Young Christopher Hitchens with Ludovic Kennedy (1981) — British Intelligence & James Baldwin

our screens this week have been dominated by the beginnings of a running story which is going to go on running for the rest of my life and maybe yours too that of britain's future king and queen on tuesday afternoon the gentleman and ladies of the press and broadcasting descended on buckingham palace to snap the prince and lady diana in a variety of poses even on one occasion persuading the prince who's about the same height as his fiancee to climb one step higher to make a better picture and kate aidy was surprised to find among the goofers outside the palace gates an unexpected shutter fiend in the shape of the eighth earl spencer and we've got some people also uh well hello can i say congratulations thank you very much well spencer himself very proud and very happy very proud very happy what are you doing on the pavement outside the palace i thought you'd be inside i'm photographing the photographers well what a marvelous day for you lovely day there's another day and we're all very happy i was all down last night he's looking absolutely radiant raining very happy i've never seen her look better i've photographed every event in her life i'm photographing this one too well you can see that you're very much in the center of attention now your whole family and i see everyone here very nice to see everybody here sure they'll be as happy as she is thank you very much thank you very much those hopeful of receiving invitations to the wedding may have got some bright ideas from that evening's fascinating omnibus on bbc one when jana bakova filmed in the neiman marcus department store in jr's hometown an unusual shopping place for passing millionaires and we have this year after dinner toothpaste now this is really fantastic it's really nice it really is a really extraordinary gift and does this go with it oh no well you could buy it uh as an extra it's a 24 karat gold toothpaste i mean toothbrush and of course if you wanted to give it as a gift you could put it together a more straightforward arts program was saturday's arena on the american artist edward hopper which the times described as dull one reason no doubt being that too much emphasis was placed on filming streets and pictures in new york and perhaps not enough on organizing decent stills in the world of the great outside julian pettifer started a 13-part series for atv on nature while the world about us on bbc2 gave us a portrait of the willow and its place in the somerset wetlands and in assault on everest 1933 the last of that splendid series travelers in time the careful dubbing on of sound effects nearly 50 years after the event tents flapping in the wind feet crunching in the snow muffled conversation brought the triumphs and setbacks of that unsuccessful expedition marvelously to life on the geriatric front thames gave us a sympathetic portrait of that saintly man basil hume cardinal of westminster whom some but not many think of as a future pope while over on bbc two another latter-day saint in the shape of malcolm muggeridge launched a survey of his life and times with a re-run of a 15-year-old film he'd made about his croydon childhood had he been making this today the commentary would i think have been a good deal more lively in drama there was a return of the whitehall situation comedy yes minister while bbc2 presented us with a play set in south africa the jail daddy of alby sax peter mchenry was alby sachs and stratford john's returned to television as a bigoted yet not unattractive prison officer oh mr seymour i i do have one request what is it at maitland for the last time they did let me have a bible bible you read the bible yes i do you understand it do you well i'm learning a great deal of course there are things first that i find hard to understand well that is to be expected the bible needs a lot of study as it so happens i have studied it myself for over 20 years you could say i am something of an expert on the bible later in the program i'll be discussing with roy langridge media director of the advertising agency j walter thompson the advertising industry's concern about itv's falling viewing figures but first three of this week's programs monday's panorama on the security services the last two episodes of the current series of comprehensive school drama grange hill also on bbc one and wednesday's itv documentary with the writer james baldwin i heard it through the grapevine and with me to discuss these programs are liz forgan women's editor of the guardian soon to be a commissioning editor of channel 4. bernard ashley a junior school headmaster and himself a writer of children's books one of which is currently a bbc serial break in the sun and the new statesman journalist christopher hitchens first panorama which after one or two publicly aired hiccups this week presented the first of a two-part series on britain's security services the second part in this coming monday and we'll look at mi5s and special branches monitoring of subversives and the question of individual privacy the theme of this week's program was the security services lack of public accountability unlike the united states where after watergate public accountability was established also again unlike the united states the overall and to some excessive secrecy concerning every aspect of our security services greater public accountability of mi6 to parliament might ventilate the sensitive issue of the use by the secret intelligence service of occasional agents and part-time operators who can and invariably are disowned if revealed or if anything goes wrong some are men who persistently work in the twilight zone of intelligence gathering where deception and lying are rated as trade craft qualifications some have criminal records we retain a journalistic skepticism about their stories but because the use made of men like this bears directly on the issue of greater public accountability for british intelligence we have listened to a couple of such operators one of them is a man called lee tracy and we can take a normal tape cassette such as this a compact cassette which we would put into he says he used to work for mi6 as a technician then left to start his own electronics business while maintaining mercenary links with the intelligence world he's brushed with a law in the past and although it's just not possible to check all his claims some are true others seem to be true he represents perhaps an ugly but unavoidable part of undercover work and we'll see whether or not that