Children in the melting-pot

Much of this piece was practically illegible, due to its source being an overexposed photographic copy: here’s an image of the first two paragraphs. In the text below I’ve greyed out words I just couldn’t discern. There may be other errors throughout, but I’ve tried to keep my reconstruction true to Clive’s meaning.
As ever, an original copy would be greatly appreciated — SJB.

‘GOD,’ one of the Pakistani schoolgirls informed her classmates on Panorama (BBC1), ‘is like President Ford. He has better ideas’. This arresting proposition was merely one component of a mantra which went on to compare the Deity with Silvikrin hairspray, because He ‘holds through all kinds of weather.’

She was a bright girl and ### to ########## of the many Pakistani adolescents currently being assimilated ## # ##### #### ##### ### ## ### ### ### ####### ### ######## ### ### ####### ###### ### ##### # ### ######### ### #### ## ### ### ##### #### ### # ### ## ### ### ####### # ##### ##### ###### ## #### would be a less ###### ## ## to the same cheerful ##### her ##### born-and-bred contemporaries ### notoriously determined to arrive at. The Pakistani girls were already Westernised enough to keep their parents worried. Intermarriage, the ultimate insult to the old ways had not yet happened, but there were hints that it already shadowed the horizon. A creative tragedy was on the boil, leading to new life. Children all the colours of the spectrum would vault from the rim of the melting-pot, their minds on fire with the energy of the future! Yes, it was easy to regard these parental sufferings as necessary and even negligible, especially when you didn’t have to stick around and watch them. God, like President Ford, moves in mysterious ways.

When God moves like President Nixon however, His ideas are harder to laugh at. The message behind a ‘This Week’ special on The World’s Worst Air-Crash (Thames) was that a shambling dereliction of duty on the part of a Nixon appointee led inevitably to the death of 346 people in the DC-10 crash near Paris. Readers of posh papers already possessed most of this information, but here was the story spelled out for the millions, and one aspect of the tale was made clear in a manner not previously seen — John Shaffer, the appointee, was interviewed at length. If you were wondering how he shaves in the morning, here was the same question amplified a thousandfold: how could he possibly face the camera?

The answer, it eventually became apparent, lay in the special, Nixonian, self-exculpatory psychological condition which will forever be called Watergate. In Shaffer’s mouth, meaning perished. Why hadn’t he made the suggestion to modify the DC-10 an order? Because the suggestion had the force of an order. But wasn’t it plain that the suggestion had not had the force of an order? No, because if he had made it an order, then the order would really have been just a suggestion.

Shaffer’s unfortunate reference to a ‘drop-dead date’ (‘excuse the expression’) mirrored his master’s Freudian habit of physically mangling words touching on a subconscious nerve — when Nixon tried to say ‘integrity’ it usually came out as ‘intregity.’ The Shaffer interview saved the programme, which was otherwise far too light on analysis: it was plainly a mistake for example, to spend so much time talking to the mother of one of the passengers. The Mother of the Deceased is a sure bet for human interest, but not even 346 such interviews would have been adequate to the scale of the destruction. I am told by a contact in the Australian Fleet Street mafia that the names of Bruce Page and some of his sedulous colleagues, who did a considerable part of the hard digging in the programme, were erased from the credits because of an ACTT demarcation dispute. Considering that the subject of the programme was the miasmatic effect of covert political action, this was ironic.

Not having read The School for Scandal in 15 years, I had remembered that it was good, but had forgotten that it was great. Many are the brickbats one has thrown at Cedric Messina, but this time he may have a ball: the whole mise-en-scène, from sets to make-up, was appropriately raddled, grubby, peeled and poxed. Elegant finery thus acquired a vivid dialectical edge. The playing reached a high standard, although Pauline Collins was wrong for Lady Teazle, and not just because her impact has been irreparably jollified by ‘No, Honestly.’ It was difficult to believe her malicious, so her reform counted for little. Equally it was difficult to believe Bernard Lee (Sir Peter Teazle) gullible, but in the end this paid off, since the part gains weight if the man being fooled is no fool.

In all other departments there were no questions to be raised about the acting. Edward Fox’s straight-arrow bellow fitted Charles Surface beautifully; Jeremy Brett as Joseph Surface, racked by randiness and leading with his crotch, spat perfect dialogue through shapely teeth set in scurvy gums; and Arthur Lowe as Sir Oliver was style incarnate, his angry asides filling the screen with rubicund fury. My favourite was Bridget Armstrong as Lady Sneerwell, her face a geological deposit, her voice like gravel sluicing in a cement mixer. What a play it is: as symmetrical as the mundane can become before it is transformed into the ethereal — which it was shortly to be, in the operas of Mozart, who was born five years after Sheridan and died 25 years before him.

Sunset Across the Bay (BBC1) was a piece of autumnal filigree by Alan Bennett, directed by Stephen Frears. This was the second time Bennett and Frears had tried the difficult task of talking about northern working-class life without condescension, and once again they brought it off. The subject of the play was the last years of a long marriage in Leeds, between two people for whom a big event was when ‘Workers’ Playtime’ came to the factory (it made tanks during the war) and a big journey was the annual trip to Morecambe. Morecambe was where they spent Dad’s retirement, he wandering helplessly — his occupation gone — and she gently upbraiding him for his lack of the Spirit of Adventure.

The piece ended with a long hiatus showing Mam waiting while Dad failed to emerge from a toilet: the kind of scene, composed of long stationary shots butted together and boosted with an over-amplified soundtrack of slow footsteps and distant buses, that they used to call the Antonioni Sequence. Their marriage hadn’t added up to a lot, but neither had it meant nothing, and such tenaciously substantial frailties are Bennett’s legitimate and valuable concern. Not as spectacular as Bergman, perhaps — of whom More Next Week.

The Observer, 23rd February 1975