Even as We Speak (45 page)

In the early eighteenth century, the great tragedian Wilks played Hamlet at Drury Lane. According to contemporary accounts, when the Ghost came on, Wilks climbed the scenery. When he climbed
back down again, some time later, he used his sword not to fend off his companions who were trying to keep him from the Ghost but to attack the Ghost. And he did this while wearing a complete
tragedian’s outfit – full-bottomed wig, plumes and a cape. The outfit was the only complete thing about his performance because, like most of his successors, he cut the text
drastically. When Garrick came on, he came on in elevator shoes and stole one of the Ghost’s best lines. ‘O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!’ Dr Johnson thought Garrick was
over the top, but most of the playgoing public concurred in the opinion that Garrick was unbeatable in the role.

As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, Kemble arrived and the romantic interpretation of Hamlet began to arrive with him. Hazlitt didn’t think much of Kemble in the role. He
thought he played it with a fixed and sullen gloom, but I think we recognize that gloom as the beginning of the romantic interpretation of Hamlet which has persisted almost down to our own day.
Hazlitt didn’t think much of Kean, either. He thought his performance was a succession of grand moments, but had no real human shape. Everybody else thought Kean was marvellously natural,
especially in his appearance, and he
looked
like the Hamlet we know today – short hair, black clothes, white lace collar. And on they came – Macready, Barry Sullivan, Edwin
Booth, whom some people thought was the ideal Hamlet but who had his thunder stolen by Irving – and the total effect of the nineteenth-century actor-managers was to establish Hamlet as the
romantic, alienated outcast, the poet who perhaps couldn’t write poetry but could certainly speak it, the man who was just too good for this world.

As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, a truly revolutionary actor-manager arrived on the scene – Johnston Forbes-Robertson – revolutionary because he widened the focus
of attention from the central character to the whole play, and never again was it possible to argue plausibly that the play was anything less than the miraculous sum of its parts. Nowadays we never
think of any interpretation of the central character, no matter how brilliant – Gielgud’s vividly mental, Olivier’s vividly physical – as anything more than a contribution
to the total character, just as we never think of any cut version, no matter how consistent within itself, as anything more than a contribution to the total play.

The world could go on changing unimaginably and Hamlet would still have everything to say to us. Whenever we hear of some new atrocity and wonder impotently what life is for, we always find that
he got there ahead of us. Hamlet poses the eternal question of whether life is worth living. The answer that he appears to arrive at is that it isn’t, but the way he says so makes us realize
that it is. Hamlet has been given the creative vitality of Shakespeare himself. Even though robbed of will, he’s still the embodiment of individuality. Hamlet is what it means to be alive. So
all those actors were right, after all. Hamlet’s tragedy really is a triumph. A prince of the imagination, he inherits his kingdom in eternity, even if Fortinbras inherits it on earth.

Boris Pasternak, who translated
Hamlet
into Russian, also wrote a famous poem in which Hamlet faces something even worse than his own doubts – a world in which his doubts are not
permitted.

Pasternak wasn’t the first, and probably won’t be the last, to see Hamlet as the supreme symbol of liberty. As the doomed Prince of Denmark, Hamlet must act out his
tragic fate, but as a mind he remains free. He fails in the outer world only because his inner world is so rich. Scorning necessity, he reflects upon his own existence – ‘In my
mind’s eye, Horatio’. Hamlet is the human intelligence made universal, so he belongs to all of us. ‘For which of us,’ wrote Anatole France, addressing Hamlet, ‘does
not resemble you in some way?’ We’re all like him because we all think, and it’s because, on top of all its other qualities, its hero incarnates the dignity of human
consciousness, that
Hamlet
is the greatest play by the greatest writer who ever lived.

