Television
Penalised
Richard Ingrams
It is of course scandalous that with our monopoly or duopoly system of televi- sion the two companies should be allowed to compete with similar programmes at the same time. World in Action goes out simultaneously with Panorama, the South Bank Show with Omnibus. It seldoms hap- pens that one wants to watch both, but when one does it is particularly maddening, especially when there is so little of any worth on TV. I am thinking in this instance of Sunday's clash of Melvyn Bragg's inter- view with John Le Carre and the BBC pro- file of Dirk Bogarde. I imagine that there are quite a lot of people who would have liked to have seen both programmes but on- ly the rich video owners would have manag- ed it.
In the end, because I remembered having seen Bragg interviewing Le Carre some years ago and was fairly sure that they would go over the same ground, I opted for Mr Bogarde, or 'Uncle Dirk' as he refers to himself. His interviewer, also the producer, was a mysterious figure called Saxon Logan whose face was never seen and who spoke in a reverent, precious voice and laughed rather too readily at Bogarde's 'jokes', thus: Bogarde: 'As long as I get the best part I don't give a shit.' Logan: 'Ha, ha, ha, ha.'
Not having read any of Bogarde's books, all of which are bestsellers, I had a picture in my mind beforehand of a shy, appealing bachelor living in leafy France — like Groucho Marx 'just me and my memories'. But Bogarde, judging by his TV ap- pearance, is not an especially attractive figure. Like many of his profession he is an excessively vain man who lives only for himself. 'I'm the only thing I care about,' he let slip at one point. The invisible Saxon made much of the fact that Bogarde had graduated from his early career as the star of the Doctor in the House films to more 'serious' productions like Victim, Death in Venice and Night Porter. We saw some clips from these films, in all of which Bogarde played an assortment of gloomy German perverts and SS men. He seemed to think that it was a wonderful achievement on his part to have kept his fans following him from his corny Odeon days to the latest Fassbinder period. Personally I felt quite grateful not to have seen any of the so- called serious ones and couldn't help think- ing that really Bogarde was at his best in the Doctor films and that everything thereafter represented a downward curve.
There was another of the BBC's so-called 'tributes' on Saturday, this time in honour of the late Sir William Walton. Most of it consisted of just a re-run of the 80th birth- day concert at the Festival Hall. In between
there was a number of repetitive snippets from such luminaries as Andre Previn, Hans Keller and Humphrey Burton, who ought to have been drummed out of the BBC some time ago. Once again I made a determined effort to respond to Walton's violin concerto, but without success. It seemed extraordinary that with all the material available the BBC was unable to put together some kind of proper biography. But there doesn't seem to be any talent left in the BBC's arts department. All we get nowadays are ponderous and inter- minable profiles of American bores like William Burroughs.
Michael Foot would be well advised to keep off the box in future if he wants to in- crease his popularity rating. I feel sure that every time he appears he loses thousands more voters. Starring on this week's World in Action, a scrappy little post mortem on the Darlington by-election, he was asked to watch a video of Darlington voters discuss- ing his performance as Leader of the Op- position. The comments of these mainly working-class speakers were extraordinarily perceptive: 'I just think he's weak and scruffy. . . he's not strong enough . . . he's too old . . . he may be a good man but he doesn't come over as a leader.' Worzel somehow remained impervious to this type of criticism and waffled on in his usual way about the need to rebuild our great country which he pictures in a devastated state as it was in 1945, seeing his task like that of Ce- ment Attlee to rebuild and restore it to its former glory.
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