Television
Bumper numbers
Clive Gammon
Rich reading for the holiday flopped on to my doormat, as on millions of others, well in time as usual. In time, but not timely, though no one's to blame for that, not even the ' sub ' who crossheaded Brian Clough's little piece in TV Times, " Let's Make '74 Champagne Year," not even the Radio Times writer who burbled gently, "It's a good long holiday, with the whole country having New Year's Day off for the first time ..." Lots of other days off too, Jack, but you weren't to realise that, were you?
The double issues of both publications (a somewhat grave word but you can't call them papers or magazines, can you?), more flamboyant than usual, and hence more noticeable, made it seem reasonable that some critical notice should be taken of them. That's not meant to sound patronising: the combined readership of the two makes trying that as irrelevant as patting Centre Point on the head. But the curious halfway position they occupy between, let's say, reading matter and show-biz is worth a closer look than either normally gets.
In the issues that run up to 'Jan 4' (as TV Times snappily puts it; '4 January,' says Radio Times in its old-world way) the show-biz element is naturally to the forefront. So is the show-biz idiom. In TV times, especially, everybody is lovely including Danny La Rue who is "obstinately, but charmingly, reluctant to discuss the saucy, near-theknuckle material in his shows. "Take that word ' saucy ', now. I can't recall when I last saw it in contemporary print. How redolent of pre-porn-age innocence it is. I've only once heard it used in speech, by a cab-driver in Cork who found my wife parked in a taxi-rank in Patrick Street. Ready to fight the good fight, she was disarmed to a humble apology when told she was a saucy girl. There is no harm, and may even be a winning charm, in being saucy. If Danny's material is just saucy that makes it all right for everyone from little Kevin right up to his great-granny.
And that's the unassailable reason, I suppose, for the kind of bland, plastic writing that runs right through TV Times (this issue, indeed, sees its resident film critic "nearly falling out of his seat," he tells us, at Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?, a manic comedy, so he says, "of the misadventures that befell various people in the famous New York blackout of a few years ago." Couldn't even be bothered to look up which year it was). So it goes, without for a paragraph rising above this level. And now, page 81 promises us, there's to be a new publication, tulife (that's the way it's printed there, anyway) aimed at TV Times's six million women readers. From the sound of it, if TV Times is sub-Reader's Digest, tvlife will be sub-sub-Cosmopolitan. Seven ladies, for instance, are going to tell the other 5,999,993 how to enjoy their bodies.
There's a fair bit of the same in Radio Times, too (not body-enjoying, I mean, but the old bland goo). "Mike Yarwood likes sticking holly into potatoes, David Niven likes mulling glogg (yes, really)." Maybe it was a little unfair of me to pick on the Big Bumper Christmas Issue, for I've a feeling that sometimes I've read pieces in Radio Times that weren't on the same cosy level as the ones I've been looking at today.
But it all seems a bit ominous. I can't help feeling that TV in Britain is creeping ever more closely to a completely show-biz philosophy and the way it is mirrored in its tame publications seems to bear this out. But that's a thesis to pursue another week.
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