Television
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By JOHN BRAINE LAST week I viewed my last. I don't suppose that I'll be able to resist the occasional rendezvous with Tonight or Panorama or This Week or Picture Parade; but for 99.99 per cent. of trans- mission time the cathode tubes in my seventeen-inch modern miracle will rust away (if that's what cathode tubes do), despised and rejected. And my small son will never be allowed to keep up with the other little Joneses in this respect at least. I saw a letter from a fifth-form grammar-school pupil the other week in which there were four spelling errors; that, as far as I'm concerned, was the red light. In fact, I think I shall sell my telly; one can buy a great many books for seventy guineas.
The process of disillusion began with Judith Kervis's excellent adaptation of John Buchan's tiuntingtower. I suddenly realised that it wasn't exciting enough, that I'd rather read the book. And I also' realised that, once you take away Buchan's prose, once there are no longer his wonderful descriptions of the Scottish country- side, then what is left is pretty sad stuff. The camera could replace Buchan's prose (as it did in 7'heThirty-Nine Steps), but not on that tiny screen in my drawing-room. James Hayter made an ex- cellent Dickson McCunn; though he was a shade to much the solid grocer and not enough the frustrated poet.
In an attempt to squeeze some entertainment, some pure TV (the will-b'-the-wisp I've been chasing for some three months) out of one channel or the other, I switched over to Alfred Hitchcock, and was given Dragnet instead. I make a rule of not watching American imports, believing that the vast sums of money spent on them would 14 better employed in paying TV writers a living wage. I don't of course count Hitchcock as an American import; he belongs to the whole world.
However, this particular episode in the Los Angeles Police Saga was, though inevitably scrappy in treatment, horribly fascinating. Ameri- can Teds kill for fun; or rather, out of a dreadful arid compulsion, They don't really seem to have any fun at all, as any normal human being under- stands the word. The ostensible villain of the piece was a sixteen-year-old boy who shot an eleven-year-old boy, a perfect stranger to him. I say the ostensible villain, since it's apparent to me that no one but a lunatic ever kills for no reason. I felt that the youth was possessed, that Mr. Ray Bradbury would be more likely to know the identity of the real killer than the Los Angeles police.
This Week, compered by Ludovic Kennedy, did not lift my spirits, its main item being a debate between two doctors, one who maintained that fall-out had killed 20,100 people last year and would kill 120,000 in the near future, and the other who firmly and courteously maintained the official Harwell viewpoint. One of them must be wrong, and this fact soured the rest of my even- ing's viewing, which included Jack Hylton's On With The Show and Daniel Farson investigating unmarried mothers.
Mr. Farson began his programme with the resounding statement that 38,000 bastards were born in Britain last year. He interviewed the mothers with his usual almost clinical coolness, keeping away from oleaginous sympathy or brassy impertinence. If the BBC had been respon- sible for this programme, they'd had given him at least half an hour; but would they have chosen this subject?
To Mr. Jack Hylton I award one final accolade: always in his shows appear a fine selection of bouncing, leggy, unrefined. in the nicest possible manner, chorus girls of a quality I thought had perished with the music halls. (I like the Television Toppers too, but differently, more respectfully.) But even as in a roaring rugger-club-outing kind of way I enjoyed the sight of these young ladies, I reflected that the studio audience saw them at their best in colour and in three dimen- sions. I saw only shadows, and these shadows weren't big enough or bright enough.
I realised this finally whilst watching the pro- gramme on Max Ophuls, the director of, among others, Lettersirom an Unknown Woman and La Ronde. The latter is the greatest film of the last twenty years. And, as a friend of mine is wont to say, if you don't agree with me, you're wrong. Watching the fairground railway scene again, I knew that these were the only shadows good enough for me. The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs, of Apollo; you this way, I that way, back to the library, the bookshop, the theatre, the cinema. I am too old to change my habits now; I can only wish my successor good luck and turn the face of the one-eyed monster (and it's high time someone thanked Mr. Allan Price for, that phrase) to the wall.
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