; Television
That old feeling
Clive Gammon
Unwontedly, a macabre vision overcame me last week as the BBC blurbed its 'new' autumn schedules and the honest face of P.C. Dixon started painfully organising itself to articulate " Evening all!" As in the picture of Dorian Gray, his features collapsed grotesquely and his true age, unacknowledged for decades, revealed itself in decaying yellows and purples.
Yes, it's autumn schedules time, with all your old favourites and mine! Garnett lives! Hattie Jacques is alive and well and utterly unchanged but Handsome Harry Hawkins has got a bit more jowly since the last series of Softly, Softly and shows promise of developing into as big a bully as Barlow since he became the youngest Chief Inspector in the land.
Sec how I'm carried away! Of course I know that isn't really true because I read a very interesting feature in the Radio Times about Harry having a day out with the real youngest Chief Inspector and a right toughie he was, declaring in the piece that he'd shop his brother-in-law or his wife if need be — a sweet reminder of 1984 in what's meant to be a family read.
All things are mortal, except for telly series. Once a month, maybe, I accidentally catch the last five minutes of Coronation Street and such is fifteen years of brainwashing (I'm guessing about the time) I leave it on. It has the grisly longevity of any successful institution, like a well-established school or regiment. The whole is greater than its parts except for Ena Sharples who is a great-grandmother now, I see, though lesser characters have disappeared long since. And at least I do not flee the room, as I do when Dixon materialises of a Saturday evening.
Don't misunderstand me, though. I'm not complaining too hard about the old perennials. Softly, Softly, in spite of its occasional endorsements of dubious police attitudes, I'm always ready to welcome back. Also the calm opening titles and music of The Onedin Line. What a fine soporific these few moments would make, video-taped for nightly playing on the bedfoot telly which surely no home lacks.
I looked forward to the resurrection of Till Death Us Do Part also but, well-disposed as I was, I found the beginning of the new series a little disappointing. In spite of the arrival of the new baby there was too little dialogue-inspiring situation and it was a mistake to hold up the action for such a long time (as the family sheltered from the rain outside the maternity hospital) solely to give Alf the chance to sound off about the Micks.
Only one of Alf's fixations I find unconvincing, and that's the Royalty fixation. At Alf's level — I find at any rate — Royalty just doesn't exist. But his approval of the Crown could be simply a cockney thing, which I wouldn't know about. In my part of Britain, the Alfs find no inconsistency in combining gut-prejudice against Jews, Blacks and English with a violently expressed Marxism.
I bestow approval, at least a temporary approval, on the one genuinely new series I've caught so far — ITV's Van der Valk. As a main-lining Nicholas Freeling addict — to the extent of buying new titles featuring his splendidly sympathetic Dutch detective in the hard-back edition — I was naturally prepared to be hypercritical. But there was no necessity for harsh strictures. The Amsterdam locales were beautiful, not that you can go wrong with that city, the downbeat detection well in line with the novels and the portrait of the great V der, V himself acceptable. Only one slight criticism. Mevrouw Van der Valk is at present too skittish. She must be toned down to a proper Dutch seemliness for us V der V buffs. Yes, I know she's French, but she's had years to get over that.
Previous page
