TELEVISION
Crink'm-crank'm
Patrick Skene CATLING
Crinkum-crankum? Just in case the meanings of the word have slipped your mind, and the meanings are certainly slippery, allow Me to be of service. Ian Thorne, the writer of 'Byron, the last of the Biography series (rac 2), forced me to resort to the diction- ary, and this is what I found: Crinkums, in 1719, was a slang expression for venereal disease; Crinkum-crankum, in 1761, was a jocular term denoting 'anything full of twists and turns or intricately elaborated.' In Mr Thorne's biographical play, when Byron was preparing to keep his rendezvous with death in Greece in t824. he impatiently. asked: 'Now, what's all this crinkum-crankum about the money?' Well, what indeed? Maybe he was beginning to worry about the cost of all the sumptuous costumes and sets.
'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I alwrys pay it extra.' Not all egg-heads are equally conscientious, I suppose, but if Mr Thorne's conscience is as well developed as his early nineteenth-century prose style, which I admired, he owes the adjective 'Byronic' a small fortune. He did not use the word overtly or explain it, but he seemed to pre- sume that it would be working away con- tinuously for ninety minutes in the minds of viewers, to fill the gaps in his dramatisa- tion of the poet's difficult days in Venice.
Judging 'Byronic' by the higgledy-piggledy evidence presented in the play, we were apparently expected to deduce that the word meant aristocratic. heroic, proud, sensitive. eloquent,'witty, loyal, amorous, tender, arro' gant, cynical, gluttonous, stubborn, incestu- ous,. bisexual, hysterical, brutal and remorse- ful—and all the other adjectives applicable to a lame, idealistic silly Billy of a genius afflicted by satyriasis and a Messiah com- plex. Could even Humpty Dumpty have afforded so much?
Several of Byron's conflicting characteris- tics were explicitly demonstrated; others were suggested clearly enough; a few were only hinted at. The point I am trying to make is that this so-called biography was a crypto-biographical fragment without a dra- matic shape and sufficient dramatic power. The fragment dealt with the crucial period in which Byron progressed from 'a quiet, de- bauched life' to formal adultery and thence at last to martyrdom. There were allusions to the social scandals in England from which he had fled and the fatal dangers in Greece to which he felt compelled to expose him- self. But the script required too much of the audience, and not even the cleverest direc- tion and the most passionate performances could have supplied all the help that was needed.
The dialogue, on the whole, was admirably apt, fluctuating from literary grandiloquence to the bathetic platitudes uttered by people in a complicated emotional mess. Some lines, however, were below standard, even banal. Byron's delicious young married inamorata fretfully complained: 'We cannot always be meeting in gondolas.' The exotic trysting place did little to refresh the soap-opera cliché. A short time later, like some English Humbert Humbert confessing a yen for cannibalism, Byron told her: 'You smell of bread and butter, like a little girl.' Later still, his appetite having flagged, she briskly urged his manservant to fortify Byron's diet with red meat and wine.
Bawdiness often amuses me, but I must say my eyebrows were raised several milli- metres by Byron's saying: 'What I get by my brains I spend on my ballocks.' The declaration was superfluous; his fiscal policy had already been made quite obviously apparent. Parents who allow their children, and children who allow their parents, to watch television after dinner are probably prepared for the exercise of this sort of poetic licence; but I felt that in this instance Mr Thorne ought to have his licence en- dorsed—for tautology.
Desmond Wilcox, introducing 'Phela Ndaba: The End of The Dialogue' on Man
Alive (BBC 2), announced that five black members of the Pan Africanist Congress" had made the film in South Africa illegally and smuggled it out of the country.
Was it reasonable, balanced, objective?
No, of course it wasn't. Have you seen any good films that objectively assessed Ausch- witz, Buchenwald and Dachau? Apartheid appropriately is pronounced 'apart-hate'. The view from the wrong side of the barbed wire, the wrong side of the economy, is hateful. Hate was the motive force behind 'Phela Ndaba'—black hate. Everyone, black or white, who watched the prOgramme with any sense of prophetic imagination whatso- ever (never mind ethical scruples) must have been appalled. Black South Africans out- number white South Africans by about five to one. All South Africans have red blood. Is the dialogue really over?
Harold Soref. MP, under Mr Wilcox's tactful chairmanship, was willing to continue to discuss South Africa. The South African government deplored the film but refused Man Alive's invitation to send a representa- tive to the studio to propound the govern- mentls case. Mr Sorer, speaking as their un-, official spokesman, called the film `a malici- ous caricature' and its makers 'self-confessed terrorists' who were waging psychological
warfare 'worthy of Goebbels'. The shade of Goebbels must have been quite embar' rassed by that insult,
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