makes contact the fact that one or two are even killed or get lost or become wet jobs it does it mean that you must destroy a very good system that works just because now and again it hiccups what is that job when somebody is eliminated that's what it's actually called yes has your department ever done wet jobs oh i wouldn't answer that if i knew and you do know but you don't want to answer it liz fogen your opinion of that uh film on the security services yes it's a great pity after all the fuss that in fact what we saw on the screen i thought was an awful disappointment and things were taken out of that film quite how much exactly i don't know but we can't talk about that all we can talk about is what we actually saw well i can tell you that very little in fact was taken out well what we saw was really nothing new to anybody who's been reading newspapers seriously over the last few years and it wandered around and meandered the film it raised all the questions but it's easy to think of the questions we all want to know whether the security services murder foreign statesmen or listen to our telephones they're hard questions to answer and it's a hard subject to tackle and i've got the greatest respect for tom mangold as a reporter but though i'm glad he tried it i think in this case it didn't succeed it's hard to deal with spies because the respectable spies the good spies won't talk to you you have to talk to whoever's available and the ones that are available tend not always to be the most useful witnesses but watching that program the best bits of it were the stuff that came from america because in america as you said after watergate certain things have had to be unleashed and we now have the curious situation where any member of the public in america now in theory has available to them information which a british mp cannot ask for here if they had made the whole program in america looked at from there i think we'd have ended up with no less information certainly possibly even a little more and it would more elegantly have made the point that they set out to make which is that the british security services are almost entirely not subject to public scrutiny of any kind and that we could do a lot more here quite safely to see that they were christopher hitchens yeah well i thought it was as dull as rain and mangle isn't a dull reporter at all not a boring guy and the issue is very simple really and yet he had to keep on apologizing for himself i mean he kept having to say well here's this manly tracy you know it wasn't nice having to go and talk to him but we did it for you um and then you know rather insultingly although i don't think tracy is a very nice man they proceeded to sort of put him on then they threw away various other people i mean frank snep is not just an ex-cia man he ran the cia in south vietnam at the crucial time he probably voted for reagan a few weeks ago as well they didn't introduce him he wasn't presented nor was senator jake garn he's a very important politician now coming out when snep says he's not philip aj it's not explained what he means by that so except for when they were disowning their tasks as journalists they hardly took any time excuse me any time to explain themselves at all and the issue is you know one of really are the security services protecting us from the russians or are they a dirty tricks group for the establishment and is it and is it unpatriotic to ask this question yeah if i could interrupt you it seemed to me that what the uh program was about was should there should not be greater public accountability of the security services bearing in mind what is now the form in america now don't you think that question was posed and is an interesting one in a very oblique way i think it was posed but it was posed in well i've said apologetic almost a groveling way bernadette do you think that tom manger was being a as christopher hitchens has said apologetic i think he was apologetic he was also oblique i agree with that i found that um although he set out to give us subject headings and the subject headings were backed up by the flat saying mi5 mi6 gchq in fact when he got into it he partly described and then partly criticized in each of the sections and i think i'd found it much easier to follow through as a program had he dealt with one at a time described the work then talked about the reasons for um for us to feel dissatisfied or to ask questions about what's going on and then finally to bring in the interviews where people had some of the answers for example the um david owens suggestion that there should be a group of privy councillors who do have access to this sort of thing on our behalf although heaven help us if somebody as naive as david owen is one of those because it did seem that the wool had been pulled completely over his eyes anyway well he was suggesting i think that there should be a small committee which should be able to question the prime minister the fire secretary in the home sector i mean did that uh seem a sensible idea to you certainly yes we i want to be protected from the russians by these people and what i want to know is whether they're doing that or whether they are protecting the establishment from inquiry because in fact whenever the russians seem to have had a rather larger hand in the work of the security services in this country than the british people have and you know i don't think one needs to be um to be too tame about saying that's a cause of a concern well now we change to a rather different subject which is grange hill a tale of a tale of adenoidal boys and girls in a north london comprehensive school and with a viewing audience of around 10 million one of the most successful children's programs ever this week the program ended its fourth series a fifth is planned and there's also to be a feature film the popularity of the series lies in the frankness with which it deals with such subjects as bullying sex education corporal punishment boys crashes on women teachers and girls problems with their first bras the differences between the school's treatment of boys and girls was the main theme of yesterday's edition was all that bad noisy aren't you that's why i asked we've got to miss hockey because the boys want to play their interform final on our pitch what's wrong with their own the groundsman's doing something to it i'm typical that is why can't they miss their stupid final because they're the boys aren't they can i see you're going to wear school uniform next year i've got much choice of life anyway i've had enough ago trying