Television
Highlights
Peter Ackroyd
Ian MacShane as Disraeli had so much lacquer on his hair that it seemed to be carved out of wood: political 'confidantes' tended to stare at it; perhaps they were studying its grain, or counting the number of concentric circles. The dialogue was hardly more supple, with phrases like 'It was ruin to be seen with you. . . Another cup of tea?. . . I burn to write great drama' and Disraeli kept on looking at the floors to make sure that none of his lines had fallen through it. Of course there was a lot of history about: Robert Peel smiled, stiffly, like an advertisement for Ex-Lax; Frenchmen seemed to think situations were piquant',. society ladies gave little sobs and squeaks as if they were frogs about to die.
Game-shows will go on forever. Nicholas Parsons is resting, perhaps with a stake through his heart, but in the meantime Ted Rogers is pretending to be nice on 3-2-1. After a sequence of impossibly difficult questions Kan you name for me five different animals?'), the contestants win a small but ugly car. Mr Rogers himself behaves like a vacuum-cleaner salesman in a town without carpets, but his manic affability is as nothing compared with Derek Batey's the mortician who doubles as host on Mr And Mrs. There must be a limit to the number of questions which he can still ask about married life when did your husband discover he was a homosexual? How many times has he tried to stab you? Let's hope he finds it soon.
With Wonder Woman summoned back to eternity, Dr Who has crawled on to the screen again. Of course everyone knows that it is 'really' for adults (those extraordinary people who also pretend to enjoy the grotesquely unfunny Muppets), but the over-acting and the Tupperware sets of this prehistoric series have now turned it into a mixture of Blackpool pantomime and an English language course for Urdu viewers. The programme has sent itself up so much that it has drifted completely out of sight. At least Star Trek is back, with real people, even if William Shatner is wearing a corset. And The Man From Atlantis, alias Patrick Duffy, is still with us, albeit now in an earthly form: his beauty and goodness shed a blessed light over Dallas, an American soap-opera set amongst Texan oil-barons. Ten-gallon hats perch precariously above ten tons of collapsible granite; the macho males are so uptight only their eye muscles move.
But television has its rewards: David Hunter, of Crossroads, now drowns the last syllable of every word with a groan, as though he were swallowing golf balls. An Irish announcer became over-excited dur ing a hurling match: Tat Boylan, the man with the flowing locks, is trying to get it up' and then, perplexingly, 'He is waving his stick or his hand'. At least the hurlers don't kiss after a score, but perhaps they don't know where their lips are. And then there is always wrestling: Kent Walton, like some crazed Canadian exegete, still draws attractive parables and moral homilies from the secrets of the ring. If only someone would give him a reverse-crutch-hold, doublearm-lock and kamikaze-special: preferably all at once.
There's always more to come: Russell Harty introduced the 'autumn highlights' of London Weekend Television, and not even his prissy suburban camp could disguise the horror of it with programmes like Mind Your Language, a kind of Holocaust set in an English language school, and Soap, the most boring American comedy series since Bewitched. Why can't we import the real thing? We could be breathless in front of Let's Make A Deal, a quiz-show where the audience actually become hystekcal, stunned by talent-spots like The Gong Show where the contestants attack the judges; and of course there is the invincible Truth or Consequences hosted by Bob Barker, the Taj Mahal of Western television. You have to see him to believe him.
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