Television
Plain men
Richard Ingrams
The South Bank Show (LWT) promised an exclusive and intimate look at the Austrian-born conductor Herbert 'von' Karajan but in the event we got nothing but the usual carefully composed shots of the maestro piloting his yacht, embracing his beautiful blonde wife and walking through the snow with a pet sheep.
Herr 'von' Karajan reminds one more than anyone of his famous compatriot Hitler in his Teutonic concern with order and efficiency and his desire to conquer more and more territories — recordings, films, televison. He is likewise obsessed with his own image. Every shot is carefully composed, every gesture on and off the podium calculated to make the best visual impact. It is all done with the same flair as the Nazis' propaganda films.
But it has nothing to do with music and underneath his mask Karajan, like Hitler, is, as James Galway said, without meaning to be disrespectful, 'a very ordinary person'. We were told at the beginning that recently he had experienced a crisis which had revealed to him the meaning of life, but when he came to speak of it it turned out that he had apparently had, some kind of stroke and had as a result come to the rather mundane realisation of how many things he ' had hitherto taken for granted etc etc. A good television programme would have mocked, or at least have been sceptical about, this pretentious disciplinarian.
The heir to the throne seems determined to become a television personality. This is probably a mistake from the Royal Family's point of view as over-exposure will undoubtedly lead to disrespect. I am not sure why Prince Charles has chosen to appear on Face Values, a BBC programme of supposedly anthropological bent. From the brief bit I saw it seemed the worst kind of Desmond Morris waffle. Between shots of African natives on a beach and gypsies in San Francisco the Prince appeared earnestly intoning nonsense about human beings drawing boundaries and marking out their territory as if they were so many sea-gulls. We then switched to a village in Malta and it was revealed, with accompanying film as proof, that male and female Catholics form separate queues to receive communion in church. It was hard to see why the Prince had given his Royal imprimatur to this dreary stuff. I think he would be better employed writing a few more reviews for Books and Bookmen.
Woody Allen is, as far as I am concerned, the American John Cleese which is to say everybody else finds him hysterically funny while I sit stony-faced and glum. Recently he has been showered with critical plaudits
and awards of all sorts. Talking to lain Johnstone on Arena (BBC 1) Allen seemed like his fellow contemporary hero Karajan, totally self-obsessed, though more appealing than the despotic maestro. He is a lugubrious little man who gave his main interests in life as (a) work, (b) flirting with women and (c) playing jazz. He also said that he would like to be Marlon Brand°, but he may have been pulling our leg at this point. He is plainly obsessed by sex. He admitted with commendable frankness that he often saw from his car window women Walking down the street and felt a violent urge to grab them, do it, and let them out. This preoccupation may help to explain his air of gloom, as at his age he ought to be thinking of higher things. Like Karajan he said nothing of any startling interest or originality: he too is a very ordinary person.
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