Television
New look
Richard In grams Television companies nowadays have a habit of boasting in advance about how much money has been spent on a particular series as though extravagance was in some way a guarantee of excellence. Last week we were told that millions had been blown by Southern TV on the new eight-part series Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years which started on Sunday, and there were obvious signs of the money-no-object approach, a sequence for example shot on location in Monument Valley, Arizona, where Churchill apparently watched a western being filmed in 1929. This scene and other subsequent ones showing the Great Man speculating on the Stock Exchange prior to the Wall Street Crash and being wined and dined by a Bernard Baruch was no doubt also intended to serve the purpose of the makers in helping to secure a sale of the series to American television. But as so often with these extravaganzas the money has been spent to dress up something that just isn't very well thought out. The idea that Martin Gilbert's stodgy life of Churchill can somehow be made the stuff of TV dramas is dubious enough, but some thought should have gone into giving it a dramatic pulse of its own. You can't just serve up chunks of biographical material and expect them to turn into theatre. As it is, The Wilderness Years is just another humdrum history lesson for the '0' level forms with Robert Hardy struggling manfully, but in vain, to rise above his normal hearty and insufferable vet routine and get inside the skin of the Great Man.
The BBC's Nine O'Clock News has been given yet another new look in an attempt to make it more popular than News At Ten. For some reason the BBC has never been much good at news and the only advantage it hitherto had over ITN was the nice dependable old faces who broadcast the bulletins — Peter Woods, Kenneth Kendall etc. Now most of these chaps are being pensioned off and new men are being brought in, for example John Humphreys who set the trend this week along with a new signature tune and a new design featuring a large and pointless figure of nine looming to the right of the newsreader's head. The choice of Humphreys is a fairly disastrous one as he is a grey, dull-looking man with a dreary voice who looks like a shop assistant in an offthe-peg tailoring establishment, the ideal man to take one's waist measurement but hardly the person required to spearhead a bright new approach to broadcasting. What is wanted, just for starters, is more news items, less foreign news, fewer fires and funerals, and an end to long lists of soccer results. Too many of the items are just dull and no amount of jazzing up the props and scenery can disguise the fact.
Meanwhile former newsreader Angela Rippon is back on the screen again with a new series of programmes following her less than totally successful debut as a TV reporter last year. Judging from her effort this Tuesday, Angela Rippon Meets (BBC 1), I thought she had improved marginally, but that is not saying much. Her trouble is that she is totally lacking in any form of charm. Her smile is frosty and her comments clumsy and predictable — in this case the usual clichés about how tough it is at the top and how few people make it up there in the first place.
The difficulty about tap dancing, the subject of Tuesday's programme, is that after a bit the sight and sound of clacketyclacking shoes begin to pale, though there were some good scenes of little girls in Harlem being taken through their routines by a large black lady. But the programme had little or no direction and finally lurched off the rails when Rippon herself, bored with asking questions like 'What do you think it takes to be a star?', took to the floor herself on the arm of Lionel Blair and started to hoof it all over the newly restored Covent Garden Piazza. This was perhaps justifiable on the Dr Johnson principle — `It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.' However in the circumstances it looked like an unseemly egotrip by someone who had run out of ideas. Perhaps she should go back to reading the news. Personally I would find even the Ripponette preferable to John Humphreys.
Previous page
