Television
Starry night
Martyn Harris
Two hours into The British Academy Awards (BBC 1, 8.15 p.m., Sunday) Billy Connolly in Los Angeles announced, rather desperately, that he was feeling fine. 'Usually at this stage of a prize-giving I have lost the will to live. We're forming escape committees in the back row.' But that would be at the usual venue of the Grosvenor Hotel in London, and Billy was at a Beverly Hills poolside, as Hollywood's finest brunched absently around him on lobster and caviare.
There were Shirley MacLaine, Charlton Heston, Jane Seymour . . . and, oh, lots of famous people. But there was also a sense of something else going on — as if Connolly had pitched his podium as sideshow to some main event proceeding off-camera, and to which all heads were really turned, in spite of his increasingly sweaty bids for attention. They were look- ing over his shoulder for somebody really famous.
Bafta had tried to solve the perennial problem of getting American stars to col- lect their tin pots in London by shifting half of its show to the States, but even here the big names proved elusive. Martin Scorsese, for instance (Best Director, Best Film, Best Screenplay — all for Goodfellas), appeared at a poolside, but it was the wrong pool- side, somewhere in Florida: 'brought to us by the magic of satellite,' said Connolly, whereupon the satellite decided to break down and return us to Noel Edmonds, star- ing at an empty television monitor in the Grosvenor.
They always put a buffoon like Edmonds in charge of these shows — the fear is that it will all prove too heady an intellectual experience without the mediation of some pattern-sweatered punster from early evening television. He introduced Tom Stoppard to present the TV Writer's award with the words: 'Every generation in this country's history has seen its fine writers: William Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw . . . [roguish pause] . . . Ernie Wise'. And he went downhill from there on.
Connolly was better value, with his bla- tantly tongue-in-cheek tributes to 'dear, dear friends' and 'truly wunnerful people', but as Connolly advances into middle age, court jester to the Yorks and Lloyd- Webbers, his nibbling of the hand that feeds him becomes stock-in-trade — a tightrope he cannot walk forever. Nobody ever says anything interesting at these events, and none of the film clips is long enough to enjoy. Edmonds and Connolly gave us names that had won in previous years; names that might be about to win; and names about to award the prizes to those about to win them. It was orchestrated frustration: a juggling of starry names, through miracles of technology, and all to avoid the obligation of content.
I became engrossed after a while in petty semiology, musing on questions such as why BBC women producers all wear sequinned jackets and all punch their arms in the air when they win. And why so few British men bother to tie their own bow ties when it is so easy and so much more attractive than the kind which come from Marks and Spencer on a piece of elastic. The American stars had begun to opt for the smart, Iranian-style collarless white shirt, which must be the first fashion fall- out of the Gulf war, and there was a defi- nite downturn in beard-wearing. Billy Connolly's chin was bare as an egg, and Martin Scorsese scored a fashion double by shaving off his silly chin beard and wearing the Iranian shirt.
When the satellite link was finally restored to LA, a howling wind arose, but the stars brunched stolidly on as gales plucked at their awards. An especially vicious gust seized the flowers from around Connolly's podium and dumped them over the balcony. 'And there's a big society wed-
ding going on down there,' he said.
So that was where everyone interesting had gone.
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