Listener
, 29 May, 1980

A speech to the Royal Television Society

It’s a bit more than forty years now since I was first in this hall, which has always struck me as a holy place: not just because of its ecclesiastical appearance, but
because of the spirit that pervades it. I was first here as a guest, the year before I came up to Cambridge myself as an undergraduate in another college. My host was a fellow-Australian who was
proud of being here at King’s but had already learned the educated Englishman’s trick, still a distinguishing mark in those days, of underplaying any emotion that might redound to his
credit. We were sitting there at one of the benches to take lunch. A few aged dons were shuffling in to have lunch served to them up here at the high table. When you’re that young anyone old
looks very old, but none of the older men looked as old as one man. He couldn’t even be said to be shuffling. It took him about ten minutes to get from one end of the hall to the other. I had
plenty of time to study his appearance. He looked a bit like a photograph I had once seen of E. M. Forster. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked my friend, who finished chewing and swallowing
before he answered with calculated casualness: ‘It’s E. M. Forster.’

So I went back to my London bedsit and watched television for a whole year. I liked what I saw. It was entertaining and informative, and often both at the same time, this latter trick being
worked by the presence on screen of people who knew what they were talking about and had the knack of putting the explanation in as they went along. While the young John Birt was still stacking his
cross-referenced copies of
Eagle
in chronological order, television was already one big Mission to Explain. Twenty-five years later, Rupert Murdoch, the all-time most bizarre McTaggart
lecturer despite stiff competition, would make his famous accusation about an irresponsible élite giving the public what they thought it needed instead of what it wanted. If the same
accusation had been made in those days, its fatuousness would have been self-evident. Whoever the élite were, they weren’t irresponsible. They vied with each other in service to the
nation. The BBC hierarchs were outdone only by their ITV opposite numbers in the vocation to enlighten the people. Lord Bernstein, Sir Denis Forman – they were grandees of the Great and Good.
Sir Lew, later Lord, Grade, far from being a cost-calculating cynic, was already well embarked on the philanthropic course which would eventually lead him to spend more on the production values of
Franco Zeffirelli’s
New Testament
than on raising the
Titanic
; Noele Gordon in
Crossroads
had a smaller costume budget than Robert Powell on the cross, and the
biblical cast list teemed with knights of the realm playing bit parts. Below their tea towels, their faces blazed with the light of dedication.

But that was then, and this is now, and what worries me about television now is that gradually but inexorably the screen is emptying itself of the contribution that once came from the kind of
people I can only call the overqualified. Their contribution was especially conspicuous in documentary features, the field of television in which I myself have been most active, so I suppose
I’ve had personal reasons for concern, and you must allow for my bias if I emphasize the point too much. But I can remember vividly that when I first came to this country I would switch on
the black and white TV set to enjoy features written and presented by people like René Cutforth: people who could talk well about the present because they had some background in the past,
and about the past because they were marinated in history; who could write to pictures in a compressed yet clear manner without traducing the complexity of events; and who could make a programme
snap along like a good essay. You would switch on the set not just because of the subject, but because it was them treating it. Features like that were more common than not.

Thirty years later, they are less common than not. The typical feature now is written by a producer or an attendant pundit and narrated in voice-over by an actor. Whole channels sound like what
an Equity AGM would sound like if actors ever went to one. As a member of Equity myself I am glad to see the actors get the work, but the results tend to lack personality in the strict sense of the
word. The actors try hard – they try all too hard – but what they intone sounds as if a committee wrote it, and the general effect is of a long commercial. One of the consequences is
that the viewer is helpless to attribute not only praise, but blame. Earlier this year I saw a BBC 2 programme about the Holocaust in which the actor delivering the voice-over mispronounced the
word Auschwitz more than forty times. If he had been a presenter in vision we could have blamed him. As it was, there was nowhere to place the blame except on the production team, and, by
extension, on the controller and the whole of the BBC. Nor did the producer have the excuse that Jeremy Isaacs had when Lord Olivier misread every second line in the script of
The World at
War
. The actor voicing the BBC 2 feature was not very eminent and could have been easily set right. The feeling that the overqualified are giving way to the barely competent is hard to avoid.
On the whole the BBC did reasonably well over the VE and VJ Day period, but it was notable how the programme about the Burma campaign, presented by Charles Wheeler, stood out. It was because of
Charles Wheeler. His presence gave the programme authority. He had the qualifications because he was overqualified. Having seen the places and read the books, he not only knew what was involved, he
knew how to say it, in clear language tactfully contrived to sound simple; and how to deliver it in a way that drew no attention to himself except admiration for his dedicated artistry. It
isn’t his fault that he looked like a member of a dying breed.

