Television
Game's up
Richard Ingrams
Like the member of some agreeable old club which has decided finally to let women in, I have been savouring the last days of the all-male ITN. Any day now, as newspaper readers will know, a young female person called Anna Ford is going to burst in to the masculine peace and calm of the ITN newsroom as their 'answer' to Angela Rippon. There may be only a few days left in which to enjoy the last news bulletins not to be read out by high-pitched women, but bY nice quietly-spoken, soothing gentlemen with the right sort of accents like Reggie Bosanquet, Sandy Gall and Rory MacPherson.
reading as an all-male preserve. The Corporation is almost always found to be behind the really silly and degrading innovations in television. But it is a sign of cravenness on 'the part of ITN to feel obliged to follow suit. As I never tire of pointing out La Rippon may have captured the imagination of any number of male viewers as a 'sex object' but as a newsreader Hawk features is the most terrible _flop.
Besides which, she has now hired an impresario and ventured into Show Business. This, I comfort myself by thinking, could well prove to be her undoing. Newsreaders, after all, arc a bit like members of the Royal Family. They are figure-heads of a sort. We like to think of them as respectable people, even if they are not. (Black sheep Bosanquet only just gets away with his escapades on account of his roguigh charm.) We could perhaps tolerate La Rippan so long as she remained an untouchable ice-cold presence in the newsroom. But now that she has started parading herself on the stage as a kind of Bluebell girl, the game could well be up.
The truth is that most women are not up to this sort of thing. Indeed, with a few notable exceptions, which at the moment escape me, women on Current Affairs programmes have proved to be a disaster. Yet it is precisely at this moment, when this fact is at last beginning to dawn on everyone, that the television companies are foisting women into every conceivable type of slot. In fact you now have a situation in which programmes think they have to provide sexual balance, on the same basis as political programmes. A Labour MP must be balanced by a Conservative. Likewise, on Melvyn Bragg's new show, for example, you will notice that a male critic is balanced by a female.
Al! this has only added to the sexual confusion which our greatest living writer Auberon Waugh described so graphically in the last issue of the Spectator. The BBC as usual is doing its best to make matters worse. You would think, for example, that those women who campaign for abortion on demand have more than their fair share of publicity in the press and on television. why then does the BBC feel obliged to give them a whole Open Door programme to themselves, as happened on Monday, to promote their misguided views? (The programme in fact gets two showings.) It was bad enough to watch a bearded abortionist in a bow tie, Dr Malcom Potts, proudly brandishing his latest equipment; one had to listen as well to a host of gloomy flat-voiced young women moaning on about their 'supportive work situations' etc. I suppose the BBC would
justify this insidious propaganda, which encourages women tO be 'free' by ridding themselves of unwanted babies, by providing balance and giving equal time to the anti-abortion lot. But why should either organisation be given a Party Political?
I couldn't help thinking again of Auberon Waugh while watching Group Captain Peter Townsend talking to Ludovic Kennedy earlier this week. Waugh alone, I think, among commentators has had the courage to broach the one question we want to know the answer to, which, in order not to offend older readers in the Home Counties. I will refer discreetly to as the leg over' question. Ludicrous never got within miles of asking it. All that Townsend would say Was that 'matters came to head' one afternoon in the Red Drawing Room at Windsor Castle. I myself think the answer is No. Townsend seems a nice enough fellow but, like Ronald Knox, 'insufficiently coarse'. At the end of the interview it still wasn't Clear what had happened in 1955.
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