Television
Entertainment
Alexander Chancellor
Television is entertainment or it is no- thing. The televising of the House of Lords was therefore nothing. The first live broadcast of a House of Lords debate, which could be seen last Wednesday on BBC2 and Channel 4, included some en- tertaining moments. But I very much doubt if the experiment will ever be repe- ated again in that form, unless the country is facing some unimaginable crisis. The cameras will go on rolling, like the Missis- sippi river, but what they record will not be shown live or in full. It will be plundered for the evening news bulletins. We will not be expected in future to sit through entire speeches by Lord Beswick, Lord Gowrie and Lady Seear while waiting for the big star, Lord Stockton, to rise to his feet. At least I fervently hope we will not. With a bit of luck, we will be offered only their finest oratorical moments. This, as far as I am concerned, is all to the good. But it is the opposite of what the politicians pretend that they want. Members of the House of Commons, in particular, claim to be hor- rified by the idea that television might concentrate on only the interesting bits of their proceedings. Mrs Thatcher is re- ported to fear that her weekly confronta- tion with Mr Kinnock at Question Time might be the star attraction if the Com- mons were televised. Such fears, if that is what they really are, are fully justified. What members of Parliament dread hap- pening is exactly what will happen. Give the television companies a bit of time. Let them treat the Lords with such deadly respect that the House of Commons lets them in. Give them another few months in the House of Commons, and then the telvising of the British Parliament will become like the televising of the Dutch Parliament, or the European Parliament, with cameramen wandering around the chamber as they want, looking for interest- ing angles of the Prime Minster's bottom or whatever.
Not satisfied with getting into Parlia- ment, television has its eyes on the courts of justice. It will, of course, be a very long time before cameras are allowed in court. But as a tentative first step in this direction (at least, that is what I imagined it to be), Channel 4 had planned to broadcast a digest of each day's ,proceedings in the Ponting trial, with actors playing the parts of the lawyers, the witnesses and the accused. The idea was that the reports of court hearings as normally seen on the news, with some miserable reporter stand- ing in the fog outside the courtroom spouting a brief memorised summary what went on inside, are inadequate aid difficult to follow. Actors reading from a transcript of the proceedings would, it was imagined, give a far better and more vivid picture of what had happened. The Judge in the Ponting trial decided, however, that this sort of carrying on 'could involve a substantial risk of prejudice to the adminis- tration of justice.' Faced with this bad, Channel 4 decided to go ahead with aP amended arrangement under which theq actors (what actors would they have been. I wonder. We were never told) were replaced by two retired news readers, Mr Kenneth Kendall and Mr Robert Dougall, and another television journalist we see little of these days, Mr Llew Gardner. It was particularly nice to see Mr Dougall doing something other than television com- mercials, but although Channel 4 said it Was 'providing the fullest, yet objective and dispassionate account that television can provide of a major trial' and although the presenter of the programme, Mr God- frey Hodgson, declared that it was 'serving the high public purposes which have always been served by open court reporting in this Country', the programme was rather more boring to watch than it is to read the law reports in the Times. Under the original Plan, each character in the courtroom would have been impersonated by an actor. Under the revised arrangement, the Speakers were not identified with any particular lawyer or witness and they re- verted to reported speech. It was as dull as one would expect. But, as in the case of the Lords, one should not be deceived by such dullness. Give the television companies time. Let them demonstrate their respect for the administration of justice. Soon they Will be inside the courtroom looking for interesting angles of the judge's bottom. With the miners' strike nearing its end, television has begun to move its attention• from the issue of 'uneconomic pits' to that of of 'uneconomic faculties' in the universi- ties. Panorama (BBC1) on Monday assem- bled a group of university professors, students, and so on to discuss the Govern- Merit's attempts to make the universities as lean, efficient and beneficial to the nation- al interest as they want to make everything else. It was all very topical, coming as it did on the eve of Mrs Thatcher's humiliation at the hands of the Oxford dons. But I found It rather difficult to concentrate. Lord Chalfont has said that television is a medium for impressions rather than ideas, and the impression I got was that students anting to study divinity, or philosophy or Indeed anything other than applied science Or economics had better forget it. This trnpression was confused by the fact that tile people who seem to be angriest with tile Prime Minister are scientists, who are the sort of people I had imagined she was s,OPPorting at the expense of the rest of us. r I went to bed little the wiser. I was, "owever, very interested to see for the first time the Spectator's Mr Digby Anderson, gentleman who takes such pleasure in Killing eels. Although a little fat, he turned out to be rather a calm and thoughtful fellow.
I did What the Papers Say (Granada) in Manchester last week, and was puzzled when the delightful make-up girl plastered white lipstick all over my lips. I imagined that this had some secret property which w°uld make my lips look the perfect shade of red. But in fact it made them look white. Y programme was followed by one star- tritO.g Peter Jay, whose lips are quite some- To my amazement his lips were 7utte as well. He could have been Al 'Olson. Why do they do this to people?
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