Television
Missing links
Richard lngrams
Since taking leave of Times readers, Bernard Levin has popped up again on the box with a new series of interviews, beginning on Saturday with the playwright John Osborne who was pompously and wrongly introduced to us as 'a man who has stamped his name and personality on an era'. Levin is a witty journalist on his day but I have never thought he was cut out for anything else much. As a TV interviewer he suffers from being a bad judge of character. This leads him, at his worst, to fall for Indian gurus and glib Californian shamans peddling salvation in odd ways, but generally prevents him from getting people to talk which is the whole art of the interviewer. Robert Kee shows on the new Paprbacks programme how it should be done. Levin, however, is not good at it. After half an hour in the company of John Osborne I learnt almost nothing new about him, apart from the fact that he had an unhappy upbringing and hated all the members of his family — a fact that Levin had already gleaned from Osborne's memoirs, shortly to be published. Osborne also said that he had experienced a momentary feeling of peace 'especially during the last few years', but Levin like a deaf man let this interesting remark pass by without comment. What it boils down to is that Levin is too egotistical to elicit information from others. His questions — 'Do you pray?', 'Are you afraid of death?' — are really addressed to himself and are little more than clichés of a women's magazine variety. The last time I heard 'Are you afraid of death?' on the telly it was Clive James talking to Gore Vidal. I can't remember what the answer was.
When Osborne burst upon the theatrical scene some 25 years ago the chief bête noire of the avant-garde was then Mr William Douglas-Home whose tasteful West End comedies about glamorous debutantes and dotty old earls then played to packed houses. The astonishing thing, given the lapse of time, is that Mr Douglas-Home is still at it. His latest play You're All Right — How Am 1? was given an airing on BBC2 last Friday and turned out to be complete and utter drivel, worse than Rachel Billington, about a psychiatrist and his patient. Michael Hordern played a man whose arms kept making a funny involuntary movement, and Denholm Elliott was a bearded Harley Street psychiatrist who questioned him about his sex life. The worst thing about Mr Douglas-Home is that he is no longer restrained by old safeguards like the Lord Chamberlain and therefore cannot resist the temptation to use dirty words just to show that he is one of the boys.
Meanwhile on ITV Clive James was doing a programme on the world of French fashion, traipsing about Paris making a lot of supposedly flip and witty comments. This was the television equivalent of one of those vast Observer features — e.g. Clive James goes to San Francisco — and just as I am never able to plough to the end of them, so after 20 minutes or so of the programme I switched over to BBC2. James wore a funny kind of mac with a lot of superfluous flaps on it and as he plodded among the beautiful young models looked rather like a dirty old voyeur in Soho.
Yet another scientist has launched out on a series devoted to the origins of man. The newcomer is Richard Leakey, who needless to say has just got a book out on the subject. He is a worried looking man and his first programme contained now familiar shots of monkeys Winging from bough to bough and men in shorts getting out of Land Rovers and looking for fossils in the bush. Knowing little or nothing about science, I am always suspicious about scientists who start off by talking about man as if he is just a glorified animal. Leakey had been barely ten minutes into his opening lecture on Monday before he was going on about the fact that man 'is the only animal' to do this or that. He said that human language was 'arguably the most efficient communication system in the animal kingdom' as though we might one day learn that giraffes or dolphins had perfected something even more sophisticated. Leakey then embarked on a search for the well-known Missing Link, petering out as they always do in a flood of waffle 'at some point during the last ten million years our ancestor stood up on two legs'. The evidence that man evolved from monkeys has always seemed to me very thin on the ground but if you start off like any scientist with the fixed idea that man is just another animal who exists because of a series of accidents then you will go to any length to prove it. The Piltdown Man was a hoax but for a long time he was accepted as genuine not because the deception was cleverly practised, which it was not, but because the scientists wanted to believe in him.
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