Television
Flop, flop, flop
Peter Levi
Ajust estimate of this week's televi- sion would scar with fire the paper it was written on. Of course, this is partly bad luck: the normal viewer forgets at break- fast what so enraged him last night, or if very strong-minded he has switched off anyway. Television is essentially a grey area with tiny pin-pricks of illumination. Only the news was mildly cheerful this week, pleasantest on Channel 4 in the early evening, but even that could be much more amusing. Why do we hear so little of the man who died when hit in the back by a turnip from a passing car, or the elderly logger hit in the stomach by a cabbage? It is on stories like these that television should deploy its vast resources.
One of the worst disasters in recent television history is Anything More Would be Greedy (Anglia), a deadly soap-opera specially written for television by Malcolm Bradbury, the man who turned Porter- house Blue, which as a book was readable, into a dismal bit of television idiocy. The trouble with the newish series lands squarely on his shoulders or those of the commissioning editor. The production looks expensive, the actors are good, but the script is indescribably bad: flop, flop, flop, like a wet newspaper falling down- stairs. The grotesquely overpolished sham smartness made Freddy Raphael look like Oscar Wilde, and the less articulate, more real bits were worse. This is the remote Progeny of Lucky Jim, who would be an old man by now.
Worse was to come. On Saturday I turned dutifully on for sport, but what I hit was a bridge competition of absolutely lethal dullness (BBC 2). If there is a way to present bridge, they have not found it yet. But Chelworth (BBC 2) is duller. It is meant to be a soap opera about aristocrats, but only the hero has any idea how they behave. The millionaire gravel-digger's common wife and the hero's upper class wife carry on indistinguishably, and the plot just makes one want to send the lot of them to prison, producer and all. Perhaps I ought to control this enraged reaction, in order to keep something in reserve for Tony Harrison.
He has been (and so I suppose is) a good poet and a distinguished dramatist, which puts him some points up to begin with. But his Rushdie programme (BBC 1) is awful, and boring, and middle class in the worst sense of the words. He recites his verses, which are very bad indeed, in an egotisti- cal, over-solemn, sub-Yeatsian chant which makes them intolerable. He has a right to air his views but not to be a bore on television. Mr Rushdie has always been a bore and cannot help it. This was still not the worst experience of a terrible week. I was lured by the Independent to watch an old Film on Four (1986, Caravaggio) which they said was 'visually stunning if a touch lifeless'. It turned out to be a gruesome parade of buggers attitudinizing. I found it more offensive than a poet making a fool of himself, though not as pointless as the Bradbury or as asinine as Chelworth or as stupefying as the bridge. That Rushdie film was a pure, pointless ego-trip all the same, an awkward attempt to jump on an over- crowded Hampstead bandwagon.
Wendy Cope is on holiday Next week: The Salzburg Festival after Karajan.
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