Television
Not a Happy One
By PETER FORSTER
THE most extraordinary com- mercial of all has arrived. It shows a platoon of commandos blowing up a bridge, while a • soft, urgent male voice describes how their mission is vital , . . how they are nearly foiled by an enemy recce plane . . . how even so the job is successfully accomplished. After which, as they were shown relaxing, I waited to be told that Soldiers Love Player's or some such deep truth—but no, the voice livened up and made it clear that the whole thing was meant in deadly earnest as a recruiting advertise- ment. What is the mentality, not to mention the morality, of anyone who in these times can try to sell soldiering as an exciting game which may actually give chaps the chance to blow up bridges and get at the enemy? Ugh . . . ugh . . . ugh: it is more likely to make recruits for the Com- mittee of 100.
At the same time, against the falsehoods tele- vision can spread, we must always set its power of exposing truth. For instance, by the time the Chief Medical Officer at London Airport had undergone his sad exposure to the public gaze on Panorama and Dateline London last Monday night, it became, plain as could be that the auth- orities had failed notably in not realising that a London-bound Pakistani might change planes in Paris, and so enter uninspected. Mr. Dimbleby performed the execution with immense reluctance but the dithering was such that eventually he remarked, in hardly the week's happiest phrase, that `six blacks don't make a white.' We passed on to Robin Day interviewing a disguised East German spy, who was obviously Benny Hill.
But I must be careful with Panorama, and not indulge in reckless Mse-Dimbleby. The other week I mentioned having received a Christmas card from the editor of Panorama, Mr. Paul Fox, `whom I do not know'—a harmless peg on which to hang a comment, I thought, for everyone realises that in these days, when Christmas cards are a form of public relations, few come from people one does know. Mr. Paul Fox, whom I still do not know, has now written to me to explain that the card was a reward for 'some rather kind things you had written about Panorama a few weeks earlier,' adding, 'Quite frankly, I would have thought that a personal Christmas card was a privileged communication and, as such, its contents are not divulged to your audience.' A critic's life, you must agree, is dreadfully difficult.
The best thing in the last Panorama (I search round feverishly) was Robert Kee's lucid, well- written commentary on a film about Albania. The one paradox seldom sufficiently grasped by producers is that the spoken word needs to be prepared every bit as carefully as the written— witness the way Mr. Muggeridge has scored with his brilliantly acidulated commentary on The Titans, the BBC's striking potted histories of Russian revolution and American evolution; and the other week Mr. Fyfe Robertson gave an off- the-cuff summary of his visit to Israel which was a model piece of verbal reporting.
But ATV's big feature Inside China, based on Felix Greene's much-reviewed new book, suf- fered from the sheer sloppiness of Mr. Greene's verbiage—the Chinese have 'an extraordinary, almost haunting beauty,' and Peking is 'like a claen modern city.' Mr. Greene's enthusiastic assessment of the regime's achievements also struck me as pretty disputable, and somebody more, cogent than the editor of the China Quar- terly might have been found to dispute it. As it was, the whole programme seemed a protracted commercial for fabulous pink Cathay.
Previous page
