Television
Fantastic
Richard Ingrams
Some months ago I received an invitation from Granada Television to take part in a new programme in which selected wits WOuld be asked to give five-minute 'afterdinner, speeches to an invited audience. The idea did not appeal to me. First of all, aPPearing on Granada means going on a horrid train to Manchester, the dump of dumps. Secondly, it is well known in the trade that when it comes to rewarding the workers in his vineyard Lord Bernstein, like S o many who call themselves socialists, is far from generous. Without examining it too closely I threw the invitation away. I was altogether amazed to hear a few weeks later from a colleague who had accepted the offer to take part in the programme that Bernstein had undergone a Scrooge-style conversion. Two hundred and fifty pounds, no less, was being shelled out in exchange for going to Manchester, donning a dinner jacket and regaling guests With five minutes' worth of sparkling wit. Once again I had missed a great opportunity to enrich myself. Having now seen the programme, My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am glad that I did so, and anyway I do not possess a dinner jacket. Bernard Levin once remarked that for mysterious reasons when any funny writer writes for Punch he automatically ceases to be funny. So far as I am concerned the same thing happens when a man, however humorous, dresses himself UP in a dinner jacket and starts telling jokes into a microphone to a lot of people smoking cigars after dinner. Even the great Spike Milligan failed to bring a smile to the lips. And there was a predictability about the Choice of guests: Clive Jenkins, who showed by his recent libel action against the Socialist Worker that he is completely lacking in a sense of humour, and the inevitable Norman St John-Stevas (it is high time that both Channels signed a Norman St John-Stevas Non-Proliferation Treaty). The only person Who made me laugh was a vicar, the
Reverend Don Lewis, who in the course of five minutes' worth of complete nonsense proclaimed, 'What this country needs is more ex-Prime Ministers.'
The second of the two Bragg — Russell films about Coleridge and Wordsworth, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Granada), was more what one might have expected. The two collaborators had decided to link Coleridge's famous poem with his unhappy marriage to Sara Fricker. The albatross became a symbol of Mrs Col eridge and there was a typical Russell scene when the poet, rowing his wife on a lake, suddenly put aside the oars and plunged an anchor into her breast to the accom paniment of some strident music by Vaughan Williams. Like so many of Russell's biographical fancies this identification of
the albatross with the wife was utterly mistaken and bogus. At the time he wrote The Ancient Mariner Coleridge was still on quite
good terms with Sara, and even were that not the case it would still be wrong to kill the two birds with one anchor. Coleridge's vis ion is that of an intensely imaginative man whose writing perhaps was already influ enced by drug-taking. Unlike the healthy man's dreams, the drug addict's fantasies have no links with reality, so it is rather pointless to search Coleridge's writings for personal symbols.
One would not mind too much about the travesties of Bragg and Russell, were it not for the fact that most viewers who will never read a line of Coleridge will be left with an utterly false impression of him. Many of them will perhaps conclude that the poor fellow really did kill his wife in a fit of mad rage brought on by drug-taking. The fact that Melvyn Bragg, television's leading artistic pundit and a man of some influence in the world of state patronage, was jointly responsible for this trash is, I suppose, not to be wondered at and I imagine that the inflated reputations of Russell and Bragg will be quite unaffected by these two worthless and dishonest films.
After so much nonsense it was pleasant to listen once again to A.J.P. Taylor, this time
on Revolution (BBC 1). He is someone
who, in contrast to Bragg and Russell, shows some concern with uncovering the truth. As happened last year, his lecture was preceded by an hour and twenty minutes of show-jumping with, as usual, a gratuitous commentary from Dorian Williams.
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