Television
Mug shots
Martyn Harris
uanto?' said Giovanni incredulous- ly, `Quanto?' They seemed to be his only two words of Italian, but he made a con- vincing enough foreigner for the touts and hustlers of tourist London. A mini-cab charged him £75 for the quarter-mile jour- ney from Victoria station to his hotel. A theatre ticket agent charged him £70.80 for a £20 ticket to Phantom of the Opera (sit- ting behind a pillar). A Soho clip joint took him for £189 for two drinks and ten min- utes with a hostess. And still all he said was: Quaaanto?'
He was a World in Action reporter, of course (ITV, Monday, 8.30 p.m.), with a video camera in his hold-all, and if tourist rip-offs don't seem a serious enough sub- ject for a flagship current affairs pro- gramme, the researchers were there to point out that tourism brings 17 million vis- itors and £5 billion a year to London. It is usual in the capital to be beastly to visitors who always seem to be milling about aim- lessly at the bottom of the escalator with enormous backpacks on. A few years ago there was a competition in the Times for the unkindest advice to give a tourist and the winner, I think, was somebody who wrote, 'It is customary when using any form of public transport to shake hands with other passengers before disembarking, and to thank them for sharing the journey.'
Taxi and ticket touts exist in every capital city, as one of the mini-cab men pointed out, and you have to be a pretty thick tourist to miss all the warning signs at Vic- toria station and the legitimate ticket offices. The clip joint, though, does not exist elsewhere, and falls into a different category, since money is often extracted with menaces. There are only two sensible things to do with clip joints, which is either to ban them completely or to make sure they are run properly, with real sex on offer. It is typical of the furtive attitude to sex in this country that we do neither, and allow them continue as a blatant form of static mugging.
Frank Stubbs, who was selling Phantom tickets on Cambridge Circus two months ago, reached the heights of author promo- tion in the final programme of the series Frank Stubbs Promotes (ITV, Monday, 9 p.m.). It was true that Clive Riley, the author (Hywel Bennett), had just spent 15 years in prison for something very nasty, and it was true too that the book was rub- bish (`She reached blindly in the dark for his manhood . . . '), but Frank (Timothy Spall) was definitely on the up. His smoothie-chops rival, Dave Giddings, was in hospital with nervous collapse, his ex- wife Di was being friendly and the publicity scams were working a treat.
He ordered multiple copies from every bookshop in the phone book; he arranged for death-threat callers when Bennett did a radio phone-in, and he wangled him on to a Danny Baker TV chat show by blackmail- ing the producer — and what I want to know is why didn't my publisher do any of this? Spall has been good throughout the series, and Bennett was tremendous, rais- ing again the mystery of why he hasn't had his own vehicle since Shelley. He is one of those actors who can build menace into the most harmless of scenes and extract come- dy from the most ordinary of lines. `So what was the biggest thing you noticed when you came out of prison?' someone asks him, and Bennett thinks carefully for quite a long time before replying: 'Bottled water.'
Frank's rise, of course, is only temporary, as the conventions of con-man drama insist that our con-man is always an innocent and a failure. He mistakenly assumes Bennett has raped his niece and punches him on the TV chat show; his wife walks out on a family reunion dinner and demands a divorce. But you know Frank will be back next year, and I hope he comes back with Bennett, in what could be the best partner- ship since Minder.
Previous page
