Tear drops
I am lachrymose. There is, I'm afraid, no denying it. I cannot say I discovered, but I can say I faced up to, that fact during the last six weeks when, each Sunday, I was a devoted watcher of BBC-TV's Sunday serial — Francis Hodgson Burnett's The Little Princess. I have always accepted that I cry when I watch, for the umpteenth-plus-one time The Dam Busters, or a Gary Cooper Western. But to cry six Sundays running, while watching the evolving tale of a little , girl at first rich, then poor and reduced to slaving away in the school kitchen, and suffering the lash of rage and dislike from nasty head mistress and nasty cook alike, while all the time maintaining an untouchable serenity, then becoming rich again through the intervention of an Indian nabob friend of her late father, well! But I can't deny it, and so have added a clean handkerchief to my usual equipment of cigarettes and a gin and tonic for those Sunday serials. Anyway, my own distressing propensity to the softest kind of sentimental collapse aside, I must congratulate the BBC boys for a serial that technically and artistically was totally true to its slight but haunting original. There have been signs that the Sunday serials, once uniformly excellent — remember The Count of Monte Cristo, and when are they going to re-run it? — have been going off. I liked Cranford, but Walter Scott's Woodstock was distinctly sluggish.
But one of the things for which the BBC deserve no praise at all is the rapidly declining prose quality in at least their early morning news bulletins. One's attention is drawn to this the more readily because the bulletins are sandwiched between the various slices of the excellent Today programme, itself distinguished by Robert Robinson's -delightful baroque monologues, which serve him as introductions to different items. The idea appears to be to give a relaxed air to the bulletins, so we get strings of sentences without verbs, sloppy syntax, and worse grammar. We had a reporter the other morning, for example who, in a piece about the rescue work going on at the scene of the Yorkshire mine disaster, referred to the spot where it was thought the trapped miners might be entombed as "the hopeful hole." Later he did nearly as well with the observation, "This imponderable will only become a fact later in the day." Lord Reith, thou shouldst be living at this hour. I note these things, by the way, partly because Kingsley Amis and I have been collecting them. The best one he came up with recently was from a piece by Katie Boyle, advising a girl who wanted to attract attention away from some less than pleasing part of her form to wear a piece of jewellery which would " detract " you attention. But that was TV Times.
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