Television
Cut the nostalgia
Ian Hislop
Why was BBC2 paying tribute to the life and worle of Lew Grade? It cannot just have been to fill up a whole evening with old ITV programmes that used to get big ratings so there must have been another reason. I am still not sure what it was. Was ATV Night a sort of post-modern, ironic tribute or were we really meant to take all this self-consuming televisual history seri- ously? Lord Grade certainly took himself seriously and so did his nephew, Michael Grade, who was given the job of interview- ing him in The Persuader (BBC2, Saturday, 9.00 p.m.). This was presumably an ironic, post-modern interview where the fact that the two men are related is part of the idea and the audience shares the joke that no question of the remotest difficulty will be asked. Lord Grade was therefore allowed to get away with criticising another tycoon, Robert Holmes a Court, on the grounds that 'he was only interested in money.' This was shortly after telling his nephew a very long and self-serving anecdote about how he had got £25 million out of the American networks for the rights to Jesus of Nazareth. This figure, he said in what I presume was meant to be a mildly blasphemous joke, came to him as 'a vision'. What was obvi- ously not a joke was his comment that he went into film because 'I had done every- thing in television.' Well, up to a point Lord Grade. A more modest man might have admitted that there are possibilities in the medium of television that The Golden Shot and Sunday Night at The Palladium had not fully explored. Areas beyond even The Prisoner and The Muppets.
Grade lost control of the television com- pany he built up because he finally did business with someone more ruthless than himself. None of the previous stories Lord Grade had told about bullying people into doing what he wanted for the price he wanted made this seem particularly sad. Nor did the thought that he subsequently went down the pan in the film world by producing the abysmal Raise the Titanic. The charisma that his stars talked about was in no way evident, least of all in his chomping on the fatuously long cigars that serve as a trademark for so many charmless men.
The best bit of The Persuader was the title sequence, which was somehow appro- priate because it was always the best bit of The Persuaders. The BBC used the same music and format of the original series to tell the life of Lew Winogradski, an immi- grant success story as spectacular as that of the Tony Curtis character in the pro- gramme. Similarly the most enjoyable sec- tion of the whole ATV evening was the A to Z of ATV (8.00 p.m.) which pared down all the old programmes to their theme tunes, title sequences and very short clips. BBC2 has become extremely good at pack- aging archive material like this (too much practise one might argue with all these theme nights) and this sort of brief, nostal- gic compilation was a great deal more entertaining than actually watching a lot of the ATV programmes.
I sat through an episode of The Saint (BBC1, Monday, 10.30. p.m.) which showed how disappointing nostalgia can be. After the titles it was all pretty embarrass- ing. Roger Moore raised his eyebrow quizzically and wandered through a limp spy plot to the final scene where someone died in his arms. And he still looked quizzi- cal. I thought Jason King (BBC1, Monday, 11.20 p.m.) would be more fun since it is easily the worst attempt to portray a het- erosexual man that television has ever achieved. In this episode Jason's mous- tache made unconvincing contact with the lips of Felicity Kendal. But in the end even watching him change from purple kaftan to lime green trouser suit and then back to lilac dressing-gown got tiresome. He also kept saying things like 'Discovered a new pate' and `Take off the mask our revels are ended.' I think its time to say 'Ciao!' to this stuff for a decade or two.
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