Will Waspe
All those radio and television personalities who have established glowing reputations as inspired ad-libbers and spontaneous wits must feel sadly let down by Radio 4's Controller, Antony Whitby, who cheerfully blew the gaff to the Sunday Times's Peter Dunn this week. Whitby was able neatly to endorse Dunn's naughty article hinting that panel-show people aren't always as quick-thinking and percipient as they might seem. If they're actually slowthinking and thick, telling them the questions or whatever in advance is not only permissible but downright essential. There was never any showbiz mileage in blank faces and tied tongues, and showbiz is what panel games are about.
This has always been obvious enough to anyone who gave the mechanics of shows like What's My Line?, Call My Bluff, Does the Team Think?, Looks Familiar and My Word a second thought. (Competitive prestige quizzes like Brain of Britain and Top of the Form are a different matter, of course.) Nevertheless, there are plenty of red faces around the studios at Whitby's admission that he'd be "slightly surprised" if the producer of an entertainment panel show didn't liven it up by letting the participants know what was coming to them.
Title change
Opera buffs who have been wondering bemusedly, and not a little apprehensively, what to expect of a forthcoming addition to the Covent Garden repertoire — a new opera by Henze to a libretto by dramatist Edward Bond entitled The Privates — can relax. Someone at the Garden awoke belatedly to the inherent potentiality for irreverent ribaldry, and I hear the work has been retitled The General.
Occasional news
Despite (it would be uncivil to say because of) its including revue material by such journalistic sparks as.the Guardian's Nicholas de Jongh and the Evening Standard's Oliver Pritchett, and others of equal distinction, a show called Here Is the News at the New Chelsea Gallery Theatre Club has begun inauspiciously. It is supposed to be playing Thursday to Saturday, but don't bet on it. The show opened last Friday, but an intrepid colleague of Waspe's who turned up for the 8.30 edition on Saturday found it cancelled for lack of an audience, even though members of the cast ran desperately out into King's Road in an endeavour to drag in a few unsuspecting passers-by.
well up with the uncomfortably credible moods. I wonder for how long people are going to permit their atavism to destroy them. An extremely interesting double bill.
Horizon is a surprisingly critical stretch of realism from Hungary, a country which is revealed as having slums worse than most and the sort of generation gap/social alienation which the west might have considered its own. The flat black and white photography drives home the central European broodishness, the squalor of old factories, the characterless momentum of the system, and one cannot help feeling that if you are going to drop out there is no more depressing, juiceless place to do it than Budapest. Set in the present day, it looks like nothing so much as a relic from the Depression.
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