Television
Generations
Richard Ingrams
The most baffling sight in recent days was, that of the undergraduates at the Oxford Union rising to their feet to give an ovation to Richard Nixon. Having always thought of myself as a rathey older undergraduate, I felt for the first time in my life aware of the fact that I was standing on the wrong side of the generation gap, quite unable to identify with or even to explain the behaviour of , the young chaps opposite. Of course there may be illogical forces at work here of the type best left to Christopher Booker to explain. To me the surprising thing after all the publicity oyer Watergate is what looks like ignorance. This could have something to do with the telly, which consistently fails to provide the necessary facts.
On Monday's Tonight (BBC-1), a programme that has sadly declined since I last watched it some months ago, there was an interview with the sinister looking American oil millionaire Dr Armand Hammer. Dr Hammer, now in his eighties and still working fourteen hours a day, described how he made a bomb by selling grain to the starving Russians in 1921. This led to a meeting with Lenin, who had a similar effect on the doctor to that of the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi on Edna O'Brien: 'I was captivated by, his mag netism and humanity ... there were tears' in his eyes when I described the starving people I had seen.' The old ogre went on to attack the Russian dissidents — a tiny handful of discontents among the prosperous, contented, better fed population of the Soviet Union. In a summary of Hammer's career no mention was made of the fact that in 1975 he had pleaded guilty to making an illegal contribution to Nixon's CREEP fund.
Alan Bennett is my generation's answer to Noel Coward. He has the same, to me, rather irritating habit of using the names of towns to get a laugh. Early on in Yes, I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the first of a series of six plays specially written for LWT, a girl in a doctor's waiting room said, 'They've sent my sputum to Newcastle'. Spoken with a Yorkshire accent, that is the sort of Cowardy line that sends a West End audience into hysterics but tends to leave me cold. Bennett's hero, if one can so describe him, was a dim, bespectacled lecturer on English literature at a polytechnic in Halifax (laughter). Unable to strike up a fruitful rapport with his GP, his mother, his pupils or a predatory yoga instructress, Trevor Hopkins at long last 'came out' as a 'gay' in response to the promptings of Skinner, an improbably butch member of his evening class.
Bennett has an ear for dialogue which makes him a good sketch writer but he lacks the necessary inspiration to see him through a full-length play. His flat, camp, northern voice giving a wry little commentary on the action and the strange physical resemblance to Bennett of Trevor Hopkins suggested that with a nudge nudge here and a wink wink there he wanted us to identify him with his hero. I might have felt more sympathetic on any other occasion, but recent events at Minehead have given the gay movement rather a bad name.
The BBC's mammoth run of all Shakespeare's plays started the following night with Romeo and Juliet (BBC-2). Nowadays some producers are inclined to take Shakespeare at his word by casting Juliet as a teenage girl, but when so much of the play rests on her shoulders this can prove disastrous, as it did on this occasion. Rebecca Saire, with long straight hair and a gosh-golly voice, could not hope to convey the necessary range of emotion. Patrick Ryecart as Romeo delivered almost all his speeches on a monotonous low A flat, while Celia Johnson as the nurse, a part which must be properly cast, looked quite out of place on the wrong side of the green baize door. Only Michael Hordern as Capulet gave a memorable performance. It is a comic part but he still managed to provoke the only really moving moment in the production when he spoke the lines Death lies on her like an untimely frost Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.
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