Television
Camera shy
Wendy Cope
They're advertising water on television now. Not just designer water, which has featured in commercials for some time, but ordinary tap water. If you had to have this delivered to your door in bottles, the advertisement says, every family would need the entire cargo of a milk float every day. To illustrate the point, there is film of friendly watermen unloading umpteen bot- tles on to the doorsteps of a housing estate. It would be a nuisance, wouldn't it? If some people needed convincing that run- ning water is a good idea, I expect they have changed their minds by now.
A new programme called Floyd on TV (ITV) relied heavily on commercials, all of them foreign and featuring half-dressed or naked women. If the series goes on like this, it will be very popular and that doesn't bother me at all. Watching nudes on television seems a harmless enough way for
men to pass half an hour on Sunday evening, as long as the nudes in question are over the age of consent. But I was shocked (I like to think this takes some doing) by a French advertisement for a teenage brassiere, which used pubescent girls in a way that was clearly intended to titillate. London Weekend did a bad thing, bringing this to our screens.
In between the clips the eponymous Floyd (normally a television cook) pro- vided some unmemorable linking waffle. Billed in TV Times as 'the new Clive James', Floyd is no competition for the old Clive James, currently presenting a rival show about television on BBC 2. Last week's Saturday Night Clive included wonderful excerpts from The Mother Daughter Pageant, an American event of glorious and almost unbelievable yucki- ness. At one point each perfectly groomed pair had to stand face to face while a tape was played of things they'd said earlier in separate interviews. 'Amber, you're the light of my life. You're the most perfect gift I could have chosen to give any mother."Mom, you're incredibly special. I owe you the sunlight in the morning . and so on. The mothers and daughters found this very moving. As tears rolled past their waterproof mascara, the studio audience and I were reduced to helpless mirth.
Someone once rang up and tried to get me to be on a Clive James programme — not Saturday Night Clive but the other one, The Late Show with Clive James (BBC 2). This is a serious discussion programme and I hardly ever watch it. They wanted me to discuss, with Enoch Powell and others, the question of Britain as a Christian country, with special reference to the celebration of Christmas. As it happens, I have strong feelings about Christmas (I hate it) but the idea of arguing the matter with Enoch Powell, in front of television cameras, did not appeal.
Fear of television nearly caused me to miss a pleasant weekend at Dartington in January, a forum for writers and compos- ers organised by the English National Opera. Eventually, even though I had learned that a team from Signals (Channel 4) would be filming the occasion, I decided to go along, keep my mouth shut, and wear red lipstick, just in case. The television people, under the direction of fly-on-the- wall man Roger Graef, were very unobtru- sive. This was good in a way but it could, also be unnerving. We'd be drinking in the bar and suddenly realise that the camera had crept up on us. Could it hear what we were saying? Nobody was sure but we fell silent anyway. It's not surprising that neith- er I nor any of the people I made friends with appeared in the programme for more than a split second. All the same, when the New Opera edition of Signals was broad- cast last week, I was disappointed. That may explain why the programme seemed boring. Or perhaps it was because I had heard most of it before. A friend assures me that it really was boring. Sometimes it's hard to judge.
Previous page
