TELEVISION

by MARY CRAIG
'It was monstrous, but I loved it'
"THE VULGAR, disgraceful over-fed, godless order that we call Edwardian", mused Lord Clark lovingly at the end of his reminiscences of childhood, (An Edwardian Childhood). "It was monstrous, but I loved it."
This nostalgic Upstairs look-back to Edwardian society has been rudely offset by Days of Hope, the BBCI drama series with an unequivocally Downstairs-and-out-inthe-streets view of the same period and the one following. It is such superb television that we almost tempted to overlook the extent of its political bias, its characters which are mouthpieces for increasingly overt propaganda.
Ben has seen the light and joined the CP, and while Philip is still misguided enough to believe that simple socialism might he the answer, I don't doubt that by next week he too will he converted to Truth and Pravda.
It's an interesting thought that subversive material of this kind wouldn't see the light of day in any Communist State. Though the Garnett-Loath-Allan team dislikes our own as much as Edwardian society, they are Fortunate to be able to air their dislike through a free broadcasting system. It's fortunate for us, too, since freedom of that kind is the mark of a healthy society.
Abu Dhabi is to all intents and purposes a new society (Everything
New Ender The Sun) (Tuesday Documentary BBCI). Once a tiny sheikdom on the Persian Gulf, whose sheikh is reputed to have said: "What to 1 want with roads? They'd hurt my camels' feet", it is now the richest country in the world.
Thanks to oil, the mud huts of a decade ago have been replaced by high-rise buildings and almost everything — houses, electricity, education — is free. Children arc actually paid £1 a week to encourage them to go to school?
Patrick O'Donovan went to Abu Dhabi. didn't like it. but discovered a kind of innocence there, "It is a place where, without violence, they have tried to distribute a wealth that came like showers of gold from heaven".
On television, some commentaries can pass unobserved, a mere adjunct to the filmed material. It is never so when the commentary is by Patrick O'Donovan. However good the camera work (and it was very good indeed in this case), you find yourself listening almost more than looking.
It's partly the marvellously cadenced voice which could turn the meanest prose into poetry, partly too that his prose frequently is poetry. "Trees that look like treasure against the poverty of sand" or "the emirs maintaining their jealousies like heirlooms"; his style achieves an elegance that is rare today.
Unlike O'Donovan, who remained unseen throughout, Alan Whicker was very much to the fore in ITV's Come Home, Dr Freud, All Is Forgiven, a rather selfconscious title for a slight film about Vienna, birthplace and rejector of Freud. I can t hear Whicker now without being reminded of the Monty Python send-up, but his commentaries are always enjoyable and often illuminating.
Vienna, it appears, is full of old people (thanks to the war, a quarter of its population is drawing the oldage pension); it is preoccupied with death and funerals and cemeteries; the Viennese don't spend their free time whirling to Strauss waltzes, they prefer to sing songs of farewell and despair and dying.
They are, insisted Whicker, "uncertain of today, much preferring yesterday". Aren't we all? Still, they don't make such a bad job of today. They work hard, and workers and management get on well together — a relic of the days when they pulled together against a foreign occupying force.
And the politicians don't squabble. Novelist Sarah Gainham said it was because they'd all been shut up together in Dachau. They got opposition out of their system and have never argued since. It sounds dull, yet devoutly to be desired.
The Viennese may look over their shoulder at a more romantic past but they have learned to live in their prosaic present. Something that Emma Bovary never even tried to do.
Flaubert's novel Madame Bovery now adapted in four parts for BBC2 (Mondays at 9jom) is acknowledged to be one of the world's great novels, and Emma is one of the outstanding heroines of fiction. Flaubert put five years into the writing of this book, meticulously charting every stage in the selfdestruction of a petty bourgeoise who wanted life to be made of the stuff of dreams.
Emma has been called a tragic heroine, but she was too banal and ordinary to he truly tragic. Hers was a mean, egoistic spirit, which created hell for itself and others and was unrelieved by greatness.
In the first part of this dramatised version by Giles Cooper, we saw Emma (Francesca Annis) grow from a bored young girl (head already filled with romantic stuff and nonsense) into a bored housewife. But the small screen wasn't equipped to trace the cancerous progress of that boredom as Flaubert traced it.
The bare bones of the story are here, but they aren't what made the novel great. The series will no doubt unfold into excellent melodrama, but that wasn't what Flauhert was about either. The brooding intensity of the novel has not been, could not be, captured,