Television
Communicators and mice
Clive Gammon
"Are Maggie and Tony using each other as a means of Communication with Dr Leafer? Or are they using Dr Leafer as a means of communicating with each other?" Discuss, I suppose, illustrating your answer with reference to Three's One, Penelope Mortimer's 'Play for Today' Which went out on Monday (BBC 1). The earnest question appeared in Radio Times which helpfully ran more than a thousand words Of background reading about the relationship between Mrs Mortimer and her daughter Caroline Who played Maggie who was maybe using Tony or maybe Dr Leafer to communicate with either Dr Leafer or Tony.
Well, let's try to make a start. Tony (Hywel Bennett) was a man Whom no one in his senses would try to communicate with anyway, a wispy-bearded, vain, ' creative ' (Le. ncreative) bore, easily Slotted int() n early Amis novel. Maggie was a sad arld lonely lady, a type made equally familiar to us in previous pieces ot Mrs Mortimer's. Dr Leafer, the psychiatrist, a shadowy figure who acted as a (wait till I get the jargon right) ... a catalyst, at least until later on in the play when he started to shout at both his patients quite a lot. It Was the strain of this, I expect, Which made him ill in the end (" Indefinitely ill," said his wife. And killed him, too, I wouldn't be surprised. At least the blinds in his house seemed to be drawn in the last shot of all).
These two, Maggie and Tony I Mean, conduct a small, ragged affair, chatting to Dr Leafer about it the while, for they share the same psychiatrist. The fact that they have an affair at all strains credulity to breaking point. Tony is a lousy, insensitive lover though he believes himself to be God's gift to lonely Maggie. Not only is he a boring talker but he's physically boring as well, cavorting about on country walks as if he was in some dreadful, sensitive film, snuffling repellently, being painfully inefficient at flying kites for children, bumping into recordplayers. He also lies a lot to Dr iLeafer. Now how would a nice girl like Maggie fancy someone like that, even though she is as depressed as Jackie Stewart's throttle?
Communication? The truth is that in this play there was no communication at all, certainly not with me (and that's the important thing), once the characters had been established. There was no progression and no serious complexity. Just a couple of portraits.
Communication was much better in The Editors, a new series on BBC 1 which got off to a dream start on Sunday with the News of the World's seedy confession of its role in the Lambton affair to kick around. William Hardcastle, the chairman, I find presents a somewhat unsympathetic persona on radio and no doubt there will be times later in this series when his niggling will irritate me but on this first programme he was kept well in the background by the editors of the Sunday Times, the Daily Mail and Tribune who couldn't help having a field day with the subject. There were, too, odd moments to treasure, such as when Richard Clements of Tribune suggested that, in some circumstance or other, the Sunday Times might say "Stuff it!" "Not a Sunday Times expression," said Harold Evans severely.
Communication, too, on the Omnibus File on British Jazz, which sent me spinning back to the old Grosvenor Hotel in Manchester in the early 'fifties, the Dixieland Revival and (was it?) the Christie Brothers Stompers playing through hot and beery Saturday nights. There are still, apparently, attempts going on to move jazz ahead from Bebop and Progressive. One contemporary group, Nucleus, sounded as if it might have something fresh to say. Another, called Iskra 1903 (I might have copied that down
wrong), made tiny, unco-ordinated noises like those of a mal functioning sewing machine or mice farting, diminuendo, behind a distant skirting board.
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