Television
Sporting types
Jeffrey Bernard
On Saturday afternoons my gambling becomes compulsive. During the week I kid myself that my hours spent in betting shops have something to do with scientific reasoning and investment but come Grandstand (BBCI) and World of Sport (London Weekend) on Saturdays and I know that I'm simply playing at collecting injustices. I prefer to collect them at the meetings televised by the BBC who at least give you some sort of run for your money. Their team of Julian Wilson, Richard Pitman the ex-jockey and Peter O'Sullivan, the world's best race reader and commentator, is the coolest, most concise and professional on the box. You get to see the horses in the paddock, you get some useful reminders about them and, if you bet on credit, you've time to get to the phone to get on during the preliminaries. The races themselves are well directed and the camera that travels with the horses down the far side at Newbury, for example, makes it all very nearly as good as having a mount over those fences.
World of Sport on the other hand is little more than a results service that saves one from traipsing back and forth to the betting shop. It just isn't possible to cram in seven races at fifteen-minute intervals and do them justice if you're going to have John Rickman waffling like a maiden aunt between the races. There have been moments on this programme when something really interesting is happening with the horses actually at the start when suddenly the proceedings have been interrupted by a commercial telling us that if we don't all drink Cinzano or Martini then we'll sleep alone for ever. They don't bother to tip horses on Grandstand but on World of Sport Rickman fancies a good seventy per cent of the runners and God only knows why he bothers. The fan mail he gets from housewives has obviously gone to his head. It's a head on which perches one of those brown trilbies that racing people have a compulsion to wear and his frequent lifting of it has, I'm told, endeared him to thousands of viewers who love him for his manners. It's his manner that worries me. Unctuous, embarrassed, patronising.
Last Saturday was pretty typical of the difference between the two programmes. Grandstand ran up to Chepstow races with a snooker match between Ray Reardon and Alex Higgins and, after, went on to international athletics and then the second half of a Rugby League Cup tie. World of Sport was a pretty squalid hotch-potch. Speedway from New Zealand—what a yawn—Rickman and Ken Butler like Gert and Daisy, racing at Stratford and Teeside followed
by dog racing, would you believe it, and then wrestling.
The only thing that grates with me as far as Grandstand is concerned is the seriousness with which David Coleman views the attempts of various teams to play soccer. Better men than Coleman have, I know, been mentally affected by soccer—Alan Watkins the political buff actually supports Arsenal—but he really seems to think that football is important, does Coleman. This strange man, frequently clad in Bri-Nylon, really ought to talk, along with Jimmy Hill, in front of a back-drop made of pebble dash. Which reminds me. Melvyn Bragg, the David Coleman of books, had his most interesting guests for some time on the last Read All About It (BBC1). Quentin Crisp was charming and looked it, Ken Russell is beginning to look more like Liszt every day and inside Margaret Drabble [think there's a hockey stick trying to get out. What was really fascinating was the awfulness of Edna O'Brien. Much as I like to use the sweeping generalisation as a weapon in hysterical arguments I've never heard it used to such effect as it was by the sad and bitter little biddy from Ireland—home of rotten chaps who drink too much and who don't know how to treat ladies. Women are much more feeling than men, more sensitive and generally more wonderful. Men are rotten and if she's going by the ones I've met who are pulled by heavy lady writers who go in for lame ducks then she's absolutely right. Writing is like making a tapestry and it's tremendously hard work and ... oh God I can't go on. What she did leave unsaid is the fact that she's a very, very lucky woman. She probably doesn't know how lucky, but I think Miss O'Brien is as lucky as David Niven, Michael Caine, Des O'Connor, Lord Longford, Bob Monkhouse and Nick the Greek.
Looking at Going for a Song again for the first time in years, it struck me that it's an incredibly smug and toffee-nosed little show. It's also an odd title for a show— Going for a Song—when you come to think that the majority of antique dealers are as avaricious a bunch of sharks as you're likely to find down any high street. Arthur Negus has a brow that I'm sure has got beetled through masses of accountancy and peering in the till and Max Robertson knows all the answers especially since he's got them written down in front of him. It's a job that's given Chris Booker, Hughie Green and Bamber Gascoigne funny faces and Robertson's getting one. The celebrity guests on the show are something of a joke since they're just anyone with a well-known face. Usually, anyone with a well-known face is likely to have enough money to pop into an antique shop from time to time and they don't have to know what they're talking about. This week's faces belonged to Adrianna Stassinopoulos and Simon Williams. Arianna, I thought, was probably middle-twentieth-century, foreign, possibly Greek, well made, rounded quite beautifully, used for I don't know what. probably just for decorative purposes but maybe with a domestic use and worth, well, I wouldn't really like to hazard a guess, but since I've got to, a week's wages.
Loyalties (BBC!), the Play of the Month presentation, lived down to expectations. The cast put on voices that made them sound as though they were trying to get into the Garrick Club. The story of an utter cad who ends up by doing the decent thing he should have done in the first ten minutes, it showed that John Galsworthy would have been dead and buried years ago if It wasn't for the resuscitation that he was given by Eric Porter. Cedric Messina should let sleeping dogs die.
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