Television
Bore-in
Richard Ingrams
A state of unseemly shambles now prevails in the BBC's Current Affairs department. Earlier this week it was announced that Newsday, the worthy BBC-2 daily commentary, is to be scrapped. It will apparently be replaced by something or other in the autumn. There had been plans to move Tonight onto BBC-2 but now the head of the BBC's current affairs programme Mr John Gau has said with commendable frankness, 'the trouble aboutmoving Tonight to BBC-2 is that it would have to be replaced by somethingon BBC-1.'
You see the snag, of course. Meanwhile in this state of confusion viewers will have been reassured to learn from informed sources not a million miles from the Daily Telegraph that the Controller of BBC-1, Mr Bill Cotton, favours the idea of a fivenights-a-week chat show such as the Saturday Parkinson. The Controller of BBC-1 no less, sincerely believes that what will be good for the BBC and the nation as a whole is a nightly Parkinsonian Bore-In — featuring whom? Glenda Jackson? David Frost? Norman St John Stevas? Just how utterly discredited this formula is was shown last Friday, in fact, when Russell Harty's guest of honour was none other than Michael, Parkinson. I do not know what they found to talk about because I did not stay up to see. But I bet the subjects under discussion did not include the advisability of early retirement.
It was hard not to be reminded of retirement by James Cameron who appeared as compere of Race to the North (BBC-2), a programme about old trains. There is something irresistible about trains and about films about trains but this one did not quite come off, partly because the alleged race to Aberdeen by the East and West Coast Rail Companies seemed rather bogus. What pathos there was came from the similarity between Cameron, who for some reason
was not allowed to write his own script, and the fine old chuffers of yesteryear. I can see a good BBC documentary about their veteran reporters whizzing indefatigably all over the place — Cameron, Cutforth, the flying Fyfc-Robertson — all of them soon to be replaced by the equivalent of those ugly yellow snub-nosed HSTs.
For the first time in several years, or possibly ever, I found Panorama fascinating. It
consisted of a report by Michael Cockerel!
from Brazil on the Letelier affair. Orlando Letelier, a former Allende minister was killed by a car bomb in 1976 in Washington,' where he was exiled after being imprisoned by General Pinochet. President Carter's new FBI would not let the killing go uninvestigated and the General was in the end compelled to extradite one of the organisers of the killing, an American-born agent called Townley, formerly a salesman for Bernie Cornfeld. Two women made the most impression: Madame Letelier, who bravely insisted on seeing her husband's remains after the car-bomb explosion and the wife of the assassin Mrs Townley who predicted that General Pinochet would lose support for cynically handing-over his trusted agent to the United States. Cockerell managed not to be too smug about the Junta with the result that the story had something of the appeal of an Eric Ambler thriller. Amid the talk of cover-ups and hitmen, however, it was hard not to remember that the BBC have for months been sitting on a report on the Norman Scott affair. Like charity, the exposure of political scandals should begin at home.
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