Television
New menace
Jeffrey Bernard It must be very nearly as exhausting to watch hysterical scenes as it is actually to play one of the leads in a real one. After the Fall (BBC 2), Arthur Miller's effort last Tuesday night, was one of the strongest doses of barbiturate I've ever had administered by the box and the idea of staying awake to witness Lyndon Brook's rendering of 'Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day' at 11.50 pm was laughable. Faye Dunaway managed to consume the entire contents of an all-night chemist plus an offlicence in the last fifteen minutes of the play, but in the end it was the relentless boring intellectual mouthings of Christopher Plummer that finally got to her and killed her.
There are some pretty nasty things up God's sleeve that are set aside for women but surely the nastiest must be marriage to an intellectual. Of course, I could be wrong and maybe Quentin as played by Plummer wasn't meant to be an intellectual, but I always assume that if t can't understand a word of what a man says then he's an intellectual or Polish. Quentin even had an intellectual mother who came out with some dreadful lines while she was ironing a shirt.
The Radio Times billed the play as being about dear old Quentin's memories which 'include Maggie, a blonde, beautiful sexsymbol—the sort of girl men dream about'. Well, I wonder do they really dream about Maggies and Marilyn Monroes ? Some of them possibly, Authur Miller seemingly. But surely a man of real intellect like Quentin wouldn't waste a gem of a line like, 'Suicide kills two people. That's what it's for,' on a jumped-up secretary that he'd managed to pull at a bus stop in the unlikeliest pick-up in history. I've also been wondering just how such a girl would react if you looked at her very intently and told her that she had the word 'Now' written right across her forehead. Television men and women really do put up with an awful lot including each other. If Hadleigh had been in Quentin's shoes he would have rung for the servants and put Maggie to bed with a hot water bottle. But then there wouldn't have been a play and in that non-event I would not have switched the set off after two hours and five minutes with the word
'wank' written across my forehead.
The play is always said to be 'reputedly' based on Miller's relationship with Mar ilyn Monroe and it must be very, very loosely based on it. The girl who gave the interviews I've read couldn't have been anything much like Faye Dunaway's Maggie. Miss Dunaway does the vacant, vacuous, slightly shocked stare all right but her pill-swallowing was a little whimsy if you can apply whimsy to a person with a gargantuan appetite. The director's fault and that's what most of the epic was. They'll have to think up another way of conveying deep thought, sensitivity and the rest of the rubbish that we wonderful people who have suffered go in for other than staring straight at the camera lens and looking as though we'd just swallowed a beetle.
Before all that started there was the first episode in a new load of Sutherland's Law (BBC 1). This was oddly sad since Michael GoOdliffe who played the part of a suicide in it did actually commit suicide a few weeks after the film was made. That aside, it seems to me to be no more than a pretty average show with Scottish accents everywhere. There's a sort of regional television that seems to grab people simply because the accents used aren't like their own. Perhaps if Crossroads was moved to Somerset it might improve it. The thought of that makes me wonder how important is Melvyn Bragg's Cumberland burr to his tremendous success? That in turn makes me wonder how Melvyn would have coped with Maggie in Alter the Fall. He would have saved her, I should think, which wouldn't have been hard what with only beer and aspirin in the house.
The new menace on television is this wretched birthday that the Americans are having. They simply will not stop celebrating it. There was an extraordinary film that had people ringing bells all over the place— the Queen graciously touched the Liberty Bell on the news—and I suppose the world's film vaults are still packed with yet more unseen documentaries about more and yet more immigrants. It's the thin end of a great new wedge of nostalgia. Apart from television exposure, there'll soon be posters all over the shop of bedraggled Serbs queuing up to go to America to make her what she is today. This will, no doubt, lead to a mammoth serial of Clayhanger proportions about a wonderful family who start out with yarmulkas and beards at Ellis Island and who by episode two all look like Doris Day and Tony Curtis. Inevitably one of the grandsons will be an intellectual called Quentin who falls for a sex symbol called Maggie. Oh God, what is to become of us telly viewers?
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