Television
Home-made
Richard Ingrams
The only politician a politician is interested in is himself. It follows that a programme of Harold Wilson talking about Churchill will only tell us something about Wilson and will therefore be dull. This proved to be the case with the latest Frost-Wilson dialogue filmed in Churchill's underground wartime bunker beneath Whitehall. It seemed a good setting for these two ghosts of their former selves Wilson looking glazed, Frost with a pecul
iarly vacant expression nodding in agreement with open mouth. Wilson plainly has
no conception of what made Churchill dif ferent from the normal run of politicians. This is because he has such a high opinion of himself that he cannot begin to imagine how a fellow Prime Minister could tower above him like a colossus. Half an hour passed and nothing was said to explain Churchill at all. Wilson told once again his famous Churchill anecdote about the time he resigned from
the Attlee government, though typically in
this particular Churchill story it is Wilson who delivers the punch line. Frost excelled himself, I thought, by asking Wilson at one point 'Could Clement Attlee have done what Churchill did?' I like to think of the two of them shut up in the bunker for ever engaging in their banal cross-talk.
An interesting little controversy has been going on in the Radio Times about Eustace and Hilda. Obviously many viewers were as
appalled as I by the incestuous kiss at the end of the story. But the producer Anne Head is unrepentant. She says bravely that there is 'an implied incestuous relationship' in the book between brother and sister. In reply Hartley's friend Lord David Cecil now writes, can state categorically that neither directly nor by implication did Hartley intend incest to be the theme of the book . . . the kiss in the last chapter was not meant as erotic but as a symbol of Hilda's new-found power to express affection demonstratively.' But even if incest had been implied this would not entitle Anne Head to film a thoroughly erotic kiss. There is, as I said before, this awful urge to intro duce explicit sex as an element in everY single story. In this case it was tragic as it wrecked an otherwise excellent production.
Why am I nearly always disappointed bY Mike Yarwood? I think for the same reasons that many other comedy shows dis appoint. You feel that like Ronnie Barker for example, Yarwood is a cut above the material he has to perform. He is such a good mimic that given the right sort of scriptwriters he could provide a dose of
much-needed satire. But he wants to be loved by the mums, and wants to be a show business personality. Why else does he insist on singing terrible Frank Sinatra-type
songs completely `straight', so behaving like one of those Palladium dummies he rightly feels compelled to mimic? (The high spot of Saturday's show was in fact a superb impersonation of Mrs Thatcher by Janet Brown.) After all such mass-produced comedy Spike Milligan's 07 is fresh and home-made, For once the studio audience is not just there to Provide plastic laughter. Milligan and his east perform to it. If actors forget their lines, they go back and try again. The small besPectacled pianist Alan Clare reading his lines off a clip-board is an excellent addition to the cast which includes as always the brilliant John Bluthal.
Previous page
