Television
Home movie
Clive Gammon
Now what am I supposed to say about David Bailey's home movie, Warhol (ITV, as you cannot help being aware)? Not having, like almost everyone else in the trade, seen the preview, I surmounted considerable difficulties not to miss it when it went out on Tuesday evening. Where I was staying, the hotel housekeeper arranges for a television set in one's room "on request" and never before has one failed to materialise. But "Sorry, sir, every single one is out," was the response I got as early as lunch time. Thank you, Mr McWhirter. And so it was in the uncongenial context of a crowded TV lounge that your devoted critic took in the programme. Well, half-an-hour of it, anyway, because, for once in accord, the corps de critics had it bang to rights. This was the most leaden-footed of films I've seen since Neil Armstrong stomped over the moon.
Not good enough just to say that, though, is it? So let me explain that people who clearly have great difficulties in communication are inevitably boring. The slow, painful D-stream constructions, the inadequate vocabulary, the dying-fall voices — Warhol's poor little play-group made me sad. I see now that Mr McWhirter was trying to help these people. He didn't want them to expose themselves so cruelly, and I'm not talking about the celebrated tit bit — no tit-bit this, though seeing it has caused me to ponder on Elkan Allen's claim that Brigid's breast was the ugliest he'd ever seen. What has he been doing on Sunday evenings when they've been showing all those documentaries about New Guinea? One must be fair.
I find it hard, though, to be fair to Andre Previn, who communicates only too well. Having fun with long-dead minor composers is fair sport, I suppose, but in Fidelis Finhe, Where Are You Now? (BBC 1), Previn's nudging, intimate style as he patronised his sycophantically simpering audience come close, now and then, to transfiguring him into a rich man's Liberace. And the mid-Atlantic parallel came out also in the Readers Digest diction (" Look, I'll tell you what, let's play a game . ."; "Since, oh, if you have to put a date on it, 1901.")
" The timing of a chat-show veteran," said the Times critic approvingly. I suppose so and it was certainly a mildly amusing idea to dig out such funny names as Erich Wolfgang Komgold and Xavier Scharwenka and ham up, among other works, the latter's piano concerto. You can have similar fun with nineteenth-century poets like Ebenezer Elliot. Maybe we could be treated to side-splitting programmes .on Sir Samuel Ferguson and there's a laugh or two in Austin Dobson yet. But I found Previn's treatment similar to duck soup — too oleous to be appetising.
And so, with relief, let us turn to a goody and pay tribute to Dave Allen on the occasion of the last of his Allen at Large series on BBC 2. The 'At large' bit I'm not sure about. Apart from the long and hilarious sequence of the priests' strike, the filmed sketches have a tendency to fall, if not flat, then a bit crooked. But Allen alone, sitting in his chair and talking straight into camera, is a benison, funnier than anyone else on the box.
There is a simple reason for this. His stories are funner than anyone else's,
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