Television
Situations Vacant
By PETER FORSTER
A typical example was last Sunday's Time Factor (ATV), by John Whitney and Geoffrey Bellman. The title proved ironically pointed. A young man has borrowed a flat to entertain a girl during the afternoon. So well and good : this happens. Admittedly, not all flats are underneath a clock overlooking the Thames, but this allowed for a second hand to tick-tock throughout, which again is promising enough, even if it is hard to compete with O'Neill's use of the same device in The Emperor Jones.
But what then? By my reckoning, it took about thirty minutes before we were told clearly that the young man is lending the key of a chemical -warehouse to the owner of the flat, in order that the latter can steal drugs. The girl pleads with her lover to tell the police, which he pretends to do, only to be told (after returning from a call box) that she has herself rung 999 from a phone in the hall.
And at last, after some fifty minutes, the piece acquired the necessary impact to give it momen- tum; alas, it lasted only a further five minutes, to allow a dying-fall ending with the revelation that the thief, smelling two rats, had not attempted the burglary after all. Characterisation was of the feeblest (even to the girl as a golden- hearted waitress), and we were expected to swal- low that the young man did not know the sur- name of the flat-owner with whom he was risking criminal collusion. Lyndon Brook and Sylvia Kay did their best, and Peter Madden as the thief did a good deal more, as a genuinely sinister, lean-jawed, balding, Christie-looking villain with half-rim glasses. But for the rest there came through only a vague, muddled, implicit plea that sometimes it could be wrong to tell on your chum and sometimes it could be right.
In short, somebody had thought of a perfectly good little situation, but had taken no trouble whatever to work it out in terms of arresting drama, let alone television. It was much the same with Marriage Settlement (BBC) last Saturday, a variation on the old Thdrese Raquin situation, husband and mistress sorting out responsibility for, death of wife, which only packed a punch in the last twenty minutes, partly due to'Carl Jaffe's telling intervention as the foreign former hus- band suddenly caught up unexpectedly in the police web.
And Nest of Four, the previous Sunday's Arm- chair Theatre, fell into the same trap for different reasons, in that having mooted a Rififi-type robbery, the author forgot that the film had at least twice as much time at its disposal, whereas he tried to cram detailed robbery and careful characterisation into the one hour, with the 'result that there was no excitement until late in the pro- ceedings when capture impended. Again there was a general sloppy genuflection towards the idea of loyalty among thieves, and perhaps this is a reasonable moment (with the papers full of items about intimidated witnesses) to suggest that all TV companies might act more in keeping with their own much-trumpeted protestations of civic responsibility if it could be made clearer more often that the police are not only frequently on the right side of the law, but that the law is sometimes on the side of right.
By contrast, a belated discovery which I can confidently recommend as the funniest pro- gramme currently on the screen : Music with Max (BBC), half an hour of Palm Court music featuring Max Jaffa and his Trio, who make Victor Sylvester and his Ballroom Orchestra seem an orgiastic riot of rock. Of Mr. Jaffa, one can only repeat what Hermione Gingold once said of another actress, that 'even the Admiralty was never so arch'; his cellist plays with the tense and troubled air of a man buttoning himself LIP behind cover of the instrument, and fearing de- tection at any moment. There is a chorus of singers like nothing so much as a glee club in aspic; and last Sunday an impeccably genteel dancing couple in which the male partner seemed alternately to be weight-lifting and weight- guessing. Infinitely, infinitely more fun than the Royal Command Variety Performance.
Previous page
