to sit a parson in front of the camera and let him offer the message direct to the viewer. But after watching many earnest chaps giving parables and counsel, I can't re- member a single word any of them said. I don't think this is merely agnostic prejudice on my own part.
Then there's the religious discussion formula, in which somebody fires questions at a parson, or parsons fire 1,7ords at one another. This ought to work, because a good-going barney always gets the viewers. It hardly ever does work, all the same. The Scottish region, where I do most of my viewing, is pretty keen on the discussion lark, and I would be greatly surprised if we had a single electronic convert to show for it. Scottish Television mounted one well-intentioned debate at the weekend—two Christians and two agnostics, all civilised, all intelligent, and all once more chewing endlessly over the old familiar ground about acts of faith and scientific scepticism. It did its best, but the total effect Was soothing and soporific.
There are two main problems. One is the purely mechanical one, the tendency of the camera to flatten out everything into a set of shadows. The other, of course, is the absence of anything like real anger or fanaticism, or even plain excitement. Television—both BBC and 1TV—is terrified of a real row on a subject that might upset folk. Television religion is a re- spectable, douce and hygienic creature, which i3 more than you could say for John the Baptist. Perhaps that's why we occasionally get, as a substitute, morality plays for the kiddiewinkies, like the BBC's sad clamjamfry Undercover Cat. This was all about three modern rebels—the ageing suffragette with memories of great days, the seedy aristocrat reduced to solitary boozing and sneering at modern times, and the hip adolescent obsessed with trad. To this carefully chosen cross-section of something or other was added a lost cat, and hey presto, in humane concern for the poor wee thing, everybody gets round to loving everybody else. Ah, there's good in everybody, I always say. What do you always say? ATV was streets ahead with a genuinely original little thriller The Power of Zero which had a downright plot. It was the classic situation of the baddies conspiring to make the goodie think he's mad, but this time the goodie was a top-secret mathematician, and the chief baddie was an intellectual conjurer who set about the job by shattering his victim's faith in the basic axioms of simple arithmetic. It was good to see a script prickling with tension and conflict without a single blow being struck.
We've also had the classic Hollywood plot, done specially for television by Nigel Balchin in The Hatchet Man (BBC). You expect some- thing formidable from such an author, and the play was certainly expert and neatly finished at the seams. The snag is that it is now impossible to write a new play about Hollywood. We've all spent so much of our lives there that we can size up the situation before the titles are off the screen. It was odd to see Donald Pleasence, of all people, over-acting his under-acting. I felt he couldn't quite believe he was such an unat-; tractive little runt as the script asked him to be.
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