Television
An opportunity missed
Martyn Harris
When I was a child we all watched the Queen's broadcast after Christmas dinner. For my mother and Aunt Irene it was a religious observance, for my father it was patriotic duty, while for us children it was simply hilarious. Would she actually say 'my husband and I' this time, and how many 'ones' was it possible for one to include in one sentence?
Now the hot breath of the Murdoch pack is on the Windsors' heels I am becoming a closet monarchist and hoping that Aitcharaitch might surprise us all one year with a snappy little feature, with flash direction by Ridley Scott and witty script by Alan Bennett. This year was the ideal chance, with the broadcast embargo broken by the Sun's 'journalistic enterprise' two days early. Aitcharaitch would scrap the whole show and have it re-shot on Christ- mas Eve with just enough tasty new morsels to leave Kelvin McKenzie with egg all over his face.
McKenzie deserved it as well, with all his nonsense about the Sun's duty to 'news', when the only thing newsworthy about his revelation was the fact that he had broken a useful convention (of embargo) which was only established in the first place to assist the media. As it turned out, of course, one missed one's boat yet again, and found oneself wheeled out to mouth one's standard pieties about Cheshire Homes and the Christmas Spirit, which one felt one had already read somewhere before. Not that one wasn't perfectly sin- cere, nor that one's words were any less than apt and true, but one did get the sen- sation one has felt more than once in this annus horribilis, that if one is to play this media game at all, one had better start playing it to win.
TV researchers have found that over the Christmas period audience IQ falls in direct proportion to the rise in TV gigawatts consumed, so that by Boxing Day evening one is quite unable even to guess whodunnit in a standard Miss Marple (The Mirror Crack'd, BBC 1) and one must turn to the annual programme of TV out-takes (Auntie's Bloomers, BBC 1, Sunday) pre- sented by some pattern-sweatered punster from Radio One. Terry Wogan it was this year, marooned on a styrofoam desert island, since the pretence behind the out- takes show is that broadcasters are embar- rassed by their blunders and wish to hide
them away. In fact, of course, the reverse is true. Just as theatrical luwies like to cackle over tales of missed cues and collapsing props, programme-makers are desperately proud of their bloomers and devote consid- erable resources to saving, collating — and probably confecting — them.
So, with critical faculties fully blunted by Nigel Mansell and The Darling Buds of May I laughed my head off at the Mastermind sequence where Philip Wharmby the cleri- cal officer from Solihull finds himself so overwhelmed by Magnus Magnusson and the black leather chair that he is unable to remember that he is in fact a clerical offi- cer from Solihull and is obliged to pass. Murray Walker was terrific as well, in his interview with some motor-racing magnate: 'Bernie,' he said, 'it is 15 years since you bought McLaren and you've had some good times and bad times. What do you remember best?' Well,' said Bernie, after a masterly pause for thought, 'I don't remember buying McLaren.'
Like the old, pre-Christmas Festival of Misrule when Lords would wait upon com- moners, the message of the out-takes show IS that the gods themselves are fallible and can come to earth to live among us. For a day or two a year the world may be turned on its head, but it is a calculated act of con- descension, which ensures that for the rest of the year it should remain the right way up.
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