Television
Cold and frosty
Richard Ingrams The Duke of Edinburgh in the BBC God Slot on Sunday seemed to offer an op- portunity for some satire. He was being in- terviewed at Buckingham Palace by the BBC's religious correspondent Gerald Priestland who now cultivates a rather Pickwickian appearance complete with spectacles and benevolent smile. What prompted this unusual encounter was the publication of A Question of Balance, a
collection of the Duke's speeches, put together with the- encouragement of his friend Revd Michael Mann, Dean of Wind- sor, a cleric who once was described by a bishop of my acquaintance as 'energetic, ambitious and stupid — a fatal combina- tion'. His Royal Highness looked thoughtful and made some references to Karl Marx and his experience with training dogs and horses but try as I might I could not glean anything at all from his remarks. He reminded me of the men who used to come and address the school on speech day, upright figures of soldierly bearing, full of ideas about leadership with occasional references to the Almighty thrown in for good measure.
Similarly, in an earlier programme on Sunday called Writers and Places (BBC 2) Jan Morris talked about Wales with the help of some very beautiful shots of the Welsh countryside. The film rolled, Miss Morris spoke fluently and with assurance, but somehow it all left me completely cold. I think the truth about this sort of topographical film is that it has to be very specific, both in relation to buildings and people. It's no use just showing a lot of nice pictures and waffling away about roots and so forth. In the event we learned little about either Wales or Jan Morris.
The adapter, Alan Seymour, and the pro- ducer, Anne Head, were both involved in one of the best recent TV dramatisations of a novel, L. P. Hartley's Eustace and Hilda, shown a few years ago on the BBC. Apart from one glaring error of taste in the final episode, this was an altogether outstanding effort. I therefore made a point of watching Frost in May (BBC 2) which has been done by the same team. It is based on four books by the late Antonia White, the first of which describes life in a girls' convent school some time before the first world war. The atmosphere of childhood, and the il- logical anxieties that affect children, was something that L.P. Hartley understood very well but I did not feel that Antonia White had the same sort of intense insights. Although the Convent of the Five Wounds was meticulously recreated with some very good performances among the nuns, I was not gripped as I ought to have been. Only one scene when the new girl, about to go to sleep, saw the black shadow of a nun hover- ing over her cubicles brought back the awful loneliness of the first days of boar- ding school life.
With tickets selling for £50 a time, the BBC could, I suppose, claim that Saturday's Vladimir Horowitz recital on BBC2 was worth the licence fee for a whole year. Personally I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to pay out this kind of money ex- cept for purely snobbish reasons. Mr Horowitz is one of those pianists who Humphrey Burton would call 'legendary'. That usually means that the man is very old and rarely if ever appears in public, neither point being necessarily proof of great musi- cianship. Horowitz, who gave a 15-minute interview with an unseen party (could it have been Burton?), seemed a faintly com-
ical figure who, with his deep bass voice and outsize bow-tie, would not have been out of place in a circus. But he was also too pleas' ed with himself to be a sympathetic figure, and his playing was not inspired, though technically brilliant. I noted that the BBC did not stay to let us hear all the encores, though of course, had it been snooker, they would have stayed there all night.
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