Television
Burnt-out
Richard Ingrams
Quality not quantity is going to be the theme of the Society for the Exter- mination of Russell Harty, an idea which I floated in the Spectator a fortnight ago. So far there have been only three appli- cations for membership — from `Giles', the great cartoonist, and Frank and Geraldine Norman, the distinguished art historians. All three seem very eager to participate, but I have not really had time yet to give the matter much thought.
The Harty phenomenon is only the most glaring outcome of the dearth of good interviewers on either channel. Frosty is obviously a 'burnt-out case' as a result, in my view, of all that transatlantic commuting which 1 am convinced leads eventually to a' sort of permanent jet-lag, the victim of which is never, quite sure where he is or what he is doing. The BBC's Ludovic Kennedy doesn't look too well either, but this may be because the Corporation makes him stay up so late at night to do his interviews. He is however the only person on either channel to whom Sir James Goldsmith will talk, as
he did on Monday. Sir James himself seemed subdued. Asked to give an exam- ple of what was wrong in Fleet Street he could only say that too many book reviewers write 'in' jokes. '1 sometimes wonder,' he said, 'what a lusty fellow in Yorkshire with his feet planted firmly on the ground makes of it all'. He went on to acclaim the spirit , of the Jubilee and and the singing of 'Land of Hope and Glory' that had taken place. Ludo allowed this to pass unquestioned. But I couldn't help wondering whether a lusty fellow in Yorkshire would think that `wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set' is an appropriate anthem for our times. Or was the cosmopolitan Sir James merely trying to reassure the Aitkens that he is just as much a patriot as the Sunday Express leader writer?
The telly adopts an uncritical attitude towards its elder brother the cinema mainly because the two enjoy what Sir James would call 'a symbiotic rela- tionship', but if The Arnhem Report (ITN) was intended to be a plug for the film A Bridge Too Far then it was a flop. The film has already received a bit of a drubbing from the critics, one of whom commented succinctly 'An Hour To Long'. I was not myself over-impressed by what we saw of the director Sir Richard Attenborough with his neat grey side-burns and unappealing pork-pie hat. He seemed to be acting a part just as much as anyone and I think he could have been more frank about the purpose of his star-studded cast, his line being that he had to have big 'superstars' like Dirk Bogarde and Robert Redford because the characters they were playing were superstars.
The whole exercise revealed without meaning to how bogus the cinema is compared with the actuality. And there are surely risks in allowing generals loose on a film set to advise on authenticity. Major General Frost, the man who actu- ally got to the bridge at Arnhem, was full of advice for Anthony Hopkins who was portraying him in the film. 'Don't run so fast,' he told him, 'you've got to show the Germans your contempt for danger'.
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