So whose fault is it? It isn’t really anybody’s. It’s an historical tendency. There used to be dozens of these people on the screen and now there are hardly any. They
haven’t been bumped off. One or two of them have been edged off, but most of them seem to have just died off, with the passing of time. What alarms me is that they haven’t been
replaced: not, at any rate, with people of their type. There are superficial reasons that can be adduced for this. One of them I would call the Ford Cortina fallacy: the idea that if a subject is
sufficiently fascinating it can present itself, with no single narrator. But few subjects are that fascinating in themselves: as the original proponents of the presenterless, multiple-interview,
flashily edited documentary feature have no doubt been painfully discovering since they became channel controllers, even for a killer whale people are more likely to switch on when it looks as if
it wants to eat Sir David Attenborough. There has to be a human face there. Bob Peck’s sepulchral voice is not enough, except if the subject is the evolution of the funeral parlour through
the ages.

Another superficial reason is the Mission to Explain: a good and necessary idea, it got diverted into the news department, where there is less room for it, and away from documentary features,
its proper province. Thus the impeccably overqualified John Simpson gets a few minutes to report from the battlefield and has to fufil his mission to explain in the
Spectator
. On screen he
seems mainly to have a mission to get shot at.

But the deep reason, I believe, is a lingering nervousness about whether an élite is justified in delivering enlightenment to the public. It’s hard to believe, at this distance, how
persistently the left wing, when it existed, used to attack the broadcasting élite for its paternalism. An élite was held to be a very bad thing for a society to suffer from, and the
more paternalistic it was, the more manipulative it was felt to be. What else was the Establishment but a tool of Late Capitalism? This line of thought attained the status of religious belief in
the 1960s, when the youth movement turned the universities into broadcasting stations of their own. Right here in King’s, on the other side of that door at the end of the hall, in a room
which is now the student bar, a Free University was set up in permanent revolutionary session. Though it had all the appearance and noise level of a Trotskyite crèche, it was taken seriously
by those present. I myself attended several of its soirées and made a stirring speech against the evils of
in loco parentis
. But as one of the older dons remarked at the time, the
parents were’t as loco as they looked. Several of the more radical undergraduates – the ones who had reduced their daily intake of food to a single bowl of rice in order to proclaim
their solidarity with Chairman Mao’s struggle for world freedom – condemned the Machiavellian cynicism of King’s in having provided the Free University with a room and tea-making
facilities. They called this an act of repressive tolerance.

It was. On the whole, and in all its institutions, repressive tolerance was the way the Establishment neutralized attacks from the left. The unspoken assumption was that there was a solidarity
between the ruling élite and its critics, the more promising of whom, it was correctly anticipated, would one day join its ranks. There was a large measure of tacit agreement that the ruling
élites were as permeable as they needed to be and that there was enough social mobility to ensure that talent would rise. That it would
want
to rise was supposed to be guaranteed by
an educational system that imparted knowlege not for utilitarian ends but as an absolute good. The broadcasting system was meant to play a large part in this process and largely did. Attacks
mounted from the left thus found themselves short of ammunition, and had to make up for it by shouting slogans. Although the broadcasters exhausted themselves keeping a cool head in the hubbub,
accusations that they were too much in thrall to the market answered themselves. What nobody expected, until Mrs Thatcher came to power, was the accusation that the broadcasters were too
little
in thrall to the market.