Television
Ad nauseam
Richard Ingrams
Ihave been thinking more and more in 1 recent days what a good thing it would be if the BBC was 'privatised' like Amersham and flogged off to the highest bidder. If Mrs Thatcher is looking for simple ways to help boost the economy this is surely a very good one. With the licence fee now at £50 the abolition of the BBC would leave the average householder nearly £.1 a week better off, though for those of us with black and white the saving would be less.
The point being that the BBC's fare is really now no better than ITV's and is pro- duced on exactly the same lowest-common' denominator principle. In some fields it is actually inferior. The new arts programme Omnibus (BBCI), for example, has been put out in a quite shameful way on Sunday evenings with the aim of grabbing the au- dience from the London Weekend South Bank Show which starts an hour later not a way you would expect a public cor- poration to behave, for a start. But even so there is no doubt that Omnibus is a dog's breakfast compared to the Bragg alter- native. Barry Norman is just not up to do- ing an arts programme and has only been given the job because he is a familiar face. Last Sunday he did a very scrappy little in- terview with John Mortimer using one or two snippets of film. If the South Bank Show had done it I am sure they would have given the whole programme over to Mor- timer and very interesting it would have been too. Instead of which, Norman after about a quarter of an hour had said good- bye to Rumpole and was waffling awaY about some Indian dancer that no one had ever heard of.
Another objection to the BBC is the way in which too many people are doing too well out of it. It annoys me, for example, that on quiz shows the same BBC faces come up over and over again. ScooP (BBC2) is a shameless imitation of Radio 4's News Quiz, a programme with which I have been connected now for some time. But the television version doesn't begin to work, partly because the panellists seem to have been chosen not so much for their ability to make a few jokes — the only point of a programme like this — but be- cause they are BBC people for whom a bit of extra publicity is no doubt thought to be a good thing. Last week featured not onlY Esther Rantzen but her husband, Desmond Wilcox, formerly the BBC's head of general features, and introduced to viewers as, inter alia, an 'author'. This week we will have Julian Pettifer and David Dimbleby.
I have not yet been to the new Barbican Arts Centre, and from what I hear it may be some time before I set foot in the place. From the glimpse one gets of it on Live From the Barbican (BBC2) it does not look very inviting and I can't see why London needs yet another concert hall when people find it hard enough to make the old ones Pay. The BBC2 show has featured a number of outstanding musicians such as Rudolf Serkin and Yehudi Menuhin, but on both occasions the performance has been Marred by the presence of a man called John Antis who squats on the stage in his shirtsleeves and tells us what the music is all about. Poor Yehudi Menuhin, who was try- ing to conduct the Eroica symphony, could hardly get a few bars done before Mr Arms was interrupting to speculate on what a.eethoven was feeling at that particular Jncture. IVIenuhin, who is a humble and 1011g-suffering man, put up with Amis's Preposterous interjections with great good humour. 'I enjoy playing this — even backwards,' he said at one point to ap- Plause from the audience. The week before, Antis had insisted on singing during his lec- ture on Mozart and did so in the wrong key. Then he had to break off in mid-flow because the programme was over-running. T,The producer of this musical shambles is unmphrey Burton, another good. BBC man Whom it seems you can't keep down.
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