Television
Morons
Richard Ingrams
The new head of the BBC has so far failed to do anything to overrule the Corporation's rule that anything 'Not for Morons' cannot go until after 10.30. Tonight is still at about eleven o'clock and now The Book Programme, which used to be at a fairly reasonable hour, has been put back to 11.30. Last week owing to the lengthy encomia of Bing Crosby it didn't get going till 11.45. Professor Asa Briggs, one of the chosen trio of reviewers, is not the ideal person to listen to at that hour of the night but the programme was enlivened by the appearance of Tom Stoppard who launched an excellent and overdue assault on Dr. Desmond 'Naked Ape' Morris, quite rightly showing inter alia how he exploits sex in the name of science. Morris himself cropped up two days later on The World About Us, sporting dark glasses and an open-neck denim type of shirt and compering one of the most boring programmes I have ever seen in my life. It is self-evident to all but dreary Doctor Desmond, that if you regard man purely as an animal you not only make a cardinal philosophical error, you also make him seem as dull as any warthog.
Morris's new field is human gestures for which he has invented his own pseudoscientific vocabulary eg. tic-sign, pair-bond, postural echo. Sunday's programme con sisted mostly of film made of the citizens of Naples, 'the gesture capital of the world', and told us such fascinating facts as that when a man and a woman were filmed eating in a restaurant the man took twentyseven sips of his drink and the woman forty-eight from which the Doctor made some contentious deduction which now escapes me. He would have been interested in the body-display of this particular human animal to his programme — abnormal amount of Body-Shifts in arm-chair, contorted facial display indicating acute bore dom, drumming fingers as symptoms of Impatience Posture, followed eventually by Short Loping Run to television set to carry out Switching-Off Activity-.
The pressures on the writer of comedy shows to produce more of the same are intolerable. One of the best programmes of recent months was The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin, written by David Nobbs and starring the very versatile Leonard Rossiter. This chronicled the Stonehouselike breakdown of a middle-aged executive driven to a faked drowning by his failure to come to terms with an over-loving wife and a posse of awful relatives and business colleagues. The story ended happily with him returning after his 'death' in the persona of Martin Welbourne, a bearded friend of himself from Brazil, and marrying his own wife who wisely pretended not to recognise him.
Nobbs, presumably egged on by the Beeb, has now written a sequel which not surprisingly lacks the narrative drive of its predecessor. Reggie is currently going through a series of relatively unconnected adventures. Last week the Perrins opened a shop called 'Gra selling rubbish ranging from Tom Perrin's undrinkable Sprout Wine to paintings of the Algarve by their dentist Dr Snurd — 'Hundreds of ideal gifts for people you hate'. The idea catches on and Reggie soon finds himself in charge of a vast business empire marketing such items as Perrin's Insoluble Suppositories on a huge scale. Meanwhile his old firm, Sunshine Desserts, have gone bust. This production moves at a tremendous pace packing a lot of action into each half-hour episode. John Barron's performance as the head of Sunshine, 'C.f.', is especially humorous. It may not be as good as it was first time round but it still is far the funniest thing on the telly at the moment — except of course for The Muppets.
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