Television
Street ahead
Wendy Cope
0 ne disadvantage of working at home is the narrow range of newspapers and magazines available on the premises. In the staffroom at school, where absolutely nothing was laid on free, you could at least borrow someone else's Daily Mail or Cos- mopolitan. The only downmarket reading- matter lying around here is TV Times, which I feel obliged to buy for professional reasons. The idea is to look through the programme schedules and plan one's view- ing. There is no need at all to read the articles but I usually do.
A recent feature on Gail Tilsley's love- life interested me so much that I have been revisiting Coronation Street (ITV, 7.30 p.m., Monday and Wednesday). The fea- ture revealed something that I would have known already if I read the tabloids. Gail's husband Brian died six months ago. She is now having a steamy affair with a young lad called Martin, the one who used to work in the café. Her Catholic mother-in- law is up in arms about it and the scandal is about to break. Elsewhere in the street, Mavis's husband has begun drinking and Baldwin's factory is being demolished. On Sunday afternoon I watched the omnibus edition (2 p.m.) and found myself spell- bounc. Coronation Street is really good at the moment. Years ago I used to be a regular viewer and I'm afraid I may be tempted to take up the habit again.
Very many years ago — though this is now hard to credit — I used to enjoy watching Juke Box Jury. The programrue has just been revived on BBC 2 (6.40 p.m., Sunday) with Jools Holland in the chair. All the people I've ever known called Jools have been female and it was something of a surprise to learn, not long ago, that this one is a man. On Sunday he wore a dark suit with a dark shirt and a hideous tie, which must, I suppose, be the height of fashion. As a presenter he's not bad at all — pretty low-key, with a flat sort of voice. He doesn't bounce. The panel of pop celebrities wasn't bad either and I quite liked some of the songs — mostly the ones that were condemned as plastic, poppy and disposable. The studio audience comprised a conventional-looking bunch of people, not all of them young. When they liked a record, many of them 'jiggled about'. This was much commented on by the panel and taken as a sign that the record in question was likely to be a smash, That's as may be, `I trust that you are not adopting Greene policies.' but I don't believe the audience would have jiggled and done the hand-jive if they could have seen how utterly ridiculous they looked. Perhaps they'd been told to do it by someone who thought that rows of people sitting still wouldn't be good televi- sion.
Anyway, they forfeited my sympathy at the end of the programme by giving noticeably less applause to one of the jurors than to all the others. The person they didn't like was a beautifully painted young man with a camp manner, whose comments, in my view, had been rather amusing. It was a nasty moment and I wished the sprinkler system would open up and drench the lot of them.
This week's serious viewing was Red Dynasty (BBC 2, 8.15 p.m., Saturday), the programme about China, which has already received a lot of attention from other critics. It was a good straightforward history lesson with a good straightforward reporter, Edward Behr. Programme two, which goes out this Saturday, deals with the period between the death of Mao and the tragic events of this summer. I think it will be worth watching.
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