For days now, the irritating words of an irritating tune have been going round and round the mouldering interior of my head like tired wasps circling the remnants of an abandoned cream-bun. ‘No Two People have ever Bin so in love Bin so in love, Bin so in love, No Two People have ever Bin so in love as my lovey-dove and I –’ and then all over once again, her lovey-dove, his lovey-dove and me. I do not wish to deny the manifold pleasures of such great passion, but its tinkling repetition is surely an excessive punishment for watching The Black and White Minstrel Show (BBC-1) right through from sugary beginning to sickly end on Saturday evening.
It is not so much the potency of cheap music that alarms me as its promiscuity: the plink-ploink of the off-screen band and the ban-an-an-ality of the lyrics have since intruded into the most guarded recesses and the most private moments, a chime of Bin-so like a call from the great icecream van on high. There was, for example, an affecting programme about cancer patients on BBC-2 on Monday (called Dying, rather to the delight of the other channels) which ended with a dressed corpse in a coffin, a glisten of tears in the eyes of my wife and eldest child, and a dumb stupor on my own part in which Bin-so in love tripped gaily across the back of an addled brain. The nearest and most horrible analogy to the effect of this maddening chorus, perhaps, is to the original nerve gases developed and stockpiled by the Germans during the last war, all of which so successfully devastated the microchemistry at the nerve endings that a victim was left with no means of stopping muscle action once the muscles had been activated. (They even had ways of making us dance, it seems.)
The Black and White Minstrel Show is a programme specialising in noxious syncopations which are all made to sound as if they come from the palsied hand of one and the same cretinous tunesmith. There are no real distictions, therefore, between a jolly dance, a lugubrious ‘country’ number, a sweet old folk song or even an evangelical hymn. On Saturday, for instance, the renowned West Country song ‘Widdicombe Fair’ was delivered in bland mid-Atlantic accents by a choir standing on a polished stairway that led from nowhere to nowhere missing out old uncle Tom Cobley and all. Blacked-up minstrels and stripped-down dancers prance and mime around a vaguely geometric set under a paper moon and ochre skies, lacking any sort of vigour which might otherwise overcome the contradictions of place and time and mood and music that make the programme so laughable.
But why on earth expose my precious self to such poisonous gases in the first place? Or even compound the distress by tuning in to (and staying with) It’s a Knockout (BBC-1), Husband of the Year (ITV), The Money Programme (BBC-2), Crossroads (ITV) and other such low-minded drivel?
I decided that my last column for a few months would have richer flavours if I took heed of some characteristic sentences from Martin Amis which I came across while shredding a back number of The New Review the other Bin-so day. The splinter off the old block was confiding what he called ‘a mild suspicion’ that
intelligent people would rather watch anything at all than intelligent television – that indeed they pine for the rubbishy, frivolous and ephemeral…it is only the TV critic, that unhappy figure, who actually wants to watch all those documentaries on the recreation facilities for Stuttgart-based immigrant workers, all those regional plays about the illegitimate offspring of paraplegic pet-shop owners.
The tone of voice is recognisable in others, the attitude of mind is shared by many who work in television, and the level of its response helps to explain why a derivative and second-rate novel can often lay more claim to attention than good programmes which shunt and bump across the schedules before disappearing for ever into the night. The latest of the many treasons of the clerks, in fact, lies in just this amused disdain for a box that can be plugged into the same socket as a hairdryer or a coffee perculator. The rubbishy, frivolous and ephemeral are fit enough for such a contraption are they not? Certainly it would not be possible to advance the mildest of suspicions that ‘intelligent people’ (hello there) would rather read anything at all than intelligent books, or at least not to put it forward in a literary journal which in other matters accepted that the task of the critic is to attempt to discriminate (with reasons) between what seems to be good and what feels to be bad.
The unhappy television critic lost in the arid Stuttgart of the soul occasionally ends up clowning with his readers because he, too, is infected with the mild Amis suspicion about what the intelligent want to see on their screens, and so turns his pieces into complicit sniggering about precisely those vast areas of television which tend to make it a mere device to pass the time. I believe the ailment is also called the Clive James Syndrome, but only in its more chronic manifestations.
‘Do you mean,’ quavered an incredulous crew member of the starship, ‘that one of the people who threw the Enterprise a thousand light years is on board and killing our people?’ ‘Exactly,’ came the answer, on the nod, tightening the tension in the Star Trek episode celebrated here last week. A useful scrap of dialogue which emphasises that the best thing to do is to get off the ship for a while, even if it means leaping into the summer doldrums with only an excruciating pun as a life support system – and that (Bin-so Bin-so Bin-so) is what my present aim is.
