Television
Prised
Richard Ingrams
Part of the trouble with telly is that it is instant and ephemeral, seldom showing any interest in or awareness of its own past. Recently I was lucky enough to attend a private showing of a film about John Piper. It was of course in black and white and all the better for it; an outstanding film about one of our leading painters. But because it is 25 years old I doubt if Mr Humphrey Burton the Master of the Beeb's Music would ever dream of showing it on the screen. Yet there must be lots of such films gathering dust on the shelves, all of them more worth a showing than most of the stuff that is currently being produced.
Half of the appeal of Malcolm Muggeridge's new series Muggeridge Ancient and Modern (BBC2) is that it resurrects much of such old material which would otherwise never be shown again. It thereby gives us a look not only at Muggeridge's past, but of the past of telly, relating the programme of today to that of yesterday. I'm sure the idea of making Mugge ridge watch and comment on some of his old films in the company of old Harrovian Jonathan Stedall appealed to the BBC because it was cheap, but the whole thing works splendidly partly for the reason that it is so rarely that one sees old hope toreturnto Mugg when we have seen more of his series. In the meantime I urge you all to watch it.
I am fairly sure that my telephone is frequently tapped by MI5 or the Special Branch but I can't say that the fact has ever particularly worried me. As I noted last week, the people involved in intelligence gathering are mostly perverts and lunatics and are therefore unlikely to be able to decipher my highly literate and allusive telephone calls. The same is true of most private detectives. Information gathered by underhand means almost aways turns out to be wrong. This is one of the difficulties facing people like Tom Mangold who in the second of his Panorama programmes waxed indignant about the special branch and MI5. This is nowadays a familiar parrot cry from rich left-wing journalists on the BBC or the New Statesman, " . . . massive computers . . 1984. . . privacy of the individual'. (It is ironical of course that these are exactly the same people who will defend hysterically the right of the press and television to intrude on people's privacy and even in certain cases to steal and bug in order to get the necessary information.) But usually it transpires that cases of actual injustice following on from the massive computers etc is rather hard to find. It was an anti-climax, after all the forbidding shots of computer terminals, to encounter, yet again, the Scottish trade unionist working in a condensed milk factory in Dumfries whose secret file leaked out last year' — 'the case had already been given a thorough going over on Newsnight— and to learn that people attending an anti-nuclear jumble sale in Devon had had their car numbers taken by police. A more serious case was that of film maker Jan Martin who was wrongly accused by Taylor Woodrow, on the basis of information from the Special Branch computer, of terrorist affiliations (I wondered how much she would have got had she chosen to sue for libel). Obviously such cases are very disquieting. But nothing was said to suggest how often they arise; nor did Mangold say anything about the obvious benefits that accrue in cases of crime and terrorism. The sophisticated bugging device can easily be made to appear sinister. But presumably in cases like the Princes Gate siege we are all pleased that the police have such technology to hand.
In other words Mangold's Panorama was naive and one-sided, like its predecessor. Taken with the great brain-death fiasco, where again one side of a complicated argument was ingenuously and polemically presented, it all suggests the need for a sweep out of the Panorama staff. Another equally biased affair is Did You See . . .? (BBC2) which somehow manages every week to dig out the most wonderfully obscure nonentities to discuss selected programmes. What could be quite a good idea is spoiled by the selection of New Statesman types like Valentine Cunhingham and Christopher Hitchens week after week. My objection to these people is not that they are left-wing but rather that they are tremendous bores.
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