Television
Smiling thru
Clive Gammon
__-Whatever the manifold horrors that await us after the election, vie can all take a lesson in how t,° . smile through a Depression (OP; ' tal letter to show that I don'' mean just feeling melancholy but not having any money as well) from the new and formidablY horrible American series set in moiurtnietasinthyatVBirBgcin2 is Virginia inm t , of a Monday_evening, The 141.a`" tons. The first offering hat everything: Grampa and Grand a-settin' on the back porch; a warm-hearted, pre-Spock, t,°71,,-; headed adolescent who wn.":, (there J oish nhBe o yo)t;
poetry (called, may God forgo'
haertinwyO rea" being shipped off to the Count)/ I rvvtoinsorne headed moppet (there is no other word, either) who got involved al a Mistletoe-Bough incident when she was trapped in an ol' wooden chest; and, topping the lot, aT untaught, neglected, deaf-anu; dumb six-year-old girl in danger 01 i Home. In addition there are assorted kindly old doctors, kinc,11Y old grocery-store keepers arka,a sheriff with a heart of pure,' an' gold: a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover, heavilY dusted with pure, morning," gathered saccharine and toPPeu with whipped cream and YunirtlY' melt-in-your mouth chocolate flake. Friends and neighbours, ie.5 extremely worrying (if you are brow-moppin' terrible and it le' kindly disposed to the Unite,, States as I am) to learn that it earned numerous 'Emmies' since a started going out on Aflerica! telly in 1971. However, it alsuf earned one superlative piece 0., praise in my own home where IT nine-year-old daughter, fall conscious of the gravity of what she was saying and clearly after , painful struggle, rated it higher" than Black Beauty. Teatime Sunday is when The Wallows ought to go out. To a Tv° audience of little girls. mhe Now for sterner stuff. A World At War is still comPellin on a Wednesday evening (ITv,ii and it's about time, perhaps, thy, , tribute was paid not just to research and film-editing but airs to the writers. Last wee programme, concerned with life .., inside Germany during the Wt., was scripted by Neal Achersa!'d often in language which desery", better than the ephemeral life TV programme. As a sarnPlirn Acherson on the long delay 'e war-effort since it was thou, being mums: "The pram was,g,,,ii mobilising German women for wilt that it was better to keep tat'lle tank of the home front." The other thing that struck‘ was the way in which we alvi%r credited the Germans as being ..'.d more efficient and better-prep0, than we were. But in August 194 it seems that industrial production Was actually taken off a wartime footing, indeed that German industry had been producing a much higher proportion of peacetime goods than Britain was from the beginning of the war. Also there was little synchronisation of arms Production, competing firms bringing out an unnecessarily large number of different tank models. That their foreign-beamed radio propaganda was maladroit is well known — but their domestic transmissions sounded the naivest kind of propaganda, too. There was footage from an incredibly flat-footed film about not listening to foreign broadcasts. And, much more tellingly of course, the Germans were boobies enough to invade Russia with a Mere 1,000 tanks, believing that the people would rise up and greet them as deliverers.
Some memorable moments: Hitler's secretary on the way he received the news of Stalingrad — He stared on his soup_"; Goebbels ranting like a chain-store Lear; the joke that was going around
Berliners in 1944 — "Enjoy the war While
dreadful." you can. Peace will be
bMarty Feldman returned to the OX last week with Marty Back logether Again (BBC1)• There Were some bright moments, as lv,ben the undertaker and his men unindered with a coffin into a wedding party and somebody said, :,just Put it with the other "resents," but the humour was Inodest mostly and the punches aboriouslv signalled. A sad
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