Television
Muscles
By CLIFFORD HANLEY EXCITEMENT is the rarest prize on television, and possibly it
to becomes more and more diffi- cult to generate as we grow more blasé. Wimbledon simply can't fail, all the same, even for a viewer like me who is almost immune to sport. You don't have to know the state of the tournament, you don't have to know the names of the players. It can trap you regardless, and for anybody who works at home, television tennis is the number one enemy of productivity. It's partly because the conflict in tennis is always immediate, every single service must end in triumph and defeat, whereas in football a kick-off can initiate half an hour of nothing in particular. Another reason is that the gulf between a fumbling, long-retired tennis dabbler (me) and a Wimbledon champion is quite easily bridged in my imagination. I have often cursed and raged when scheduled pro- grammes were delayed because of football or boxing, but when they cut off the tennis tourna- ment to resume the schedules, I'm outraged.
The true wringing excitement also came out of Jack Ronder's This Year Next Year (BBC), a near-kitchen-sink drama about two spinster sisters locked together in love and exasperation. Nothing to it, really—anybody, it seems, could have written such a simple, mundane entertain- ment. The two sisters, Brenda Bruce and Eliza- beth Sellars, were heartbreakingly true. Miss Sellars in particular, never previously one of my favourites, appears to have matured abruptly into a fine actress. And Mr. Ronder has not only the eye and the ear and the heart, but muscles to go with them.
Altogether, I felt that the box was worth the licence money in the past week. A couple of really good programmes can throw a tolerant haze over other things. I now find it difficult to recapture my bafflement with The Andromeda
Breakthrough, which seemed . you know . . . oh, harmless last week, though characterisa- tion was almost at zero and the motivations of that earnest scientist are quite impenetrable. That other BBC SF cliffhanger, The Big Pull, is rolling along pretty well on sheer pace, though again the scientist-hero hasn't quite come to life. Saturday's episode slipped in an interesting plug for car safety-belts as equipment for hard- pressed thriller heroes.
It was easy to abandon Young Timothy (BBC) on Sunday night, despite the presence of Judy Campbell, whom I adore (that's odd, I found myself siding with the thin girls at Wimbledon too). An all-out taradiddle, this play, more high life and immaculate tails, and a family group in which the teenage son had just been killed and people then stood about and made speeches about him as if he had been a Symptom of Our Times rather than a bloke. The other channel, fortunately, was bang on the ball with The Enemy, by John Gray; a small, unpretentious play about an old faithful subject, the lunacy of war, but infused with original, bitter, maniac laughter. A beautiful shambling performance from Joe Melia as the unshakeable coward who truly believes in his cowardice, converts both his comrades and his enemies to his creed and then gets shot anyway. As his death predictably approached, I found myself muttering, Oh the sods; which is a pretty good lest of a play.
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