Television
Phrasemaking
By PETER FORSTER
HAVING myself made a brief appearance on the screen re- cently, and suffered the com- ments of friends, I propose for one week only to resist all temptations to criticise pro- grammes in terms of persona- / '1/4 lities. Not a word about the Archbishop of Canterbury's plainsong homily to the effect that pray-ying is thrill-fling. A nice smile back to the BBC announcerettes in their party dresses. Good old Huw Wheldon.
For of course it is just that much harder to appear at ease, and to do oneself what one supposes to be justice, than all you viewers imagine. That remark intended to be light—how ponderous it sounds a split-second after delivery, and it cannot be expunged, like a written word. And why is it that other people on the panel insist on cutting in just as one is at last about to say something rather bright? If only they had televised the run-through. . . . Thus comes one sad away, and a little wiser.
But the fact remains that while to um-and-er is human, to ad-lib should be divine, and an odd thing about television is that it inspires so little bright verbiage. The measured tread of statesmen's cliches, the stern clash of personali- ties facing up to each other—this is often in- teresting to watch, illuminating to hear, but seldom is there any real flash of phrase. The journeyman commentaries on Panorama and Tonight, the officialese of news bulletins, laced with slang like a long weak shandy with a little beer—I long at times for an infusion of re-write men, willing to risk an epigram, unafraid of a joke. As the sole current example, note how Mr. Bernard Braden enlivens the linkage on that very ordinary, new little magazine programme, The Time, the Place and the Camera (ATV) by adding quips. The colour bar has provided count- less items such as that shown last Sunday, but how much livelier it seems when Braden begins by saying that the subject is so stupidly taboo that he once heard a boxing commentator trying to identify a negro fighter by the colour of his shorts! This was not flippant (as most in the BBC would think): it caught the attention, which is more than the rest of the programme did. As for that wild-life film : I suppose it is terrible of me, but I honestly don't care about dying hip- popotami in Africa.
The collaboration of two old hands, Ted Willis and Edward J. Mason. has produced a pretty routine thriller serial. Hower of Evil (BBC), about a hunt for Nazi treasure, with British cop, William Lucas, doing some holiday investigation and getting in the way of the Austrian police, presumably the Edelweiss Squad. Meredith Edwards is the Austrian inspector, one of the Welsh Austrians, and with Maigret also back again, I suppose it is too late in the day to remind anybody that English actors just are not equipped to carry conviction when playing foreigners. Early on Sunday afternoon BBC put out, for no clear reason, a rushed and garbled half-hour focus on Italy, of a kind which Schools Pro- grammes would be ashamed to own: indeed, the quality of production for Schools continues to be high, especially in drama. Last week, for in- stance, there was a jolly little half-hour Chekhov, A Wedding, directed by Rosemary Hill. What children thought of it, I do not know, but it was quite equal in style to most of the offerings for adults.
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