Television
The Plug Ugly
By PETER
FORSTER IT has long been an open secret in the theatre that an ailing show is best revived by sonic television extract. Three months' extra lease of life is said to be the average benefit bestowed by half an hour on the screen from a show which (its sponsors would claim) is bringing the best of the West End to the world beyond, but which is in fact almost always so stage-managed that, either by choosing the best items, or a middle act ending in a dramatic query, viewers will be tempted to go along to the theatre to see how it finishes, or trusting that the rest will all be as good. This kind of artless-artful confidence trick has been much practised by the BBC, and it shows the Corpora- tion at its most blandly inconsistent.
For example, the other night they offered an extract from Living for Pleasure, at the Garrick Theatre. No attempt was made to re-create it for the different medium, the cameras were just lined up in the dress circle, with results that did justice neither to TV nor to the revue; whilst any- body trotting out the old one about a fillip to the live theatre would have to explain what service was done to a mildly entertaining little show by light- ing conditions which made it look like the tattiest end-of-pier offering. However, the management was doubtless grateful, the more so as potential customers were given all appropriate information short of the actual seat-prices and bus routes; business is probably now thriving. In a 'word, Living for Pleasure had received a plug.
Now there are clearly many variations on the plug, direct and indirect. Equally much nonsense is talked about the BBC being uncommercial (as though In Town Tonight has not long been the outpost of commercial radio in this country . .
or above trade (as though BBC Publications was not successfully in business to the tune of a million pounds' profit a year); and the BBC, as much as if not more than ITV, has to cope with the prob- lems raised by back-slapping (`So good luck to your record, number LP 123! '), and advertisement CI'm sure viewers will enjoy your play as much as I did !'), and those venial plug-pressures which, at lowest, have been experienced by many who have done pop record programmes, but which are no less to be met on more elevated levels where dog don't eat dog, or at least knock a brother-dog's book.
In these matters the BBC's attitude is weirdly ambivalent, as any week's viewing and listening will show. Thus Mecca Dancehalls, with whose co-operation that spectacular and excellently staged BBC Dancing Club show is produced, get prominently plugged, by name; whereas BBC newsreels are absurdly cautious in the use of such trade names. I can offer a small personal experience in this connection : not long ago, I was forced to excise Raymond's name from a little broadcast about his hair-fashion show, though the tone of the talk was hardly calculated to whip up trade for his salon—yet the same week he himself appeared for a large fee on BBC TV to demon- strate these same creations! I ventured to write to the Director-General, suggesting inconsistency, and eventually received back a letter of classic pomposity from some secretary to the effect that there is no `royal road' in these matters, and pro- fessing no surprise `that in one programme a name should be cut out and in another programme it should be given.' (0 Sir Ian, what letters are written in your name!) All of which helps to explain why, in this respect, an irritating feature of current BBC viewing is a patent lack of common sense on the one hand, and a quite excessive tolerance of veniality on the other. Here the BBC's holier- tlin-thou attitude is merely full of holes.
But last week the BBC's honour was upheld by Aidan Crawley (albeit over-fortissimo in narra- tion) and de Lotbiniere with their programme on India in The Inheritors series; just about the best thing of its sort I have ever seen, and worth ten articles on India in the quality, newspapers de- voured by those people who still ask one what TV really has to offer them. First-class interviews with a well-judged cross-section, frcirn a pro-Com- munist student unable to credit Soviet oppression, to Nehru and that intelligence of his for which luminous was almost visibly the only adjective. However else the others work out in this finely conceived series (aiming to judge what the post- war Commonwealth has done with what we gave back), this was masterly.
On a more overtly political topic, I would have thought that most viewers must have found the big Labour appeal last week drearily ineffective. (1 refer here, of course, to manner not matter) All severe, Big Brother close-ups with worried eYes belying baby-kissing words, and none of that false but telling air of relaxation which distinguishes tile Prime Minister's television appearances; these grow so frequent he must surely soon be offered hit own 'Saturday Spectacular.' But at least 14' Bevan was on better ground then when trying°. form a mutual admiration coven with Somerset' Maugham on Panorama's much-trailed and almcel pathetically misconceived interview, whereby 011/ morning at the Dorchester (note plug) he was se posed to play tubby mongoose to the `elderil party's' amiable cobra.
Not the least depressing thing in televisial nowadays is the apparent decline of technical expertise in many programmes. Last Saturdais, old Warner Bros. social-conscience gangster epic, Angels With Dirty Faces, showed up for sheet bad movie-making the preceding Highway Patrot a sub-standard thriller series of Westerns with ears instead of horses, and that fine actor Broderielt Crawford having to affect a flabby dynamism 115il he huffs and puffs about as a police officer. WI technical skill is certainly abundant in the ne'v Invisible Man series, in which Wells's scientist has now become a private eye invisible to the naked ditto. What Equity thinks of this no-actor ploy must remain ironical conjecture, but there is surely an overwhelming absurdity in the fact of a programme, made and sponsored by saP, posedly intelligent people, which induces several million viewers to sit for half an hour every SO' day evening watching—nobody! Really, in Flat'. bert's favourite phrase, 'c'est gigantesque!'
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