Television
Apr eg-Bomb
By CLIFFORD HANLEY THE post-bomb story is one of those irresistible temptations
to writers, and considering how closely we live with it now, the lure will probably in- crease. It will become a genre, like detective stories or his- torical romances or advertising dramas. It is as dangerous as any other temptation, of course. Ever since Wells, the basic idea of a world with society destroyed and a few resolute survivors has been so well examined that the situation itself is as much a cliché as the eternal triangle. The best
of it has been exploited by John Wyndhain in that best of all SF jobs, The Chrysalids, and it's hard to follow -that. It looks easy, but it's hard.
In A Deathly Hush on Sunday night (BBC) Robin Chapman decided not to try. His post- bomb community was only just out of the shelter, and it consisted of only two people in a blasted world. Having decided that their prin- cipal difficulty was going to be the retention of sanity, they embarked on an elaborate charade in which normal pre-bomb life was simulated in the splendid set of ruins. Hubby went to the office every morning and conducted fictitious business, wife pretended to keep house, with visits from the fictitious milkman and gasfitter and so on.
This was a most ingenious and worthy effort to revitalise the post-bomb legend, and the whim- sical couple were nicely drawn and resolutely played by Wendy Craig and Robert Stephens. But it didn't really work, because once the splendid oddity had worn off, nobody could really have cared what 'became of the two gib- bering love-birds. They were so exasperating, so nearly loony already, that it was just as well somebody machine-gunned them at the end.
All in all, ITV is still ahead of the BBC in those Sunday evening dramas. The magic hand of Newman has removed itself from ABC Television, but the magic itself appears to persist.
Wagger, of which I could see only the latter half, since the dramas still overlap (Still! Will these people never take a telling?), was absolutely delicious, a prole comedy with a shoemaker's shop and tame pigeons and all that nonsense. It had all the gutsy hilarity of an old Preston Sturges comedy.
It has been in fact a fairly rewarding week for drama, on the whole, and it may be co- incidence that my most amiable moments wqre provided by the commercial channel. Granada's latest item by cunning old Priestley was Ever
Since Paradise. A stagy play; the stagy feeling translated beautifully to the screen. An actor's play, and all six actors were clearly having the time of their lives, and so was 1.
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