Television
Rep. to the Millions
By CLIFFORD HANLEY
IT began to look on Sunday evening as if the BBC has de-
cided to have a fresh try at capturing weekend drama viewers. In recent months, with the plays on two channels over to ITV at the right moment to escape from the nonsense and see a bit of life.
Last weekend the position reversed itself. ATV were offering A Chance in Life, a mechanical little piece about a pools winner who finds that money is a curse. It smelt like one of those dim afternoon radio dramas. The competition, from David Mercer's A Suitable Case for Treatment, was pretty exasperating at times, but it was a serious essay in television drama. Ian Hendry settled right inside the skin of the outsider hero who lives in a car, puts home-made bombs under beds and stupefies policemen and psycho- analysts. Mercer displays a steady growth as a writer. This was a palpable advance on his earnest and unsubtle CND drama Climate of Fear shown some months back. It had poetic flashes and, thank God, outright laughs, and it also had Moira Redmond, who was cool and delicious.
Friday's revival of Odets's Winter Journey brought home to me that however we may grumble, we should never overlook the genuine value of television in serving as a high-class repertory theatre. You may say it's murdering the live repertory theatres, but most people never went to the theatre in any case, and for those people the small screen works away doggedly, giving an airing to odd new plays and re-creating past glories.
And what a masterful piece of craft Odets produced in Winter Journey. I was sucked straight into the claustrophobic hell inhabited by the drunk actor and the frantic wife and the confused producer. Eddie Albert is a better actor than Hollywood ever realised. Sam Wanamaker is great. I adore Patricia Neal. If I ever get to be a drunk actor, I hope she'll be around to suffer for me.
Owing to the routine clash of schedules, this play caused me to miss, tut tut, the second part of A-R's political blood-curdler When the Kissing Had to Stop. I saw the first part, though, and I thought it was a riot. Constantine FitzGibbon isn't quite up to Orwell standard as a seer, mind you. You can't help feeling that his view of history stems from being shut in the wardrobe too often by his nanny. But A-R did him proud with a cast of thousands, and I got the moral at once: if you complain about American bases, somebody will shut you in the wardrobe, and sucks to you.
There is something engagingly innocent in this, rather like a Kafka plot written in the style
of The Young Visiters, and it proves that tele- vision is really prepared to have a bash at any- thing. I hope all concerned were paid the earth.
Previous page
