Television
Come off it, Frank
John Diamond
There are those who will tell you that thc likes of Blind Date and The Price is Right constitute television scheduling at its most cynical. Not me. The shows are trashy, but they are honestly trashy: Cilia Black has never suggested that her show is, in fact, a demographic study of teenage inter-sexual pair-bonding, nor did Lesley Crowther ever pretend that guessing the price of a Dralon lounge suite constituted a trenchant comment on the nature of our consumerist age. But TV Heaven: there's cynicism at its acme.
TV Heaven currently constitutes the whole of Saturday night prime-time view- ing on Channel 4. It consists, quite simply, of three full-length episodes of one or other series from one of television's many golden ages. (A golden age in TV terms is any given age when any given group of Channel 4 viewers — who, as a species, tend to disparage the medium — were still young enough not to mind it being known that they spent whole evenings at a time watching: Randall and Hopkirk Deceased or The Baibn.) In order to give some rationale to the tqning over of our most serious channel 49. old tosh for a whole evening each Saturday, the three episodes, all cho- sen from the same year each week, are interspersed with little compilations of con- temporary adverts or opening title sequences. The whole is held together with a series of explanatory annotations deliv- ered to the camera by Frank Muir.
There is, on the face of it, nothing wrong
with this. Since Channel 4 started it has included in its schedules re-runs of quaint old series — Bewitched, The Munsters, Car 54 Where Are You?, The Avengers — which otherwise would have been gathering dust in some TV syndication company's vault. And just as there is a certain literary type who will justify a collection of Mickey Spillane thrillers or Jilly Cooper bodice- rippers in the high-flown language of lit- crit, so there are those who would never watch a first-run sitcom but will set the video to record the whole Mork and Mindy canon as it is played out on Channel 4 at tea-time.
TV Heaven is different, and it is different because of Muir's interpolations. These are given to show that rather than watching an incredibly cheap evening's scheduling what we are doing is taking part in a sociological seminar. Last Saturday, for instance, we were treated to the first ever episode of Thick as Thieves, a comedy which ran for one brief season in 1974 and was never seen again. Listen, Muir bade us, to the way in which the writers exercise their skill in having the young Bob Hoskins and John Thaw affect middle-class language and use long words. This proves — well, I can't actually remember what it was meant to prove because by this time I was beating the screen with my head. What it actually proves is that good comedy writers have always put long words in the mouths of working-class characters because jokes told using only the unexpanded vocabulary of the inner city slum estate would sustain a sitcom for roughly four minutes flat.
Before he showed us the first episode of The Sweeney (then titled Regan) Muir treat- ed us to a lecturette on the then state of the Met under Robert Mark and Mark's effect on the various sections of Scotland Yard. Interesting enough though this was, nobody ever watched John Thaw as Jack Regan beating hell out of a suspect because they wanted an insight into police bureaucracy. We watched The Sweeney then for the reasons we watch it now: lots of chases, a solid plot and some fair-to- middling acting. If the show has any socio-
historical interest it is that Denis Waterman once wore flares, John Thaw had dark hair, Maureen Lipman wasn't Jewish yet and everyone smoked all the time.
I would be more than happy if Channel 4 devoted its every broadcasting hour to re- runs from the old days; I'd even watch Thick as Thieves a second time. But to pre- tend that the justification for repeating these shows is an entirely intellectual one is the sort of highbrow con trick that gives low-brow TV a bad name.
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