Will
Waspe Happy though I am to see the struggling Daily Express getting a full-page ad. from ATV of which they can boast mysteriously on the front page: "The selling power of the Express" I shall have to ask my expert colleague Philip Kleinman to explain to me what seems on the face of it an act of spendthrift folly on the part of ATV. For one thing, contrary to the announcement on the front-page, they don't seem to be selling anything. What the ad. was mostly about (it appeared last Thursday) was the company's TV series, Edward the Seventh, which Sir Lew has already sold to the ITV network for screening next February, and also to the CBS network in the US.
The rest of the ad page was taken up with quaint little trade-paper promotional announcements about ATV's feature films. What, I wonder, would the average Express reader make of this straight-faced recommendation of a picture entitled Dogpound Shuffle? "Frank Yablans, President of Paramount, said in a cable to Sir Lew Grade: 'Elliott and I today confirmed Paramount's distribution of Dogpound Shuffle. This picture is so extraordinary, so lovely and, hopefully, an enormous grosser. I consider it a personal pleasure to be associated with this film and assure you it will be distributed with the same sensitivity that went into its production. I can only hope that we share enormous profits. Kindest regards."
While this reveals the extraordinary loveliness of transatlantic showbusiness cables and the pure radiance of the face of capitalism, it hardly clears up the mystery of why ATV took the page. The advertising agency claims that the paper's "editorial attention and loyalty to the Royal Family made it first choice." Only the irredeemably cynical, I feel sure, would think it in some way connected with the fact that Beaverbrook Newspapers have a financial stake in commercial television.
Ebb tide
I can recall seeing very little in the papers about Peter Hall's riverboat
press conference, to which I referred the other week. But I am not too surprised. The National Theatre's publicity department sent out a couple of hundred invitations, but discovered at the last moment that if the boat took on more than 100 passengers it was liable to sink. So there was much frantic telephoning to ensure that, at least, no one who was coming was planning as is often the habit among pressmen to bring along wife, girl friend or similar. The result was that only about fifty people turned up and most of those were the National's own staff.
Mail orders
I am sorry to learn that the sprightly veteran Cecil Wilson, the Daily Mail's film critic and former theatre critic is being retired. The paper's present theatre critic, cute little Jack Tinker, is being moved over to the films and will have to start getting up much earlier of a morning.
No riffraff
Admirers of Sammy Davis, Jr. will be pleased to hear that he is returning to London to do a cabaret season in July at Grosvenor House. They will be, perhaps, slightly less pleased by the prices being charged -£16.80 for seats at the best tables (though that does include dinner and breakfast).
Lib women
I congratulate the recently formed 'Women's Company' (derived from the Women's Theatre Group which operated lunchtimes last autumn at London's Almost Free Theatre) on their tolerant liberality, not to mention their coming to terms with the facts of life, in their intention actually to employ men in their first production, a musical called Go West, Young Woman, opening at the Round House next month. There are likely to be three chaps in the cast, all in relatively subordinate parts of course, which is an advance on the WTG which only presented plays by women, with women and, as far as could be ascertained, for wothen — thereby displaying the same discrimination allegedly practised in the allegedly male-dominated theatre.
The new attitude has not so far commended them to the Arts Council. The WTG received a subsidy. The WC has none.
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