Television
Are there fairies?
Wendy Cope
My best chance of enjoying a televi- sion programme these days is to promise myself I'm not going to write about it. By Sunday evening I had clocked up enough hours in front of the box and decided there was no need to take notes on The South Bank Show (ITV). The subject was the novelist Doris Lessing and she turned out to be such an interesting talker that I reached for my notebook anyway and scribbled down quotes that seemed worth remembering. First it was the phrase 'the banality of impersonality' — Ms Lessing has come to believe that readable writing always stems from private emotion. Then there was the comment, 'Being reasonable has nothing to do with being a writer' — a saying that is bound to come in useful some time.
These were from the first half of the programme, in which the author was inter- viewed by Claire Tomalin. It was pretty good, despite the fact that the two women seemed to be at cross purposes some of the time. In the second half, Doris Lessing talked to science fiction author Brian Aldiss, evidently a kindred spirit, and this part of the programme was even better. Aldiss reflected on the fact that 'we kid ourselves we're homo sapiens and that our great glory is our brain', although our brains are not really very good for thinking with — they're better at producing fantasy. That seems absolutely right to me and it seemed right to Doris Lessing too. But she added that fantasising and dreaming must have a function or we would have lost the capacity in the course of evolution.
Towards the end of the interview Ms Lessing — a former communist — got on to the subject of political speeches. Defin- ing rhetoric as 'the use of words to stop you thinking', she expressed the view that politicians — left, right and centre — 'take off into this garbage' and are always on a far lower level than their audience.
In the midst of so much good sense it was rather startling to learn that nowadays Doris Lessing believes in fairies, or 'little people', as she calls them. When she first mentioned them, I smiled. Later, watching Janet Suzman perform an extract from one of Lessing's works of space fiction, I began thinking about the possibility of intelligent life on distant planets and the possibility that very small beings from somewhere else might have discovered the secret of intergalactic travel and — who knows? they may have landed here and set up home at the bottom of the . . . No, stop it. Earlier on Sunday evening John Lloyd, producer of Spitting Image, presented an item on Did You See? (BBC 2). It con- cerned television programmes about televi- sion. At one point he introduced an extract from an edition of Right To Reply (Chan- nel 4) in which Right To Reply itself was being discussed. Lloyd made a few com- ments about this and then, gleefully, re- minded viewers that they were, at the moment, watching a television programme about a television programme about a television programme about television programmes. And here I am reviewing it. The main thing to be said is that John Lloyd was so good in front of the camera, he should be there more often. This was the last in the present series of Did You See? and the last to be presented by Ludovic Kennedy. I shall miss the prog- ramme and the presenter. The series I did intend to review, Black and White (BBC 1), was one of the subjects discussed by Ludovic Kennedy and his guests. The five programmes were shown on consecutive evenings from Monday to Friday and have already received extensive press coverage. What particularly struck me was the nice, polite way people lied through their teeth to Geoff Small, the black reporter, about the availability of accommodation and jobs. The evidence of discrimination didn't surprise me (it doesn't seem to have surprised anybody) but the programmes did give me a better understanding of how difficult it must be for black people to trust whites, however charming we seem.
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