Television
Missing answers
Wendy Cope
Everyone's fed up with it,' said Lynne, as she cut my hair. 'They're chang- ing channels to avoid it. They're renting videos. Nobody's watching it.'
`Except people who have to write about it,' I reminded her.
`Oh yes. Well,' she continued helpfully, `the only thing I liked was that SDP woman. I listened to her. She talked like a normal person.' I agreed and asked how she thought Mrs Thatcher was coming over. 'Smarmy,' she replied.
I thought Mrs Thatcher began to look rather desperate on Tuesday of last week, when she picked up that flag and started waving it. Glancing through my notes on the rest of the week, I see I have written `Mrs T looking tired' or 'Mrs T looking very tired' several times. On Sunday I wrote 'Tebbit looking tired' and `Kinnock looking tired. Brow more furrowed.' All this, of course, could just be a projection of my own state of mind.
There haven't been many laughs in the last seven days, although I enjoyed the sight of Dr Owen in the Sikh temple with a handkerchief round his head. On Friday viewers had the chance to see what the doctor looks like when he is angry. At the press conference where the hospital waiting-list stunt turned into an embarrass- ment (with Simon Hughes having to admit that the names had nothing to do with the health service) the camera focused on the face of the SDP leader. It was purple.
Dr Owen never looks less than confi- dent. At the beginning of his Panorama (BBC 1) interview, his expression made me think of a carnivorous animal about to enjoy its dinner. David Steel looked ner- vous to start with, less so as the interview progressed, despite the fact that he bore the brunt of Sir Robin Day's aggression. The stickiest point came when the Liberal leader was pressed — unfairly, I thought to say which of the other parties he regarded as the greater evil. Since Dr Owen had already answered 'Labour', Mr Steel was in a difficult position. He floun- dered for a moment or two but seemed about to recover when his colleague de- cided to step in and rescue him. It's very hard to get the double act right and I think they are wise to cut down on joint appear- ances.
In the course of this interview I noted down the gist of the questions and answers. I tried to do the same thing during Jonathan Dimbleby's This Week (ITV) interview with Mr Kinnock but it proved impossible. Dimbleby launched straight into the defence issue and stayed with it for 13 minutes. I got his questions all right but the answers are missing. 'K. talked v. fast,' says my notebook. 'Didn't make sense.' I wondered if I ought to watch the whole thing again and see if I understood it better the second time. It was something of a relief to learn from a newspaper that Conservative Central Office spent the best part of a day trying to work out exactly what the Labour leader had said to David Frost.
I had a similar problem with Monday's Panorama. The first few questions were about how Labour hoped to control infla- tion. With pencil poised, I waited until, at the third or fourth attempt, Sir Robin elicited a comprehensible answer. This is it: produce more goods. I wrote it down and drew a box round it, so it wouldn't get lost. At the beginning of the interview Mr Kinnock looked extremely tense, which, in his case, is supposed to be a good thing. However, I thought his performance im- proved slightly as he relaxed. At one point, when he grasped an opportunity to speak about the problems of old people, there was a brief reminder of the kind of oratory that makes his best speeches so effective.
I'm disappearing from this space for two weeks to tutor a course in a place where there is no television. It's a long-standing commitment and the escape from election coverage is fortuitous. I've dutifully ap- plied for a postal vote, which won't make any difference to anything, since I don't live in a marginal constituency. The feeling that one's vote doesn't count, I can't resist adding, may be one reason why people are switching off.
Previous page
