Television
A pittance
Richard Ingrams
I said before that the misfile Barrie Gavin at the end of a programme can normally be regarded as an indication of preceding bore" dom and pretentiousness. I have also by noof become suspicious of the legend 'introduced by Humphrey Burton' at the beginning. The combination of these two in last week s Omnibus (13BC1) proved fatal to my urge t°
remain up and about. Burton, like Bragg, can't be expected to resist a musician who, as he puts it, 'is equally at home with a symPhony orchestra as with a rock-and-roll band', in this case a rather preposterous figure with a beard, called David Bedford, Who wears a garish plastic jacket with a Picture of a football on the back that makes Me glad my set is black and white.
This man likes nothing better, it seems, than to introduce Dr Who noises made by Whirling hosepipes and wine glasses into an orchestra and seems to make a good enough liVing out of it. Omnibus had in fact commissioned him to write a piece of music sPecially for television inspired by the White Horse of Uffington. Among Bedford's strange assortment of sounds I could have sworn I heard several people turning in their graves, including assorted Neolithic chieftains, King Alfred the Great and G. K. hesterron, some of whose stanzas fromthe Ballad of the White Horse' Bedford set to music for a girls' choir. These poor lasses were required to fill their mouths with helium which, if inhaled in large enough quantities, enables the voice to produce an unearthly shriek. After some shots of the Composer playing squash etc the music gan and the Dr Who noises accompanied a flint of the White Horse area taken from a helicopter. I didn't stay for the shrieking bit. To anyone interested in good music of an uncomplicated type I recommend the new
Muppet album which contains some excel lent numbers, two of which were featured on Sunday. The Muppets have been a bit erratic of late and the previous week's take-over by
the pigs was not really a success. However Sunday's show (London Weekend) more
than made up for it. The guest was Bob
Hope, for a start, and then there was a Pigs' Calypso animal wrestling with an alligator, JaPanese pole vaulters, Rowlf playing the Pathetique sonata (abridged), Dr Bunsen H.oneydew with his latest invention, a can
nibalistic waste-paper basket, and the Swed ish chef demonstrating the use of a duck Press. It ended with Bob Hope in a cowboy suit singing 'Don't fence me in' astride a
terrible parody of a horse. I would like to have seen it all again about six times. Dear
Alexander Chancellor, please can the Spectator buy me a video tape recorder. . . (No. Ed.)
Ronald Harwood on Read All About It (BBC 1) looks a bit jollier these days but the Show is terribly dull. I think the reason is that too much fiction is discussed and it is given to few to be able to convey the flavour of fiction; it doesn't help either to ask on people like Group Captain Peter Townsend who, let's face it, leg over or not, is a bit of an old bore. As for John Braine . . .
It is short-sighted and silly of the BBC and ITV to show Panorama and World in Action respectively at the same time on Monday night. Both of them lose viewers because both of them are for the same audience. I Myself would have quite liked to watch the P. anorama report about German war crimlnals but opted instead for World in Action's programme 'Working for a Pittance', it being the work of my Private Eye colleague Michael Gillard (though not, I must add, a description of his job situation at Gnome House). It was in fact a timely exposé of the way in which big business uses old and handicapped people in local council centres to do humdrum jobs like packaging, paying them as little as £4 for a twenty-seven-hour week. Not surprisingly the businessmen concerned were reluctant to come on to the programme, and British Airways, who employ the handicapped at Uxbridge to pack useless give-away souvenir wallets for Concorde travellers, refused to allow Granada to film the work on the grounds that it would be bad for Concorde to be shown to be associated with the disabled!
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