to let him make me do technical drawing i thought all options had to be chosen by now i have better give me two after theologists to think it over i think i'm gonna change your mind but i ain't bernard ashley what uh as a school teacher yourself did you think of grange hill well grange hill's a story and story has various functions it entertains it gives us the opportunity to identify with characters it gives us the opportunity to understand something about others and to safely experience something which we can do it second hand and grange hill on the first two of those counts on entertaining and on providing an identification i think certainly succeeds it's enormously popular it's viewed by 10 million children is it every week or a combination of children and adults very very popular and i think quite rightly so however although the acting is very good i think the children are marvelously natural actors although the direction is very good and the camera angles are subtly taken from the children from children's point of view although much of the dialogue is extremely well written for instance tucker jenkins in one episode shows this sort of difference between a in the adolescent boy between the the sophisticate and and the naive when he says um at one moment he's left alone with a girl it's you and me babe and and the rest of the evening's free and then the next moment he's saying to another girl who's a bit moody or it must be the end of the month and you know just slightly got it all wrong although all that is very good i've found the series as a whole because i've watched the whole series very uneven and it falls into three categories really there's the sort of comic strip grange hill which we saw this week both episodes very much like the opening titles over simplified a very child-oriented point of view of what adults might do then there are the what i would call between happenings bits of the drama the corridor incidents which a lot of grange hill is concerned with uh which is always between other points of other people's lives and so you don't really feel that the central thing that all the children are likely to be worried about is whether they can eat their tuck here or whether they're going to wear school uniform i think there are much greater pressures on lots of children and the third sort of program which has a very strong storyline is very often on film because it happens to get out into the community and i think when granger gets out into the community it's very much more successful and although children i'm a head of a junior could we come back to you in a well i've only seen three episodes of grain chill especially for this program because i'm a bit out of the age group so i've i've been watching it um especially and i must say i found it in absolute joy people had warned me that it was dangerously violent and others had warned me that it was a a stereotypic view of of young children and that may indeed be so but it i mean for me and i'm sure that i'm not the person that they made the program for i found it an absolute delight i laughed at the jokes i thought the yesterday's episode with the with the embryo feminist trying to persuade her lumpish fellow girl pupils to be interested in the fight for technical drawing which none of them wanted to do and ending in exasperation by saying to them it's like talking to the muppets talking to you was funny i loved it it was great you must be miss piggy yes that's right deeply moral a sort of angela brazil with a north london accent i thought it was splendid christopher i thought that the dialogue was very very poorly done didn't convey any sense at all of how lively children's talk is especially multi-racial jive talk of the kind you hear a lot now even if one goes as an invited guest to talk at a school let alone what one hears on the underground and elsewhere i thought all that was absent and it made it very flat and thus in that absence they have to contrive awful little situations and awful little bits of dialogue and how do you account christopher for the fact that you may think this uh it has got a massive audience and is greatly enjoyed by school children all over the country well i don't know i mean i don't know why that is and i'm and i'm i'm confess i'm baffled because i think i think maybe it's funny there's a bit of cheek and so forth also people are very narcissistic about television they like to see things they can imagine themselves doing or their own arrangements transmitted and you know that it makes for jokes and so forth but there isn't enough there isn't enough sex or violence or obscenity in it really and my stirring call to the makers of the next series is that there should be a lot more of all that otherwise they'll get nowhere near what life is is like for kids in in north london at the moment well i've just been got at by the lady who did the makeup who said you know i have a seven-year-old and she will watch it and it's awful and it's terror and he's giving her all the wrong sorts of ideas i don't think so i think that when children are old enough to understand some of the problems that are being dealt with in the program and really christopher they do there are lots of things which are almost brought in as medicine like menstruation and so on in an episode about medicals which was a failure because there was no story these these no probably not but these issues are dealt with and it's very good that children should see things which concern them day by day being discussed on television in the form of drama thank you very much well now for the third item we'll turn to the atv documentary i heard it through the grapevine which followed the black american writer james baldwin on his first visit to the american south since the civil rights movement of the nineteen sixties and finding it sometimes happens that the more things change the more they remain the same it was an episodic and i thought somewhat confusing film with visits to atlanta birmingham selma new orleans and then new york with baldwin making most of his comments while sitting on a kind of brass throne to his brother david at the end of the film baldwin was in centre august in florida where the first slave market took place and where with the african author chinwara cheby he attended a black writers conference as baldwin spoke a message interrupted the public address system threatening his life i don't quite know what that interference is i suppose the best thing to do is doing a look and the voice said mr baldy we can't handle talk like that and everyone's stunned