Television
No laughing matter
Wendy Cope
f that's what people laugh at,' I said to my playwright friend, 'you may as well give up.' We were on our way out of the National Theatre, together with an audi- ence that had responded with loud hilarity to every low bit of comic business put in by the actors, while ignoring most of the verbal wit in their lines. This phenomenon Often depresses me in the theatre. Studio audiences on television can be depressing too, though it is at least possible to imagine that the real cause of their mirth is someone at the front holding a large Placard that says LAUGH. Do they still do that, I wonder?
The audience for Tarrant on TV (ITV, 10.05pm, Sunday) sounded very much amused by the following things, which occurred in clips from American shows: a Poverty-stricken widow saying that she was thinking of selling one of her eyes, a Policeman describing how he was injured by a gunman, a one-legged man doing a dance routine on a talent show. Well, Perhaps there is something a bit funny about a one-legged man tap-dancing.
Tarrant on TV is a slight improvement Oil its predecessor, Floyd on TV, even though the presenter made some bad jokes and, worse, wiggled two pairs of fingers to Indicate inverted commas. A few months ago I read a newspaper piece about this gesture, saying, rightly, that it is very irritating and, wrongly, that it is new. Fingers pretending to be inverted commas have been making me want to scream for the best part of a decade. If anyone I'm fond of uses their fingers in this way, I beg them to desist, so we can continue to be friends. Why is it so infuriating? Maybe because there are verbal ways round the problem — expressions such as 'so-called'
and the finger-wiggler hasn't bothered to find one.
It's unfair to pick on Chris Tarrant over this because you see it all the time. He is a reasonably intelligent man presenting a downmarket programme, which he man- aged to redeem by making one or two serious and useful points. American televi- sion, he pointed out, is streets ahead of us in its treatment of the physically and mentally handicapped. There's a series about a teenage boy with Downs Syn- drome. The actor who plays him has Downs Syndrome himself and has won nationwide respect and popularity. The programme featuring the one-legged dancer, by the way, is about 30 years old.
This week's South Bank Show (ITV, 10.35pm, Sunday) was about Christopher Hogwood and Haydn symphonies. The television people arranged for the conduc- tor and his orchestra, the Academy of Ancient Music, to stay in the Esterhaze Palace in Hungary, where Haydn lived and worked for a long time. For the perform- ances, they wore long evening dresses or white tie and tails, which probably wasn't popular with the male musicians but lent something to the atmosphere. As they tootled away on their authentic instru- ments, the word 'civilised' came to mind rather a lot. Towards the end of the programme, Robbins Landon, the world's leading Haydn scholar, said of the occa- sion, 'All the civilised quality came out in a way I'd never heard it before'. Good. Got it right.
Of course, to enter fully into the civilised spirit of the thing, you would have needed to be dressed up yourself and sitting on an 18th-century chair in the same room. Watching it on a little screen, whilst sprawled on a sofa in bedroom slippers, surrounded by a thousand dishevelled newspaper-sections, wasn't the same. But I enjoyed it and I'm afraid some of this week's money will go on compact discs.
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