Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
I DON'T know whether to thank Ned Sherrin, or to
damn him, for giving me back my Saturday nights. After four weeks of BBC 3, I no longer feel that I have to clock in to it auto- matically as part of my cul- tural sentry duty. I can even switch over now for a complete Braden without feeling those nagging worries that I have chosen the wrong party and ought to be back at Phil's place where the orgy is probably just about to begin; In the nights of Not So Much, I did make an occasional guilty, illicit raid across to commercial but I always back- checked with base, every minute on the minute. Not So Much, spread like workhouse marge over three evenings, was TW3 stretched, diluted, watered down for weaker stomachs. But the poisoned gold was still there in solution for those willing to sieve and pan for it—somewhere or other over the weekend there would be a shock to the system. And it was smarter, and smartinger, to have experienced it direct from your own set than to have it transmitted to you only through newspaper reports or second-hand gossip. To some extent, the feeling that BBC 3 is the cheap, abridged, schools edition of its two predecessors is subjective—our hides have grown tougher rather than their darts become blunter.
Bernard Levin is not there any more to call the Prime Minister a cretin or be (almost) thumped by the angry husband of e panned actress. He is processing round the globe in the comfort of an airborne litter, at the cost of the Daily Mail, cabling back misquotations from The Hunting of the Snark datelined Tehran, and tributes to his mother's cooking from Tel Aviv, in a lordly manner which seems calculated to show Associ- ated Newspapers that satirists laugh at accounts departments. But even if he were in the team, it would be difficult to imagine what he could do now to snatch the Sunday paper headlines—ex- cept for being publicly received into the Roman Catholic faith, before the cameras, by St. Nor- , man St. John Stevas, of Blessed Memory. They've gone about as fer as they can go unless they are willing to plunge over into old music-hall obscenity, impure and simple.
Nevertheless, it can hardly be denied that BBC 3, though only a third of the length of Not So Much, seems longer and thinner than its fore- runners—a kind of marathon bore-in for in- somniacs who are only bludgeoned off to bed by the National Anthem. I say this with sorrow and without sharing the unholy joy of my friends at Private Eye who cannot help celebrat- ing the slow death of rival snook-cockers and puritan-baiters. I love a good laugh almost above any pleasure—and all the best jokes are violent, dramatic, tasteless, basically serious, brutally yoking incompatible ideas and emotions into one harness, sparking a painful electric flash across the semantic gap between the sacred and the pro- fane. My complaint is that the eccentricity is now so predictable, the non-conformism so carefully modish, the radicalism so knowingly shown by making bigoted remarks with one eyebrow lifted. There is rarely more than one good sketch in the course of eighty minutes and even here the double-bluff gag runs according to a set routine. So that in a funny, tough playlet about Presi-
dent Johnson's operation, , you knew down in your little toe that the surgeon in the Ku Klux Klan hood was bound to be a Negro and a Jewish Negro at that. BBC 3 is the only place on any television channel where you can be sure of a string of racial sneers about "niggers,' blackies,' `wogs,' nig-nogs,' ten in a bed and cooking in the lavatory, all officially robbed of offence by the constant reminder that only really progressive fellows dare risk such possibilities of being mis- understood. The new and valuable contribution of Mr. Sherrin's TW3 was that it provided docu- mentary satire for the first time for a mass audience. It named names, it quoted sources, it minced people but not words. Now a good deal of the material is barely even topical and it is swamped in a thick tide of treacly sentimentality. A song about Rhodesia suggests our choice is be- tween callous white slobs and lovable black babies. Oscar Wilde, in a poem full of misquota- tions and inaccuracies (and noticeably inferior to John Betjeman's threnody o. n the same theme), is paraded as a Christ-like hero, persecuted by society because his epigrams offended the Estab- lishment. In so far as there is a shock element'left in this low-voltage weekly charade, it is an un- dercurrent of low camp composed of the familiar contrast between tough, deep-voiced lady-singers, lithe, tight-buttocked boy-dancers, and pay-off lines turning monotonously on excretion and castration.
The talky-talk side of the show also seems regularly under-proof with only two moods— gloomily taciturn or feverishly gigglish. While the audience appears to have been picked from the most tiresome kind of exhibitionist, with-it snig- gerers, such as once demonstrated their guffaw- ing sophistication at the Royal Court or the old Establishment nightclub, showing oft their un- shockability at every undergraduate rudery. The fact that I share most of their prejudices does not make me regret the less their presence as a claque to sneer at the opinions I do not share. The chair- man, Robert Robinson, tersely said as much the other night but then was obliged by the conven- tions of the programme to go on to introduce, with an approving grin, just the sort of school- boy item he had been criticising. The discussions invariably shy away from any serious clash of ideas preferring always the glib, meaningless, pseudo-witticism, the tenth-told, long-antholo- gised anecdote, the showy, amateurish display of TV temperament. There is little attempt to pick subjects from the news but simply to dig out some cantankerous cranky opinionator and bait him with a trio of experts. A producer who wanted to break new earth along this well-trod- den path from Table Talk to Three After Six could surely try providing us with a short factual prologue, giving that information on the subject which is not disputed, potting the theories which have been advanced in the past, and then allow- ing the talkers to pick the evidence to suit their case.
BBC 3 is, I'm afraid, very nearly a worked- out seam. The only direction left for it to go is towards fantasy and few television producers are so well-equipped as Ned Sherrin to pioneer this trail. My main pleasure now is his almost abstract use of dancers and comedians in the background.
I look forward to it becoming an eighty-minute musical, say once a fortnight, with elaborate, imaginative use of all television's tricks, As an alternation of satirical sketches and salty talkers, it has become-a parody of the great days of its
ancestors. I would like to remember them as they were and not overlaid with the remnants, hard- working and hopeful though they be, of a formula which has lost its magic ingredient-- novelty.
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