Television
Fun and Games
Wendy Cope
cp ageantry and fun in London and Edinburgh', announced Moira Stuart on News View, BBC2's subtitled round-up for the hard-of-hearing. This was Saturday and I was already feeling that I had had enough pageantry and fun to last me well into the 1990s.
It was largely my own fault, the result of being ludicrously over-conscientious in my first few days as a television critic. On Wednesday I had The Royal Wedding for breakfast, dinner and tea, although I knew perfectly well that it would be old hat (not many of those around on the day) by Friday week. I even missed the second half of Dallas in order to catch Jenny LeCoat's 'antidote to today's overdose of royal celebrations' on Diverse Reports (Channel 4). Ms LeCoat, a feminist comic, was a pleasant surprise — not at all the loud Julie
Walters-style figure I had been expecting — and she had some sound, if obvious, points to make. It was a good idea, for example, to remind us that nobody has seen fit to comment on the size of Prince Andrew's bottom. One reason for this may be that it is quite difficult to see Prince Andrew's bottom under the kind of clothes he wears in public. If there is one thing we can learn from the opposite sex, it is that an expensive jacket will conceal the worst.
On Thursday the video recorder arrived to give me back my freedom. Or so I thought but I should have known better. I had reckoned without the clause of Sod's Law stating that any machine required for urgent and immediate use will, if it should happen to be delivered on time, turn out to be faulty. So it's been an interesting week, in which I've met lots of new people, almost all of them video engineers.
The video did, in fact, work intermit- tently and for long enough to allow me to discover that the Commonwealth Games, although intolerably tedious if viewed in the normal way, could be made quite amusing by the use of the rewind/search button which causes everyone to swim or run backwards. It also has the advantage of cutting out the sound. During one of the few stretches I watched properly, the BBC commentator was holding forth about the tremendous spirit of fun that prevailed at the swimming baths. It was true, he admit-
ted, that the Australian captain had said his team would do anything they could think of to intimidate the Canadians. But it was all in good fun.
By Sunday evening I had given in to my inclination to ignore the rest of the fun, not to mention the pageantry, if there was any more of that in store. Instead I took the unusual step of switching on a religious broadcast and found myself, at last, watch- ing something delightful. Home on Sunday (BBC1) is a kind of holy Desert Island Discs, presented by Cliff Michelmore, and this week's subject was the poet Charles Causley. Causley's quietly humorous man- ner and his gift for narrative, refined over many years in a primary-school classroom, make him an ideal choice for a programme such as this. He has good taste in hymns, too, and my battered old Methodist Hymn Book came down from the shelves for the first time in months, as I joined in the rende,ring of the one we used to call at school 'Porn For All the Saints'. Ten minutes after the credits had rolled, I was still singing. Stimulating television.
Later the same evening I admired This is History, Gran (BBC1), a new play by Robert Holman, featuring an impressive performance by a young actor called Mar- tin Walker. He played a 14-year-old whose father had lost his job and whose older brother had committed suicide. Through a series of conversations with his grand- mother about her past, the younger son manages to gain a perspective that will help him to survive. Holman's themes — un- employment, adolescence — are familiar ones, offering a wealth of opportunity for sentimentality, cliché and the hammering home of the point. It was refreshing to see these temptations avoided and to observe that the result was genuinely moving.
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