Personality Parade
IT must not be supposed that a television critic watches his screen, afternoon in, evening out, throughout the week. If he did, he would soon cease to be a television critic and become instead a nervous wreck in heavy horn-rimmed spectacles. Nor shall it be supposed that this particular critic switches crazily from Channels 1 to 5 to Channel 8, then, with a last convulsive tremor, on to Channel 9, for the simple reason that he is neither physically nor geographically equipped to do so. In other words, my set receives the BBC alone. In consequence, the BBC alone will be subjected to my criticisms in the coming month. The chances are it will survive them, but I place the fact on record none the less.
This week, l decided to have a sort of private personality parade and to choose as my runners Gilbert Harding, Major Lloyd George and Mrs. Gerald Legge. On form, of course, before the 'off,' Gilbert Harding was the favourite. while Major Lloyd George was an unknown quantity with an impressive record in another sphere, like a hurdler taking to steeplechasing for the first time, and Mrs. Gerald Legge was a' sort of devil-may-care amateur rather in the tradition of those occasional marquises from the Iberian peninsula who fly over to Aintree for the Grand National only to make a crash- landing somewhere in the vicinity of Becher's Brook. But form can be misleading on occa- sions. This was one.
Gilbert Harding came on for a quarter of an hour on a wet afternoon with a small dog called Soufflé or Truffle or Shampoo, or words to that effect, and talked about the dog for a short time and then, no doubt in order to balance things up, since the dog was by the nature of things unable to talk about him, he did the job himself. First of all, he told us that there had been a lot of fuss in the papers about him having taken off his coat in What's My Line? on the previous Monday night. I hadn't noticed much fuss myself, having, per- haps unforgivably, gone for the more trivial news about Cyprus and Mr. Malenkov and so on and so forth, but I took his word for it and was prepared to leave it at that. But Mr. Harding wasn't. At the end of an interminable quarter of an hour, which reminded me of nothing so much as an election speech by a political stooge who knows that the candidate is an hour behind schedule, he took up this monumental theme again and launched into a tirade against what he called 'those senile delinquents' who wrote in to the BBC about his braces, evidently little realising that if it wasn't for those very people creating the 'Gilbert Harding legend' and thereby main- taining the Gilbert Harding waistline, those braces might, perhaps, have more to do.
Then came my second runner. Major Lloyd George, presiding over a Conservative Party Brains Trust composed of four MPs (3. m; 1, f) who fed him with questions, which he answered with dignity and charm. Only twice did he descend to those niggling and irrelevant criticisms of his opponents which always put me in mind of those powerful lines of nursery dialogue : 'Janie. you've broken the saucer.' 'Well, Sarah broke one yesterday.' Otherwise he sat, looking delightfully like the late Leslie' Banks. toying with his spectacles and, ever and again. displacing a lock of grey hair over his right ear which, I'll warrant, every woman viewer in the country, to whatever party she belonged. would willingly have smoothed hack into place. Moreover, his four companions looked both human and friendly so that, all in all, the programme was the most successful in that line that I have seen.
And then came Mrs. Gerald Legge, at home to Berkely Smith. I found her rather sweet. She told us that she adored Mummy and Gerald (in that order) and the children, and that she was very friendly with the Super- intendent of Battersea Power Station; Gerald, she told us, had 'a date.' but the BBC. lest we should be disappointed, flashed a 'still' of him, somewhat in the likeness of Lawrence of Arabia looking for a runaway camel, onto the screen. The Superintendent of Battersea Power Station, alas, we never saw.
And my winning personality? The Major, by a distance, Second. Mrs. Gerald Legge. And Gilbert Harding also ran.
WILLIAM DOUGLAS HOME
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