Television
Barrel's bottom
Clive ,Gammon
The Operation, BBC l's offering on
Monday night in its pretentiously labelled 'Play for Today' series, was as insulting a piece of meretricious rubbish as I have seen in a long and weary while. And I would like to make it entirely clear that this verdict has nothing to do with two sequences which might have outraged more delicate sensibilities than mine: Tom Kempinski, as a dropped-out don, grunting and chuckling on the lavatory; and the mimed blow-job on the planning officer who had to be compromised. At least the latter provided the only moment of light relief (quite unintentionally — I'm sure) in the play, as the camera understandably
restricted itself to the homely features of the council official which, as they
changed, reminded me irresistibly of the wrapper they used to put on Fry's chocolate cream bars showing a small boy's face running the gamut of pleasure from anticipation to, what was it, repletion? satisfaction? I can't recall it now.
No, that wasn't the trouble. It lay in the cheap and shallow treatment of the theme
which had to do, with the corrupting influence of money and, according to Radio Times, was "a criticism of the morality of people in that sort of world," a sentence floppy enough to match the play. It wasn't a criticism at all but a jejune fantasy of power and wealth. George Lazenby, playing the part of a property dealer with all the life and conviction of a garden gnome, coveted Maureen Shaw, wife of Maurice Roeves, who played Ted Hardin, the grocer. Swanning about the motorways, sometimes in his Jensen, sometimes in his Rolls, the evil property man got not only the grocer's wife but his shop as well, pulled down in a redevelopment scheme. This naturally angered the grocer who ferociously gunned down the adulterous pair the very minute they managed to slip into their costumes for a sado-masochistic romp (red garters and a black corset for her, and SS uniform for him). Meanwhile the dropped-out don had been hovering on the edge of the action all the time — the straight guy, disapproving of Lazenby but stringing along for old time's sake. At the very end, and quite without explanation, he appeared to inherit the Jensen and left us with a flip message about the world we live in. Nice to have it pointed out because I wouldn't have recognised it.
Desperate to pile on the trappings, Roger Smith, the playwright, threw in a suburban wife-swapping party and a trip to the west of Ireland to the tycoon's super-conversion of a house on the coast which gave an opportunity for a colourful travelogue made up, it looked to me, from reject footage from Kerrygold butter commercials. A Christmas trip, it was, and the trees all along the roads t'ney travelled were in full green leaf. Of course they were Irish trees.
Why not just laugh the whole thing off as a silly piece of nonsense? Why feel angry? Because this was put out by the BBC as a serious treatment of serious themes, a 'play for today,' God help us. In this context I found it insulting. The more so, perhaps, since the previous evening I had watched the same channel's tribute to John Grierson with its sequences from Drifters. He made the film in the 1920s. It is still more meaningful than the seventyfive minutes of pretention that The Operation was.
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