Hold-up
Richard Ingrams
People keep going on about the 'ordeal' of the American hostages, now at last at an end. But what about the ordeal of television viewers bored into the ground night after night with 'up-dates' of the hostage saga? I think the BBC Nine 0' Clock News excelled itself on Monday by spending over 20 minutes of the bulletin relaying the news that the hostages had not after all been released owing to a lastminute hitch. Nobody in the massive BBC team knew why there had been a lastminute hitch but this did not stop any of them telling us at great length that what there was, after all, was a last-minute hitch. And just when you thought there was nothing more to be got out of the fact that there was a last-minute hitch, back we went to the sinister looking figure of the BBC's correspondent Mr Keith Graves who reiterated that a hitch of the last-minute variety had indeed occurred but meanwhile in Frankfurt aeroplanes were standing by, not to say psychiatrists, and all was set for a 'debriefing' (all of which had been on the news ad nauseam ever since the release looked imminent some days before); except that there was a new element in the shape of Americans tying yellow (or possibly white) ribbons round the trunks of trees, for some reason which I couldn't altogether follow. Then over to Martin Bell in Washington, and then back once again to the bearded Mr Graves telling us solemnly that the latest news was that a hitch had occurred but that they would be coming back on the air at half past 11 to keep us informed and if that wasn't enough there would always be Newsnight to be getting on with. And then back to Martin Bell for a final glimpse of a hostage-relative saying that as to the release she'll believe it when she sees it. And now for the closing headlines. There has been a last-minute hitch . . .
Did You See . . . ?, BBC 2's half-hourly
survey of the week's television, is rapidly becoming my favourite programme, apart
of course from the Muppets. It has some thing of the atmosphere of the old radio programme The Critics which many people
thought had been killed by the Peter Sellers parody; that is to say the people chosen to comment on the programmes are delight fully opinionated and boring. When I say that Dame Judith Hart was one of the company last week I hope I need say no more. However I will say that if Dame Judith were not enough there was also a man called Manuel Alvarado, wearing a bracelet, a necklace and a ring, whose claim to fame as far as I could gather is that he is co-author of a book about the making of
Hazel!, the BBC's dreary cops and robbers saga (what a rattling good read that book
must be!). Over such •bores presides the world-weary figure of Ludovic Kennedy who !think may have at last found his niche, after all those years banging on about the sinking of the Bismarck. His questions are often probing in a fairly polite kind of way. There was a very good little interview on Saturday with the ECO cellist Anita Lasker who quietly pointed out that from a historical point of view Arthur Miller's Auschwitz play, acclaimed by Dame Judith as 'deeply important', was a load of rubbish, and, though she did not say so in as many words, an insult to the women like her who lived through the nightmare of Auschwitz and who are now expected to look on and see it made into the stuff of cheap TV melodrama.
I had been hoping to make something of the Labour Party split shock horror but all the participants seem so cautious and half-hearted. A lot of people there must be like myself who welcome the idea of a split simply as something to liven things up a bit, but after watching Dr David Owen on the Brian Walden show, I began to wonder whether it would come about. The Doctor hummed and ha'ed and said he would have to wait and see and it was too soon to tell. Walden had shown in his special poll that there would be tremendous support for a Lib/Soc/Dem alliance, but I think it will soon fade away if the Doctor appears on telly too often. At the same time it is hard to imagine Michael Foot, who gave an interview to World in Action this week, ever getting his teeth into the sound of gunfire. He has always been a bit of a windbag. Now that he is leader of the Labour Party he is a tremendous windbag — I could gather nothing much more than that he is in favour of 'a whole range of measures' to put things right.
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