Television
Flutterings
Richard Ingrams
I seldom go to the theatre nowadays but I walk regularly down Shaftesbury Avenue on my way to the office,past the billboards and the life-size photographs of Celia Johnson, Alec Guinness etc. Sometimes I wonder if I am missing out on anything good. It all looks so alluring — 'Uproarious evening. . . I laughed till I cried' (Bernard Levin, Sunday Times). But whenever television shows anything of the great theatrical triumphs of the day I feel reassured that I have made the right decision in staying at home.
These reactions are inspired by the smash West End hit Saturday, Sunday, Monday which Granada proudly presented on Monday with a cast of stars. Set in Naples, 'the gesture capital of the world' as Dr Desmond Morris calls it, it was a kind of bourgeois Coronazione Strade, a weekend of the domestic ups and downs of the Priore family, an excitable volatile lot like most of their compatriots. A major difficulty on these occasions is what to do about accents. All are doing their best to behave like Neapolitans with shouts and screams and fluttering hands, so they can hardly speak in their usual Old Vic voices. At the same time the sound of a dozen or so men and women jabbering away in bad Italian accents for an hour and a half is bound to prove wearisome, as it did on this occasion. It seemed a pity that so many of our best performers — Lord and Lady Olivier, Frank Finlay, Edward Woodward — should waste their talents on such a trivial and sentimental little play, when they could have put on between them a pretty good production of King Lear. Even so, I quite enjoyed it.
Monday was ITV's night of the stars. Earlier Peter Sellers was the Muppets' guest star. Some people have complained that the guests on the Muppet Show are generally a dim lot. So they are, but I don't think it matters. Any human is made to look like a dumb stooge in the company of the Muppets. Sellers gave us a gypsy violinist and a sinister German masseur, but the real star of the evening was the director of Muppet Laboratories, Dr Bunsen Honeydew, who with the help of his frantic assistant Beaker had invented the means to transport people miles away at the flick of a switch. If only he could try it out on old hawk-features Angela Rippon.
Mention of Ms Rippon reminds me of a mystery. For some weeks now Sally Hardcastle, daughter of the late and great William, has been reporting on the BBC News but not once has she been visible on the screen. Last week if you were watching very carefully you might have caught a glimpse of her nose as she talked to two Arab shoppers at the Oxford Street sales. My own theory is that the BBC is terrified of any pretty woman upstaging Queen Bee Rippon. But this could be completely wrong and there is probably some quite simple and straightforward explanation.
Another thing that puzzles me is why those two Ron nies should be given the OBE in the New Year's Honours List. Not for being funny, I hope. I watched them again on Monday just to make sure and not a titter escaped me. There was a list of script writers as long as your arm but between them they couldn't produce anything better than the same old double-entendres. I have a feeling that this is the kind of programme the Prime Minister enjoys and that he was personally responsible for the Honours. But again I am possibly quite wrong.
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