Television
True-to-life?
Richard Ingrams
The current craze to dramatise real events is resulting in predictable confusion. A new series on the BBC called Survival for example is claiming to show us 'what really happened' in a number of recent horror stories. (Quite apart from anything else we surely get more than enough of these kidnappings and hi-jacks on the news without having them all dramatised as well.) But to discover 'what really happened' in the case, say, of the Dr Herrema kidnapping it is not enough to show the physical details, however authentically. To make it interesting you have to answer such questions as how Dr Herrema managed to endure his terrible ordeal or what made Eddie Gallagher the man he is.
Without such information, therefore, these true-to-life reconstructions give us a purely two uimensional picture. But sometimes not even the two dimensions are properly presented. In the Gay News trial for example reshown on Sunday (BBC2), everything — the Old Bailey, the lawyers, the jurymen — was beautifully and meticulously recreated. But the James Kirkup poem which was the cause of the shemozzle could not be read out. The BBC quite rightly said that they are prevented from doing so under the Libel Amendment At of 1888. But they failed to say that even if the law didn't exist they would never read out that poem in a month of Sundays. WhY not? Because of the very thing that the trial was all about: it would deeply offend the vast majority of viewers.
Yet not to read out the poem, besides lending a bogus dignity to the Gay News case, made the whole thing pretty pointless. For how can you appreciate a trial if you are not told what it is the accused has done, except in the most general terms? I notice incidentally that this was the second showing of the programme; that there will be another Everyman about the Appeal Court's decision in a fortnight's time and that there has already been in the last year an Editors programme entirely devoted to the Gay News case, not to mention an Everyman called The Lord's My Shepherd and He Knows I'm Gay. In other words you don't have to be John Junor to smell a rat here. As far as men are concerned Princess Margaret has had a pretty raw deal. First there was Old Lcgover; and having seen him on about six programmes recently I can't help feeling she was well shot of him. Second was Snowdon, who we all know was 100 per cent disaster. And now comes little Roddy, who appeared on the BBC last week making his debut as a singer in a recording made for French television. The scene revealed a young man, got up in Black Tie like a model in Harpers & Queen, sitting on a sofa clutching what looked like a glass of Vino Tinto. To the accompaniment of an unseen orchestra this extraordinary apparition now burst into song, French, of course — the usual sort of stuff about 'Venez chez moi, cherie, let's have a bit of l'amour, won't it be merveilleux', etc, while a fatuous grin played about his features. He was quite obviously miming the words because his lips didn't make the right movements. The BBC had assembled a trio of critics to comment on the Roddy sound. Hughie Green, thought he 'put up an awfully good show while agreeing with a moustachioed mall from the Daily Mail that it was not the sort of act that would go down well in working men's clubs up North. A lady from Capital Radio called Maggie something said she didn't think Roddy was 'pulling it off'. Ever since the Arabs brought us close to ruin by jacking up the price of petrol, the has been a flood of people from Britain int°, Arabia hoping to get what they call a slice 0' the action. Publishers, I need hardly saY1, have not been slow off the mark and one 0' them for some reason commissioned Edna O'Brien to go to Abu Dhabi and write a, book about it. You have to be a loony to fall in love with Arabia, and anyone could hovel told Edna that Abu Dhabi is the most awl'', God-forsaken dump. But she had to go an find out for herself; and the trip was filmed for the South Bank Show (LWT). The only thing that turned her on was the Sheikh. I rYself thought he looked a shifty little fel w but Edna gushed away like an Irish Glenda Slag about his 'long, beautiful and enticing face' and his 'magnetic and undoubtedly sexual personality'. Landing in the desert from a helicopter she proceeded to interrogate a gnarled old Bedouin la Frostie: 'What is the most special and niarvellous thing about the desert?. . . What is the most important thing in the world?' I couldn't catch the answers.
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