Television
New looks
Alexander Chancellor
First you see Julia Somerville and John Humphrys looking very small at an enor- mous, curved, dark blue desk stretching across the width of the screen. Above and behind them sweeps the circumference of the globe as seen from space. Urgent, throbbing music plays; a portentous voice announces the Nine O'Clock News; and then, suddenly, from the bottom of the screen, blobs of golden light soar upwards and over them. Messrs Somerville and Humphrys fade into darkness, the globe gets closer, Britain becomes visible, and the streams of light all pour into London. Undaunted by this 'Star Wars° onslaught, London fires off some blue laser beams of its own which are transubstantiated in space into the solid gold logo of the BBC's much-heralded 'new look' news pro- gramme. This golden logo in turn takes flight, revolves, shrinks and ends up settled neatly in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, enabling the announcers to re- appear and tell us about the day's news. It is a hard act to follow, but Miss Somerville does her best by opening — after the titles — with the words: 'The British Govern- ment has a dramatic new look tonight,' She has no business saying that, however. It is up to the viewers, not the BBC, to decide whether Mrs Thatcher's Cabinet reshuffle amounts to 'a dramatic new look'. None of the quality newspapers took the view that it did. As to the BBC's new look, it is designed to attract viewers away from ITV's News at Ten, which is much more popular. The BBC is following ITN's long-standing example by having two announcers instead of one (an improve- ment, in my view, because a single announ- cer can seem rather lonely and vulnerable). But in other respects, the two programmes remain very different. News at Ten opens, after a camera swoop down the Thames, with a shot of Big Ben, and its announcers assume an air of cosy metropolitan author- ity. The BBC news, on the other hand, comes to us from outer space and uses announcers who could well be mistaken for robots. It will be interesting to see which formula the public likes best.
Panorama returned after the 'new look' news on Monday with an 'old look' pro- gramme about the disastrous failure of famine relief efforts in the Sudan. It was a story of incompetence, corruption and blackmail which had prevented thousands of tons of grain from reaching the areas in Western Sudan where they were needed. The reporter, Gavin Hewitt, did a mean and thorough job, asking all sorts of nasty questions of the people responsible. He also interviewed Bob Geldof, the organiser of 'Live Aid', who has committed millions of pounds to the same hazardous enter- prise. Will he succeed where others have failed? Mr Hewitt appeared sceptical, but one can only hope, for the sake of his millions of young supporters, that he does.
Alan Whicker returned to BBC1 on Sunday with the first in a new series of Whicker's World devoted to Englishmen living in the United States. Awful though Whicker is, this was rather a gripping programme. His subjects included two former London policemen. One of them; formerly of Fulham, is now working as a ranch hand in Colorado, where the nearest town is a miserable little place called Fairplay. There is only one black man in Fairplay but they have formed a branch of the Ku Klux Klan there to deal with him. The other is a policeman in Los Angeles, armed with every sort of weapon including a ray-gun, looking like a torch, which can fire electric currents into people. It is essential, he says, for dealing with people on a drug called 'angel dust' which can turn even the weakest little woman into a homicidal monster. But both of them seem quite happy.
The most moving programme of the week was Churchill's Few (ITV, Sunday), about former Battle of Britain heroes. Many suffered the most terrible and dis- figuring burns during the war, but survive to this day in cheerful anonymity, sup- ported by their memories of those intox- icating days and by a continuing sense of wartime fellowship. The film was beauti- fully made by John Willis.
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