Television
Great escapes
Martyn Harris
Martin Amis was Face to Face with Jeremy Isaacs this week (The Late Show, BBC 2, Monday, 11.15 p.m.), and his can- dour and wit made an exceptional inter- view. He had dabbled in bought sex, peril and drugs, had he not? asked Isaacs.
'As a professional writer,' said Amis. 'You made your excuses and left?' 'No. I made my apologies and stayed.'
The dialogue was lit up with many simi- lar sparks. Did he draw characters from his life? No, real people had too much quiddi- ty. The ones you had met for ten minutes were best. Why did he write about sleaze? 'The L,eavisite error was that a writer's material is a moral choice. It is not a selec- tion but a recognition.' Did he still worry about a nuclear holocaust? No, he felt the planet was now safe for war.
I loved the story of Philip Larkin sullenly doling out tips of threepence to Martin and twopence to his brother Philip at the end of visits to Swansea, but then Larkin had less fondness for children than he famously did for parents. 'They fuck you up, your mum and dad' — and few more so than Harry Houdini, whose father was a feckless, pen- niless rabbi and mother a consuming virago (Omnibus, BBC 1, Tuesday, 10.20 p.m.).
Based on the new Ruth Brandon biogra- phy of the escapologist, this was a pedestri- an programme, tarted up with a few circus acts and Joe Melia as a slightly embarrass- ing ringmaster. It only came to life with Brandon herself, who was fascinating on Houdini's erotic exhibitionism and proba- ble impotence. Childless himself, he invent- ed a phantom son called Meyer Samuel about whom he wrote every day to his wife in compulsive detail, eventually promoting him to President of the USA. Most of his tricks were symbolic enactments of inter- ment and resurrection. He was buried in his escapology coffin with his mother's let- ters as a pillow.
His appeal gained a special energy, as Brandon observed, from the personal nature of his performance — the semi- conscious enactment of his own compul- sions: 'This ability to act out the inner self is one of the principal ingredients of charis- ma'. Well said, and it is this same sense of inner dramas publicly played out that was the secret of Mrs Thatcher's charisma too: the shopkeeper's daughter, the Boadicea reborn, the final, tragic Cleopatra — each pitted against a comic-book villain. In the second part of The Downing Street Years (BBC 1, Wednesday, 9.30 p.m.) Neil Kin- nock claimed 'the greatest gift Mrs Thatch- er had was the right enemies. Galtieri was a good enemy — a fascist dictator. . . Arthur Scargill was a good enemy because he did not hold a ballot and tried to excuse illegal actions'. The name of Mrs Thatcher's third enemy, who was at times no less of a gift to her, remained unspoken, but Kinnock would not have taken much prompting to pronounce it. When the Westland Affair came up, he said: 'My speech in [that] debate was the biggest failure of my career aside from losing two elections — and the reason was over-elaboration.'
Now, introspection and honesty are all very well, but it's time Neil gave himself a break and remembered the old bat had more than dumb opponents to thank. If the Argie fuses had worked; if MacGregor had provoked Nacods into striking; if Leon Brittan had not fallen on his sword over Westland, if the Grand Hotel bomb had been one floor higher. If ifs and ands were pots and pans. But she stands exposed now, not just as a beneficiary of outrageous for- tune and a probable failure in the eyes of history, but as astonishingly petty and increasingly absurd.
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