Television
On higher things
Wendy Cope
The Sunday before last, for some reason, I watched 15 minutes of The Manageress (ITV, 9 p.m.) and thought it looked rather good. I was going to watch it properly this weekend and give you, rather late in the series, the benefit of my considered opinion.
But that was before I heard about The March (BBC 1, 8.05 p.m., Sunday). A big major play about world hunger, heralded by big major publicity, is not something a television critic can pass up in favour of a drama series about a football team. It would be interesting to know how many ordinary viewers forsook the rival attrac- tions and saw William Nicholson's play.
The concept was an interesting one. What would happen, I kept asking myself, if there actually was a hunger march across Africa towards Europe? At every point the answer seemed to be that what could happen would be very different from what we were seeing on our screens. The rich half of the world was represented by a handful of Eurocrats and one black Amer- ican senator. What about all the other politicians in the world? What about the churches and the public? Wouldn't there have been a bit more activity? More strenuous attempts to negotiate with the marchers before they reached the Straits of Gibraltar? Though it was all pretty uncon- vincing, the play did begin to grip me during the final half-hour. One thing the advance publicity had not given away was what was going to happen at the end. The marchers crossed the water in little boats, landed, and were surrounded by troops. The female lead (Juliet Stevenson as `the youngest ever' EEC commissioner) watch- ed the scene on television and tearfully commented that `we're not ready for you yet'.
But whatever its shortcomings, the play Will have done some good. I can't have been the only person who felt unusually uncomfortable about conspicuous con- sumption as I browsed, later in the even- ing, through the more frivolous bits of the Sunday papers. One Sunday paper, the Observer, has for the past few years run a children's poetry competition, which I have helped to judge. For this reason I was keen to see an item in The Late Show (BBC 2, 11.15 p.m., Wednesday) about poetry teaching at Halesworth Middle School in Suffolk. Year after year, Halesworth has carried off the Observer schools prize and prizes in other poetry competitions too. A while ago I reviewed an American programme about an outstanding teacher and said that I'd like to see more celebrations of members of this profession. The Late Show item was exactly the kind of thing I had in mind.
The teacher in question is Jill Pirie, a quiet, dedicated and highly intelligent woman, whom I — a former teacher who couldn't stand teaching any longer — am inclined to regard as a saint. We saw her at work in the classroom, commenting on children's poems in a way that wouldn't have been possible unless she'd spent a great deal of time reading and thinking about them. The poems themselves were presented in the right way — words on the screen while they were read aloud, and no attempt to gild the lily with film of birds or worms or grandmothers or whatever the subject-matter happened to be.
As the Late Show credits rolled, I was delighted to notice that Nigel Molesworth grew up to be a BBC cameraman. On this occasion he had been working with a sound recordist called Greg Molesworth. Could this be the dreaded Molesworth 2? Poor chaps, they're probably quite unlike their fictional namesakes and fed up to the teeth with jokes about St Custards.
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