Television
Criticisms
Richard In grams Anthony Howard has been doing a series of biographical portraits for the BBC spread over many years. His subjects have almost all been politicians as politics is the game Howard — an inveterate observer of the ups and downs of those who aspire after power — knows and understands best. On Sunday he ventured out of politics into the the theatre with a 're-assessment' of Ken- neth Tynan. This was a less successful ef- fort as you never felt that Howard was sure of his ground. Besides which, Tynan, who died in 1980, is already a name that has fad- ed very rapidly. Few people in their twenties would have much idea who he was. Such is the fate of critics who unless they do more than describe the passing show are doomed to quick obscurity. As a theatre critic, which was where his talents lay, Tynan was adept at putting performances into words. A witty writer with a good turn of phrase, he described Noel Coward, for example, as
'cooing like a baritone dove', which is quite a good description of the master's voice. But there was nothing in this programme to suggest that Tynan did anything much more than write about performances. He was too dazzled by stars to say anything about plays, or Shakespeare, or the great men who made the stars possible.
Tynan was the Observer's theatre critic for nine years and then made the fatal mistake of moving to the other side of the footlights and joining Laurence Olivier as his right-hand man at the National Theatre. Howard glossed over Tynan's role in the in- cident of The Soldiers, Rolf Hochhuth's play which accused Churchill of murdering the Polish war-time leader General Sikor- ski, but it proved that whatever concern Tynan had once had with truth or honesty had long since left him. As far as I can tell at the time he seemed to go to pot in every sense, ending up as the debauched looking impresario in Oh! Calcutta laughing all the way to the bank. Some kind of analysis of this decline would have made an interesting programme but there seemed to be little awareness by Howard or his contributors that there had been a decline in the first place. Jonathan Miller compared Tynan, idiotically, to Havelock Ellis while other friends like Paul Johnson and Tom Stop- pard cherished the memory of a very wonderful human being. The one person who would have been interesting on the subject, Laurence Olivier, did not appear.
Another famous Observer critic who gave it all up is Clive James, who was also by chance on the telly on Sunday starring in an LWT documentary called Clive James Live in Las Vegas. James, who was not ap- pearing live, showed an awareness at the beginning of the programme that making a documentary for television about Las Vegas was not exactly an original thing to do, but there was nothing very much in what followed to suggest that James's pro- gramme was any different from the others. Apart from the Australian accent and the wisecracks it could have been Alan Whicker.
Even Kenneth Tynan would have found it hard to say anything very witty about
Skirmishes (ITV) a new play by Catherine Hayes. Lady playwrights like Ms Hayes and Lady Rachel Billington, to name only two, have a rather morbid interest in death and dying. Ms Hayes's effort concerned two sisters quarrelling angrily across the bed of their dying and, for most of the play, un- conscious mother. The major mistake was to have the mother on the set because you kept looking at her to see if she was about to come to. I went off for a bath in the mid- dle of it and so missed the old girl's two or three lines in which, so I was reliably in- formed, she gave details of her will. For some extraordinary reason the Daily Telegraph announced that this was to be a 'very funny' play. But the only laugh I got was when the mother finally died.
Previous page
