Television
Pseudette
Richard lngrams
I don't know whether it's the Christmas commercials, which always bring on a feeling of suicidal despondency, but I have been particularly aware during the last weeks of the fact that almost everyone who appears on television is a tremendous bore. When the person concerned is Tom Stoppard, who featured with Melve on the new first of the new South Bank Show series (LWT), I wonder whether it might be my fault after all. For is not this Stoppard the same person who has been acclaimed by all and sundry (not to mention Bernard Levin) as the most brilliant, witty, scintillating, etc man of our times? Yet once again, watching the extracts from his plays and listening to him talk about them, I could discern nothing — that is the slightly worrying thing — absolutely nothing, to be said in his favour apart from the fact that he is obviously a keen Muppet fan. I am therefore confronted by two possibilities: either (a) I am a clappedout, juandiced moron who is totally out of touch, or (b) the Levins have got it all wrong. I leave it to readers to decide the issue. (Please write to me on a postcard.) One of the more depressing aspects of our attitued to Art nowadays is the way in which photography has been elevated by intellectuals to the same status as painting. On a recent visit to the National Portrait Gallery, whither I sometimes resort to mingle with the illustrious dead, I was saddened to see the paintings and drawings interspersed with vulgar snapshots. I am not sure who is to blame for this but I would not be surprised to learn that it was that ridiculous moustachioed poseur Dr Roy Strong, formerly the gallery's Director.
Presumably he would agree with American pseudette Ms Susan Sonntag who told us last week at the beginning of a pretentious Omnibus lecture (BBC-2) that if asked to choose between a Holbein portrait of Shakespeare or a very smudged photograph most of us would choose to have the photograph. After trying to follow her meandering discourse, I fell to querying again why Mr Burton's chief Arts programme should be given over to a classic American bore especially when only a few weeks ago we had the appalling Rolling Stone journalist Hunter S. Thompson. The point about photographs is that they are like Tom Stoppard and Susan Sonntag not to mention Sir Michael Swann, Lord Rothschild and Dr Jonathan, jolly boring. This point has been brought home to me in recent days when the Daily Telegraph has been appearing with blank spaces where the photographs should be. In most cases the caption is quite enough; for example 'Mrs Thatcher is seen here welcoming former Governor Reagan at the House of Commons yesterday'. The blank space is useful• for doodling. It is the banality of the photograph which drives photographers to the sensational — nudes, grotesques, war atrocities — because only by provoking a shock can they compel our attention. Ms Sonntag failed to grasp this elementari point. She concluded her lecture with the portentous remark, 'Photographs have turned reality into a shadow'. Sunsets, she said, looked corny — too much like phoo" graphs. I wonder when she last looked at a sunset. I imagine in New York all those sky-scrapers get in the way. Ms Sonntag had been preceded by the scientist Lord Rothschild delivering his Dimbleby lecture on 'Risk'. His aninins seemed to be directed partly against a fellow scientist called Lord Ashby and also the anti-Nuclear Power Station Campaign. His, lordship appeared to suggest that you and,' are more likely to die of flu than as a result of a nuclear accident. I was left wondering how anyone, be he Lord Rothschild or the ignorant man in the street can know safe or not Nuclear Power Stations are14.` one's observations suggest that they are nor' When I went to Dungeness a few weeks ag° the first thing that struck me about thet power station was the site. The reason it is a Dungeness, not Battersea, is because the, Rothschild-style boffins are afraid dia.' unspeakable things might happen. amount of waffle can obscure this perfect', obvious point. vompospog
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