Television
Powers that be
Richard Ingrams
In 1932 Malcolm Muggeridge. was 1111. Moscow as a journalist on the Man- chester Guardian witnessing for himself the real nature of communist Russia under Stalin. If told that some 50 years later he would spend a week in Sussex with the dic- tator's daughter Svetlana, gojng for walks, picking raspberries and discussing Dostoievsky and St Augustine, he would surely have dismissed the idea as completely ludicrous. So there was something verY extraordinary and poignant in the mere meeting of these two people and of course it is still difficult to accept that Svetlana, born and bred in the nightmare world of her father's Russia, has turned out to be so sane and sensible and above all so religious — living proof of the power of Christianity to shoot up like grass between the thickest and seemingly most impenetrable paving stones. That said, the interest of Svetlana lies not so much in her observations on religion but in the evidence she can give about her father, and it was the main weakness of Jonathan Stedall's in the end rather disap- pointing programme that there was not enough of this and too many shots of Mugg mowing his lawn — all of which we have had before. The nature of Svetlana's extraordinary childhood had to be inferred from stray remarks like her reference to 'two aunts coming back from six years of solitary confinement for nothing'. The programme was worth watching if only for the extraordinary account of her father's death, a story whispered to her many years later by a housekeeper. Stalin, who had a stroke one evening at his country house, lay motionless on the floor while his terrified guards summoned the Politburo from Moscow to decide what should be done. It was not till 10 o'clock the follow- ing morning that a doctor at last examined him. It was, as Muggeridge said, the perfect commentary on the nature of power, that a man had become so powerful that no one dared to help him unless ordered to do so. I liked, too, the story of Stalin's mother on her deathbed telling her son what a pity it was that he hadn't become a priest!
Sir Huw Wheldon made a welcome return to the screen stepping into Ludovic Kennedy's shoes as chairman of Did You See..? (BBC2). Wheldon did his job verY well and asked all the right questions, but the programme itself is an infuriating one. Sir Huw began by saying, quite rightly, that the event of the past week had been John Mortimer's play Voyage Round My Father, starring Laurence Olivier, but instead of discussing this the panel went on to talk at great length about Baal, a play by Brecht which had been done the same night with pop singer David Bowie in the title role.
They all agreed it was pretty poor stuff. Then why did they discuss it at all — or was It because it was on the BBC, while Mor- timer's play was an ITV production?
On the same edition of Did You See..? Mr Billy Cotton, the deputy managing director of BBC Television, was wheeled on to discuss the question of satellite television and the forthcoming subscriber service. Even before Channel 4 has been launched, before even Peter Jay's breakfast television has burst upon the expectant public, they are talking of more and more channels, bombarding the viewer with more and more Programmes. Some years ago Mr Kingsley Amis coined the expression 'more means worse' when talking about the growth in the number of universities. Yet nobody that I know of likes to say that the same thing ap- plies to television. If with three channels the standard is abysmal, what will it be like when there are four or five — or even 25? Producers will be so desperate for something to put on the air that they will settle for any old rubbish. This view was confirmed the other day when I heard news of an American interviewer who had come over here to drum up material for the subscriber service. The poor man was last heard of making arrangements for an hour- long interview with Larry Adler.
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