Television
Abroad Thoughts From Home By PETER FORSTER , THE only television I saw in the South of France was un Western, and nobody in the bar was taking the slightest notice. This was at a village near Vence—in the square outside a circus was putting up a tent, and I was on the fringe of a furious argument in which several Frenchmen were blaming the blunders of the Congo on a diminutive Belgian acrobat. A poster proclaimed that on the Saturday evening an open-air performance would be given of 'La Megere Apprivoisee par William Shakespeare'— and if you twig straightaway that that is The Taming of the Shrew, you're a better man than 1 am, Dover Wilson. A lady wearing an outsize crucifix on a chest like an altar assured me it would be very good. Much better than television, she said.
And of course there were more entertaining entertainments. Such as the lady who was elected Madame Ancienne Vague. Or the flea-pit cinema one rainy night (the only rainy night in three weeks) where the film was preceded by an elderly actress from Marseilles, Fanny's mother in the Marius-Fanny-Cesar trilogy of immortal memory, who climbed up a ladder to the stage, told a number of comic stories, and then recited an impassioned ode to the memory of Raimu, which was frantically applauded by an audience most of whom must have been at school when the great comedian died thirteen years ago.
Or giving one of her better performances, the passee film star in the big hotel's American bar, socking back champagne with her two bored, resigned gentlemen—prototype of the peripatetic rootless, a self-parody straight from Swanson Boulevard, loudly remembering the days when she was so broke she and the girl she shared with took it in turns to wear the bra (where was it? New York? Paris? LA? she forgot), breaking off to see if her small child had gone to bed, protesting after the glass had been refilled. Later I found myself in a nearby street called L'Impasse de l'Horizon—which, come to think of it, is as good a description as any of de Gaulle's France. (My favourite night club comedian in Juan-1, s- Pins described Michel Debre as 'le Fidele Castre What was that? Oh yes, television. Well, the Cirque Bouglione had come out of winter hiding to offer une vraie vulgarisation scientifique, which I commend as a billing to Mr. Attenborough and Co. Otherwise one was made aware of the fact that in France the big names occasionally appear on TV, but are not made by it. The clubs and music-halls are still the nurseries of talent, not the screen, and the current. top entertainers Becaud, Aznavour, Brassens, Dalida and the assorted rest—owe nothing to TV. Also the I lit names still erupt in the time-honoured un- expected way—as witness Rosalie Dubois, rightly called la plus grande revelation depuis vingt-ci q ans, working in a Montmartre fish market a year ago when Andre Claveau heard her sing in an amateur talent contest, now regarded as the likely successor to Piaf, whom she resembles much less than records suggest. Pint-sized, round-faced, plain and radiant, she belts out cheerful songs oa the subjects of her own ugliness and frustration, as well as the usual sentimentalities about 1 et quartier—with the difference that you feel she still lives there. But the French are not so immune as they think to transatlantic taste : sadly, the first night I saw Rosalie Dubois, a far warmer recep- tion was accorded by a smartish audience to a rock-'n'-roller of the Elvis Presley Y-front school of singing.
The most original cabaret artist in mY experience remains Philippe Clay—tall, lean, gangling, flowing rather than moving, with his unique line in funny-sinister songs. The best pop singer-composer is still Gilbert Becaud. And I was sorry to miss by one night another chance to see Fernand Raynaud, highest-paid of the comedians, whose sketch I cherish of an absent- minded priest recounting' the loaves-and-fishes miracle in the wrong proportion, with ten thousand fish to seven people.
And television, our television? Ah well : next week.
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