and i just repeated what i said you know mr baldwin is nevertheless going to finish his opening statement and i will tell you now whoever you are and if you assassinate me in the next two minutes i am telling you this it no longer matters what you think the doctrinal white supremacy in which the western world is based has had its hours had its day is over [Music] christopher hitchens well um i like to think it takes a lot to make me cry and all journalists like to feel hard-boiled about this sort of thing but it did bring a real lump into my throat that film especially the the old sequences from from selma and the big civil rights battles were really wonderful and i thought that dick fontaine's film craft you know really does deserve does deserve praise but and i could have watched a lot more of it but i found it in the end um a little soft centered bourbon never has to take the stand i mean they use his wonderful voice which sounds like sort of brandy being poured over treacle into some cocktail you know very well but they don't they don't give him any hard questions and they don't give his brother who helped to make it any hard questions either and finally it's rather inconclusive film and i decided that the thing they had failed to imagine or approach was this religion was really the the the of the film their churches have brought them together for the first phase of the struggle it was still around the church and around religion they were organizing themselves and and grouping themselves and giving that solidarity i feel that somewhere in there in the religiousness of the american black is some of the answers why they haven't gone any further than than they got in the first wave at any rate it would have been a discussion worth pursuing didn't didn't come up at all every just invited to admire fred shuttleworth then as now admirable guy but i knew that already did you feel as i did that there weren't really enough signposts that you needed if not a front man you needed a rather better guide than you got as to where you were going when and why yes but but baldwin was himself trying to find out he wasn't saying look come with me and i'll take you and show you and i know the way he was trying to find his own way back and i thought that that ambivalence was good because it kept you waiting around and he was waiting around and you shared his confusion that's all right it didn't need to be didactic in that way but at the end he ought to have been grilled a little on what he felt he'd found out liz fogen i agree with you i think i mean i didn't just have a lump in my throat i had tears rolling down my cheeks when i saw little young ben chasey at his brother's funeral and heard later that he was wanted by the police for murdering a white man but what that film set out to tell you uh apart from the old 60s civil rights film was to say it is just the same now nothing has changed the buses may be desegregated but america is the same and baldwin never produced any evidence whatever of that you saw reagan on the television screens in the background so you knew that reagan was president and that was supposed to mean something you saw blocks of hideous terrible flats that have been built for the blacks in newark when baldwin says that is not a housing project that's a reservation and you saw the voice interrupting him at the end the clip we've just seen that was all the evidence he produced except for old civil rights workers saying again and again we got it all wrong nothing's changed it's all the same that's what i wanted to see more of bernard well i couldn't quite make out why baldwin in fact had done this film because i found it hard really to understand quite what his role had been then that's my ignorance there was a shot of him when he said um i'm i'm here to bring the press and that and there you saw him on film on the steps of a town hall somewhere and i fancy that now this is what this film was about he's there to take the press perhaps mistakenly because to my mind quite apart from anything that happens to society as a whole and the large movements everybody has to grow up individually and the point about baldwin for me in his writing is that he is helping us in the sort of way i mentioned about grange hill he is helping people in their own growth he's a he's very much an individual writer and while things like going to meet the man very accurately reflect the hangings from the trees and the electric prod and so on that he that he writes about nevertheless i think he is an individual and while martin luther king can affect millions in one go baldwin is very much as a writer an individual worker and therefore the point of that film to me was a bit lost in having him doing it what did you think about his statement at the end that the western world had had its day and it was a western white supremacy was over what do you think about it either self-evident which it is in the sense that there are no more southern rhodesias around and good thing too or it means nothing i mean you know in what sense is it it's like southern dj was talking about you us now white liberal democracies we've all been yet but i mean we've all had the experience of being turned on until that we're just you know concerned honkies and and liberal you know fakers and so forth and and i well i mind who's asking me that question actually and i don't think baldwin's quite shown me that living in san tropez and writing articles called notes from the house of bondage that he's gonna quite pull it off which is what he did the other day um similarly when he says you know okay and easy things like well prosperity and technology can become another barrier you know they can also become tremendously liberating i mean the south is now quite prosperous since they got rid of the stupid feta on production that was segregation um and you know when they aggregate the figures people are better off and they should be more proud of what they do just very quickly did you find you could hear everything in that film was the sound quite clear to all of you i found some difficulty in understanding quite who was speaking at times so did i did you find that took me time at the beginning it was an idiom you got into i mean it was james baldwin so i was ready to do almost anything and i was used to the style being different it was all right in the end liz forgan christopher hitchens bernard ashley thank you all very much in 1979 itv

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Length: 26min 8sec (1568 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2022