Television
A long way from Long Bow
Wendy Cope
0 n Wednesday evening I accidentally switched on a party political broadcast. I think it is safe to assume that nobody, except the MPs involved and their mothers, ever does this on purpose. We have to be tricked into it by the ploy of having the news begin late. It always seems a rotten trick to me, especially when I have hurried my bath or left my desk in mid- sentence in order to catch the news head- lines. One thing I will not do, in the circumstances, is sit down and pay atten- tion to what the politicians are trying to tell me. However, since it isn't worth switching off again, the occasional banality does register as one potters around the room trying to kill five minutes. I am now aware that the Labour Party wants the nation's children to have 'education of a high quality'. Jolly good. Perhaps I should listen to some Alliance and Conservative broad- casts, just to make sure that they are not promising to provide low-quality schooling for the next generation.
I was hoping that when News at Ten eventually came on the air I would find out who was on the Booker shortlist, announced earlier that day. I should have known better. If I had felt any curiosity about the result of the football match between Derby and West Bromwich, it would, of course, have been satisifed. There were also items about chess and snooker but the growing popularity of literature as a spectator sport has not, apparently, been recognised at ITN.
Saturday Review (BBC2) concocted a nice little feature on this phenomenon from interviews with two bookmakers who have set odds on the shortlisted novels. `Kingsley Amis. What a star eh?' com- mented Ron Pollard of Ladbrokes. 'Third name nominated. Must nearly be his turn to go past the winning-post first.' Kazuo Ishiguro's book is 'very much a thorough- bred', according to Graham Sharpe of William Hill, while Timothy Mo's is 'an out-and-out stayer' and Paul Bailey has written 'a sprinter of a book'. Saturday Review itself is a bit of a sprinter, racing from item to item at a pace that reminds you how difficult it must be to fit every- thing in. But I like its mixture of snippets and longer features and I am glad it is back.
Another highlight of Saturday evening, also on BBC2, was the first of Carma Hinton's three films about the village of Long Bow in China. Carma Hinton is the daughter of William Hinton, whose book Fanshen is an account of the same village in the revolutionary era. David Hare's play, based on the book, was shown on televi- sion a few years back. It seems odd that neither the Radio Times nor the BBC press information mentioned Hinton's book or Hare's play. The women of Long Bow were the subject of Saturday's film, enti- tled Small Happiness. It opened with the voice of an elderly man who told us, 'To have a son is a big happiness. To have a daughter is a small happiness.' Throughout the film, the brief appearances of men were especially telling. One old horror recalled a time when 'If I got into a fight with a woman I'd just stamp on her feet. She'd fall over in pain. She couldn't win.'
`Because of her bound feet?'
`Yes. It would hurt so much she'd have to sit down. That's how it was in the old days.' The memory caused him to cackle with delighted laughter.
Nowadays things have improved. Women are allowed big feet and some say in the choice of their husbands. Young wives are no longer virtual prisoners in their husbands' family homes and many of them go out to work. A workshop manager explained that he employed an all-female staff because men found it difficult to put up with the conditions. 'Men can't stand the confinement,' he said. 'They feel im- prisoned.'
Fascinating though the programme was, I felt some uneasiness as I sat and watched it. Some of the villagers were extremely unguarded in front of the camera — one woman even spoke about smothering a baby at birth. Did she understand that she was telling millions of people? And if most of them live a very long way from Long Bow, does that make it all right?
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