Television
Resonances
Richard Ingrams
Well, 1 think I have now seen it all. That is to say I have seen Melvyn Bragg shake hands with Bruce Forsyth and present him with an award for being the Top Television Personality of 1977. This historic meeting took place at the Hilton Hotel on Friday last during the sort of ceremony which makes you feel warm all over because you're not at it. To begin with there was mine host Dicky Davies. Dicky Davies is a man who looks like a Mexican hairdresser and whom I occasionally see on ITV on Friday night announcing what is in store for sports lovers the following day. His face, complete with bandit-style moustache, and his look of desperate enthusiasm are always to make me leap to my feet and switch the set off. Imagine therefore this same man, dressed in black tie, being greeted at the door of the Hilton by a bevy of gyrating models in flimsy costumes to preside over the presentation of Sun Awards-described as 'the most coveted awards in television', to a select group of tripe-artists, e.g. The Two Ronnies, The Sweeney, and Forsyth (now sporting an unbecoming, not to say obscene, moustache).
Quite apart from anything else it is of course scandalous that an hour's free
publicity should be given to the Dirty Digger's trashy 'newspaper', the Sun, read
ers of which had voted for the lucky winners. Don't tell me that this has nothing to do with the fact that the Dirty Digger's News International is the major shareholder in London Weekend Television which presents the programme. This is exactly the sort of monopolistic fiddle which the IBA under its kindly ex-headmaster Brian Young should be stamping out. Indeed it is high tinde that the close financial links between independent television and the press were severed completely.
Not being possessed of an Encyclopaedic knowledge of Eng. Lit. I always feel a bit nervous about launching into a long critique
of something like The Mayor of Casterbridge now showing on BBC 1. All the
other critics seem thoroughly well up on their Thomas Hardy and write confidently about how the adapter, Dennis Potter, has, or has not , captured such and such an aspect of the novel. It was therefore with great glee that I chanced upon a review in
The Times by its chief book critic Michael
Ratcliffe, the same Ratcliffe who can give us 2,000 words on Virginia Woolf without batting an eyelid. After mentioning a number of things like 'resonance', 'peripheral ironies' and the like, Mr Ratcliffe referred enthusiastically to Janet Maw's performance as Henchard's daughter. Having cheated a bit by looking up the
plot in the Oxford Companion to English Literature, I knew that in fact she is not Henchard's daughter at all. What's more the story partly revolves round the fact that she is not. The deafening din of the chief book reviewer on The Times dropping a danger of this size makes me feel more than somewhat smug.
The funniest sight of the week was provided by The Americans on Monday. President Carter was standing side by side
with the Shah of Persia at a state reception in the garden of the White House, addressing the assembled dignitaries on the historic links forged between their two great countries 'There are,' he intoned, 'thousands of Iranian students studying at our Uni versities.' Meanwhile a good number of these self same students, enraged by the visit of the Shah, were battling furiously with police outside the White House gates and puffs of riot gas were drifting across the lawn making everybody cry.
Previous page
