Television
The H Symbol
By PETER FORSTER THE corpses at Belsen lie stretched in rows; the fatal mushroom billows up in the Pacific; maimed PoWs hobble piteously home; an orphaned child on a faraway railway station stares us vacantly in the face. And all the time Crosby is warbling of 'Blue Skies,' and Piaf of being in love this spring, and others less recognisable blend their anonymous, ersatz good cheer about moon-and-June which parallels the ghastly pic- tures until our teeth are unbearably on edge, and the point of man's inhumanity to man making countless angels croon has been established, re- minding us yet again that the H is symbol both of bomb and of TV aerial. Sledgehammer satire, if you like (with the commercials seeming an extension of the horror), but in the miraculous cutting, manifestly the work of an artist. More explicitly, 11 V last week sensibly networked John Grierson's weekly pot-pourri from Scottish region, This Wonderful World, which showed in an oddly moving way (because he also intro- duced items, picking out his warm, humane words in a manner so different from our smarm-and- charm boys in the South) that film documentary's GOM still commands more tricks than most of his juniors will ever learn.
Yet overall the BBC has the edge at present in documentary features, as witness Robert Barr's programme about Hebridean flying doctors, though perhaps half an hour might have been lopped off the script by reducing the number of times people were woken up in the early morning. Indeed, characteristically (though not, on that account, wrongly) ITV's principal current docu- mentary is sold as fiction in the mock-court pro- cedure of The Verdict is Yours. Whether or not it is good law (and I have heard a solicitor query this) it is undoubtedly effective drama, with all sorts of fascinating slice-of-life revelations about truck-drivers bedding tarts in their driving cabins, and how soon an engaged girl may let her fiancé and how often, and similar unblinking details which in a straight play by a serious dramatist would certainly preclude performance on a public stage and might well risk restraint from the ITA. (One noted, incidentally, how the absurdity of the Lord Chamberlain's office was definitely demonstrated by, the BBC's perform- ance of The Green Pastures, still banned for the stage though suitable for eight million people on home screens; but then, his Lordship becomes more than ever like a squire irrelevantly guard- ing his footpath with a shotgun while traffic pre- fers the new metalled by-pass near by.) I hope that Verdict will not be afraid sometimes to turn its scrutiny inboard and show also the law's de- lays and severities and capacity for still behaving like a ass. I personally dislike the public ghoul- gallery of watching real courts at work, but the programme is engrossing enough to solve ITV's problem of attracting a large late-night viewing figure, and the advertisers will doubtless be satisfied.
Another example of seesaw inter-network rivalry came with I See; I Hear, a little ATV programme last Monday in which experts in phonetics tried to describe and place socially an unseen guest by his voice, while an artist drew him to their specifications. Compare Mr. May- hew's 'class' series : BBC instructs, ITV tries to add suspense to information. Yet. infuriatingly, ATV's panel do not explain what we most want to know, which is surely how and why they make their guesses.
Still comparing, I find ITV news now infinitely livelier than BBC. Nor is this (as they may flatter themselves at Lime Grove) the difference between The Times and the Express, simply that ITN seems to have more sheer news sense, and cer- tainly reflects more closely the wide-ranging con- tents of newspapers in a way the BBC disdains, perhaps through the influence of radio news, which as we all know is compiled on Sinai. I watched both bulletins on a not-very-newsful evening. ITN had film from Quemoy; BBC relied on the map. ITN's shots of a ship sinking off Wales were far superior. BBC listed articles from which purchase tax was removed; ITN did like- wise, then sent somebody to interview Raymond. Way to discover what this would mean in prac- tice. Also, ITN does not go in for that niggling pretence of no-advertising which leads the BBC to film the Boys' and Girls' Exhibition and care- fully avoid mention of the fact that Hulton's organised it. To defend this would be to adopt an argument in the end requiring posters to be taken down at sports events, race meetings, even in the streets. Whilst those BBC champions who resent accusations of Auntie's hypocrisy might consider the divergence between this attitude and those other programmes which plug pop record- ings, current shows and films, etc., ad nauseam.
For the rest, one gathers that the new season's programmes are on, which seems to mean simply that all the old season's programmes are back. ATV's Sunday night Armchair Theatre at least aims at home-grown novelty, though it got off to a poor start with a piece about doctors named (for no reason I could fathom) Pillars of Mid- night. Quite what was going on in the studio that evening I do not know, but short of actually interrupting to ask the actors for a light it was hard to imagine what more the technicians could have done to disrupt the proceedings. Things went better last Sunday with Web of Lace, a weepie- ereepie distinguished by Denis Vance's direction, Timothy O'Brien's sets and Jill Bennett being sinister in her own unique fey-sexy manner. But the moment d fhe fortnight for me was a weird piece of film on This Week which showed Papuan mystics having a ball, with a man jabbering to a girl in words whose meaning was clearly, 'May I have the next trance, please?'
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