Television
Suspect
Richard Ingrams
Ididn't bother to watch the second of Dr Anthony Clare's Motives as the inter- viewee was the former Postmaster General and jailbird John Stonehouse. Stonehouse has been interviewed many times on televi- sion, each interviewer believing that he will be the man to make him crack, just as Frost thought he could crack Nixon. I was pre- sent myself on one of these occasions in Newcastle when one young hopeful tried his hand. But it was a futile exercise.
Stonehouse after all has a perfect alibi. Any reprehensible things he may have done were done by the alter-Stonehouse, the Stonehouse who was suffering from a men- tal breakdown, and there is no connection between that man and the man you see before you today. Judging by the reports Dr Anthony Clare fared no better than his predecessors in trying to break through this complacency though I understand that twice when the questioning got a bit too hot, Stonehouse asked if he could go off for a pee.
Although not watching Dr Clare I did read an interesting piece by him in the Listener about the violence on the BBC's news programmes and the way the Nine O'Clock News in particular concentrates on plane, bus, or — as on Sunday last motor-bike crashes, murders, violent crime etc, all of which have little or no relevance to the main current of news but which are selected by the BBC purely because of their sensational value. A couple of nasty deaths at Silverstone are after all more newsy than a speech by Roy Hattersley. Dr Clare does not mention the funerals, though these are in my view just as upsetting and irrelevant. I couldn't help noticing on Monday when the BBC was reporting the typhoid scare from the Greek island of Kos they twice showed a close-up of a hypodermic needle being plunged into an arm — a distasteful sight at the best of times and one which on this oc- casion had little relevance to the story. The following night as part of a report on Mrs Thatcher's eye we were given gruesome close-ups of optical tissues and a little lec- ture on latest techniques in laser surger. This was followed by the obligatory funeral (David Niven). Dr Clare claims, and I'm sure he is right, that the violence on the news is much more disturbing than all the violence in plays and films.
Meanwhile, the BBC's obsession with disease and death resulted in yet another two-part documentary about cancer, pro- duced by someone called Alec Nisbett. My suspicions were aroused when once again it turned out that almost all the film had been shot in America in the course of visits to New York, Seattle etc. I hope the BBC per- sonnel enjoyed their trip but it was hard to see how it was justified in terms of the pro- gramme. The object was to show, with the help of what looked like very tentative evidence, that cancer has psychological rather than environmental causes. There were the usual shots of bearded American scientists in white coats and American white rats in cages, and a lot of solemn talk about stress and patients suffering from 'negative attributional style'. Towards the end they even seemed to be suggesting that Chris- tianity is a major cause of cancer on the grounds that people who suppress their emotions and try to behave well towards other people are apparently more likely to develop tumours. Even if this is true, and the evidence for it seemed pretty slight, I wonder what the point of broadcasting it at peak viewing time is, except to create a good deal more stress and anxiety. As with the hypodermic on the news, the BBC is not in the least bit interested in the cause of medical science, but only in exploiting people's morbid interest in disease and death. And if it can be done with plenty of trips to America for all concerned, so much the better.
Previous page
