Breaking points
Clive Gammon
It must be disappointing for His Excellency the Ambassador of the Bundesrepublik, but there's no sign yet that the BBC is headed towards a love-the-Krauts cam
paign. Last Saturday, indeed Yes terday's Witness (BBC 2), went back to the first world war and
dug out some ancient survivors of
the airship raids in Zeppelins Over England, and if it hadn't been for
the fact that they also found themselves a veteran of the Zeppelin Service, ex-Oberleutnant Kurt Dehn, I might have felt that
this was piling it on a bit, what with Colditz, The World at War
and all the other offerings that take us cowering down the smoking ruins of Memory Lane.
No one said anything nasty about the oberleutnant. Any condemnation of what he was up to sixty years ago would have been redundant, because he managed it out of his own mouth, this wizened, tiny Dr Strangelove who chuckled as he declared how absurd it was to talk about picking out targets. If the navigator found London itself he was doing pretty well. The heroic attack on King's Lynn, for instance, was carried out under the impression that it was Gosport.
Being unkind to the Germans isn't my reason for wanting Yesterday's Witness banned, though. It's just that all those octogenarians are so well-preserved and fit. As I sit there heavy-eyed with my milky drink, secretly pleased that the telly knocks off at 10.30, on to the screen shimmers some spry, flashing-eyed old duck nearly twice my age with a fresh hairdo and a gay print clfess — and makes me feel twice hers. What am I doing wrong?
But at least I'm not as decrepit as Kenneth Griffiths looks in Perils of Pendragon, the nasty, newish sit, corn. now running on BBC2. Nor, I trust, am I as haltingly slow of speech. The writing is as feeble as anything I've come across on the box and on top of that to have Griffiths doing his stage-Welshman act at about 1 r.p.m. is more than anyone over the age of eight should be expected to bear. Slow-witted, tediously vulgar and totally predictable; this must be the worst series of 1974 so far, and though the year is young it has every chance of staying at the bottom. Still, it may keep a few thousand tourists from crossing the Severn Bridge this summer, so it can't be all bad.
It's rare for The World About Us to disappoint, but I'd looked forward to Sacred Cowes (BBC2) for the title itself led one to expect the casting of a cold eye on the shenanigans of yachtsmen's holy week. But it turned out to be a competent, journeyman reporter's look at the racing, lacking a Whicker to seize upon and probe fascinating things like the extraordinary price inflation that goes on in the Isle of Wight in Cowes Week. The truth is that it is people who count in a story like this one, and though Sacred Cowes dutifully interviewed some people, it was nothing like searching enough about motives.
The moment of the week for me came in the BBC news on Saturday in a short item about the hunt saboteurs' attempt to wreck a hare-coursing meet. Without infringing any code of impartiality, the newscaster told of the defeat in Parliament last week of Marcus Lipton's anti-coursing Bill as the screen showed two greyhounds ripping a hare apart. A pity it wasn't possible for MPs to have seen it a few days earlier.
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