Television
Anti-Inflationary
By MORDECAI RICHLER
The Four Freedoms (ATV), advertised with such an' air of self-congratulation, is begin- ning to shape up as a worthy bore. Last week's instalment, Freedom of Worship (written and narrated by Paul Johnson), again restated the obvious at tedious length. It certainly did not add, as Mr. Mailer would say, an inch to the house. The series is uncomfortably reminiscent of the sort of guff we used to be forced to see at school during Citizenship Week or on Commonwealth Day. One of TV's worst flaws, it seems to me, is that the serious is generally equated with the boring.
An exception, the programme that gives me the most pleasure regularly, is Tonight. The editorial hand behind it is not only one of the most inventive and resourceful in the business, but has a rare eye for the absurd. The regular interviewers complement each other admirably. Kenneth Allsop, for instance, would be a dead cert to announce the end of the world, while Fyfe Robertson—stooping, gentle—would get the kiddies' reaction to the event. But my own favourite is Alan Whicker. (He is blessed with what Hemingway, in that famous Paris Review interview, said no writer could do without : a built-in bull detector.) And in our house, we trust Cliff M ichelmore. We worry when he has a cold.
Of course, Tonight is uneven, and the occa- sional lapse into whimsy (cute verses usually foisted on Derek Hart) is regrettable, but lime after time it comes up with the live, topical interview. More important, Tonight brings this sort of thing off without any self-inflation; our pleasures are not blunted by self-defeating bally- hoo, we are not forewarned weeks ahead of time that soon we will have an Appointment With — or sit Face To Face with —.
Last week, on Face To Face, Cecil Beaton told us, 'I did not dislike my father because of his smell.' The consumer programme Choice, as you can read in detail elsewhere, came and went so quickly that it seemed the BBC hoped that you wouldn't realise it was there. I only caught the last instalment of Comedy Playhouse, The Channel Swimmer, by Alan Simpson and Ray Galton, but it was very poor stuff indeed : one thin joke spread over too much stale dialogue for a half-hour. Neither did I enjoy The Intrigue (Studio 4) as much as some other critics did. We are all satiated with realism, yes, but the answer is hardly a reversion to plays in a vacuum. I did not believe in the situation for a minute (a playboy offered 200,000 francs by an industrialist to make his wife suffici- ently interested in him not to elope with another man) and the actors were the sort you never meet outside a TV screen or a certain kind of West End play. When they are not in one place or the other 1 think they are dusted, un- wound and filed away in agents' drawers.
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