Television
Rot at the Top
By PETER FORSTER
SINCE the BBC so often behaves —as many who have felt its clammy embrace can testify— like that branch of the Civil Ser- f vice which administers enter- iir tainment, some eccentric plan- ning is only to be expected.
But nowadays, what with so much sport at peak viewing hours, one begins to suspect that BBC Talks and Features are run by Peter Dimmock; and one way and another the present general, low-ebb lack of inspiration in BBC programmes suggests mildew where once the Grapes of Reith were stored.
One sad thing about this is the implicit mis- conception of what is involved in the fight for viewers. However much they may protest (and methinks they do protest too much), ITV is set up against the BBC; they may not want to put the BBC out of business, but they want it out of their particular field, rather as the Daily Mirror is all in favour of The Times existing so long as it stays out of the Mirror's field. It is surely no careless accident that ITV has now moved -its midweek play from Wednesday to Tues- day, thus spiking the BBC's guns on its regular drama night. And the way to cope with this situation is not to fill the screen with boxers and badminton players, or to organise amateur variety shows like Top Town which are even worse than professional variety shows, or to pretend that Horrocks fawning over Skorzeny amounts to a prestige programme, but to concentrate on the kind of quality work the BBC exists to provide. After all, the BBC has a loftier aim than, say, Associated-Rediffusion, which suffers from the handicap of being basically just one of British Electric Traction's lesser subsidiary companies, there primarily to make money. But where is it now, the BBC's glory and the dream? To be a bright,- ambitious BBC director in your early thirties must be one of the more frustrating current dilemmas, faced with years of waiting for all those nearer-the-top men and women to retire. Indeed, a main justification for any third network would be to give these younger people their heads: I would specify no senior executive to be over forty. When they reached forty, the BBC would always have them back.
One trouble is that quality has never neces- sarily been popular, as was illustrated yet again when the nationals howled gleefully and predict- 'ably that Vivien Leigh and The Skin of Our Teeth failed to get huge viewing figures—as if the Admass ever supported quality drama, how- ever eminent the players. Indeed, seemingly to escape the implication of this Sir John Gielgud took to the screen this week, not as Hamlet or Richard II or even John Worthing, but in A Day by the Sea, by the Tennent Laureate, N. C. Hunter, which, however impeccable the playing, remains among Sir John's most genteel and unad- venturous successes. (Another reason, incident- ally, why I still consider the Oliviers the leaders of their profession.) Of Miss Leigh's Sabina, Agate's tribute fifteen years ago still stands : 'an enchanting piece of nonsense-cum-allure, half , dabchick and half dragonfly. The best per- formance in this kind since Yvonne Printemps,' and for the rest one 'was left puzzled by those critics whose reaction to Wilder's brilliant piece was merely to assert that TV is best suited to realism, as if TV should therefore never try any- thing else. And the writing here was of a quality seldom found in the indigenous realistic TV theatre.
One of TV's enlivening qualities (usually ig- nored by those who see it as a dullard, levelling medium) is its power to arouse furious disagree- ment in the viewer. But the argument on-screen must be fairly staged. Last week, for instance, in the normally admirable Tonight, Francis Noel- Baker and Colin Legum were said to hold violently opposed viewpoints concerning Grivas. Now there are quite a lot of us who still consider Grivas a dirty murderer : not so, apparently, Mr. Noel-Baker or Mr. Legum, and thus no argument and precious little disagreement emerged. The point about this, please note, is not to do with which viewpoint is right, but whether the rele- vant viewpoints were expressed at all: a dis- cussion that superficially seems free and full may in fact amount to no contest. Again, in a recent Panorama, when discussing Cyprus, why put Noel-Baker, glib, slick, quick professional poli- tician that he is, up against a Tory who, possibly admirable elsewhere, showed as a true booby on the screen, arid an air marshal who went down in flames after an almost perfunctory burst of fire? The, balance of fire-power should be roughly equal, and even W. J. Brown, the old unsinkable cork himself, makes a better Tory spokesman than some of the regulars currently put up. Thus, with TV coverage of the election so much in the news, one might add a footnote to Mr. Grimond's article last week and remark that the real in- fluence lies first, not with those who speak, but with those who choose them. Ability on the screen can count for nothing against the fact that a secretary remembers your phone number, as many a puzzled and passed-over artist knows, and it is alway worth remembering that faces are seen mostly because the producer, not the public, asks for them. TV's real political power lies in the hands of those who select speakers. I tremble to think whose some of those hands are.
Random moments. Noele Gordon's casual, jolly lunch-time show (ITV), American style sen- sibly translated . . . Lady Lewisham, with that ineffable smile and enable manner, talking more tripe about the theatre in four minutes on A-Z than one would have thought possible . . . the Rosanna Ncri Show (ITV) featuring a busty Italian blonde with hair like a wimple, and a chorus of determined individualists, must recom- mend itself to connoisseurs of the awful, who if strong enough can stay tuned and get Late Extra, with its bland young men who try so hard and achieve all the sophistication of a suburban tennis club. ■
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