Q TV Idol Tells All

By STRIX

TFTIHE bookcase was real, in so far as anything there could be so described, but the books in it were not. They were a trompe-!'tail, a black and white photostat of book-spines fitted into the shelves. This struck me as a practical arrange- ment. To a layman a couple of sensitive charac- ters from the Real Book Shifters Union would not have swollen perceptibly the crowd of tech- nicians on the studio floor : but their wages would have sent up the overheads, and their raison d'être would have involved an element of capital expenditure.

All the same, I could not help feeling that there was a slight lack of artistic integrity about the dummy book backs. Our panel game was sup- posed to be taking place in the chairman's flat in London's famed West End; a relaxed, con- vivial, intimate atmosphere was aimed at, and champagne was being served to foster it. It was real champagne, we sat huddled together in real armchairs and we were, up to a point, real people. I felt obscurely that this ha'porth of illusion was unworthy of the occasion.

This feeling was strengthened when I looked to see what books had been photostatted to provide our urbane conversation piece with a suitable background. Pettigrew on The Gross Registered Ton, Some Aspects of Demurrage by Craik and Fowle, V. J. Bearcraft's Tabulation of Efficiency Quotients in the Jute Industry, Gadsden's The Recurring Decimal in Health and Sickness—these actual titles may not have been among those which met my eye; but all the books were, or had been, that sort of book.

Around the cameras, the microphones and the other apparatus a large posse of technicians, awaiting H-hour, combed their hair and bestowed on the assembled panel those thumbs-down-but- good-luck-to-you looks which one sees round the paddock when a small 'field is saddling up for the Ladies' Race on a cold Saturday in March. A girl in a white kennel coat appeared and asked me to follow her to the make-up room. I protested. I said that I had done this sort of thing before and we hadn't had to be made uP then.

'I can't help that,' she replied. 'For this Pro- gramme you have to be. Just a light make-up.' In no time at all she had me in a surplice and was slapping the greasepaint on to my face.

'Hey, steady !' I said. 'I don't want all that stuff on.'

She said not to worry, she was just toning me down; my face was the wrong colour.

What did she mean, the wrong colour?

She said it was sort of brown.

'But good heavens !' I cried. 'Lots of people have brown faces. Millions, in fact. What do you do when you have an Indian on television?' She said Indians were different and got to work on my ears. A-strong mutual antipathy had arisen between us.

When she had finished I looked as if I was suffering from jaundice and pernicious anaemia and had not much longer to live. I made my way to an empty dressing-room and scraped the stuff off with a handkerchief. There were still a few minutes before we were due on the air. I went out into the mean alleys behind the old music hall and lit a pipe.

Twilight was only just beginning to fall, and after a bit 1 noticed that people eyed me curiously as they hurried past on their way home. I knew they couldn't be mistaking me for Mr. Richard Dimbleby and began to suspect that my endeavours to remove the make-up had gone amiss; so I sought once more the mirror in the empty dressing room and gazed earnestly at my face.

It looked perfectly normal; and in the bustle which heralded our appearance before an audi- ence of long-suffering millions I had no time to speculate further about what it was in my appearance which had attracted the wondering, almost startled glances of the passers-by.

Afterwards, shepherded back into the make-up room with the rest of the panel, I met with a feeling of guilt the beady eye of the girl whose efforts I had Sabotaged.

'I don't really think—' I began when she proffered unguents and paper towels.

'Just as you like,' she said. The faintly com- placent note in her voice made me look into the triptych mirror on the dressing-table; and in it I saw that my swarthy features were flanked by a pair of primrose-coloured ears.

I have appeared infrequently on television. There are several good reasons for this, but probably the most cogent is that when I appear that is all I do; I just appear.

'Ha! Ha!' says the master of ceremonies. 'I must say, that's just about the best reason I ever heard for not eating water-melons by moonlight. Thank you very much, Major. Now, er, Strix. You must have been involved in some equally odd predicaments in the course of your varied career. Would you like to—' While the master of ceremonies is saying 'Would you like to,' I have begun saying 'Well, er, as a matter of fact, I don't honestly think.' He stops talking because he believes that at last I am going to say something; I stop talking be- cause I realise that I have rudely interrupted him.

This brings the sound 'part of the programme temporarily to a close. The cut and thrust of debate is interrupted, there is a loss of tempo, and the viewers are back in the old days of the silent film. If I am on the top of my form they can see me crossing one leg over the other with a. well-meaning but desoriente air before the cameras switch back to the master of ceremonies. 'Perhaps,' he says, with just a touch of petu- lance, 'we had better get on to the next question.'

As he says this viewers can hear my voice, like a seagull making background noises in an over- produced nautical drama, mumbling, 'All I was going to say was that I don't think I've got any- thing to—' I made my television debut in 1938. The pro- gramme was, as I remember, a short one for those days and lasted only three-quarters of an hour.

It consisted basically of a soliloquy by me on the Sino-Japanese war. This was enlivened (per- haps it would be truer to say that artificial respiration was applied) by a nice man who drew with extraordinary cleverness and celerity maps illustrating my strategical expositions. Viewers were then so few that television was perfectly respectable but rather abstruse : like, today, growing mushrooms or breeding Shetland ponies. In an attempt to make my talk more vivid I began with a statement to the effect that 'By the time you wake up tomorrow some hundreds if not thousands of Chinese men, women and children will, if the weather is favourable, have been killed or wounded by the Japanese Air Force.'

In those days scripts dealing with any aspect of foreign affairs had to be submitted to the Foreign Office; and the Foreign Office, not wish- ing to give offence to the Japanese, put a blue pencil through this sentence. But it is one thing to censor a typescript and another to stop its author saying what he intends to say; and I am afraid I treated Mr. Neville Chamberlain's foreign policy in the same way as I treated tb make-up.

I think that must have been almost the last occasion when I actually finished a sentence 0 television. I do as a matter of fact remembe finishing one on the Brains Trust two or three years ago. Mrs. Mole of Skegness had writtet to report that her son Thomas, aged sixteen always put his shirt on before his trousers, bu that her husband, Mr.• Mole, insisted that th' trousers should be given priority over the shill What did the panel think?

I did not even wait to see what my colleagues —the scientist, the philosopher, the distinguishes Indian lady—would make of this contemporary dilemma. I blurted out, 'What an absolutely fatuous question!' It was my finest hour. I was (quite rightly) not asked to appear on the Brains Trust again