NORMAL TRANSMISSIOI

1922 to punish Lansbury and his colleagues by investigating the level of relief and demanding it be cut down. When this was not done, the district auditor 'surcharged' the councillors, requiring them to pay the excess expenditure personally.

The councillors simply ignored this order and after the new government was formed, the whole case was dropped.

Of course, Lansbury was a muddle-headed old Christianpacifist, as Trotsky explains so clearly in 'Where is Britain Going?'. But in this action he was giving expression to the aspirations of the East End working class.

One of his friends, a survivor of Poplar Council in Lansbury's day, once told me:

'If George had taken it into his head to jump into the Thames, the entire population of Poplar would have jumped with him.' This remark well expresses both the class following of Lansbury and the inadequacy of his leadership.

But while in 1921 the government could be made to back down by a movement led by a reformist like Lansbury, defeating the Tories today demands more than the courage of the Poplar councillors.

The clarity of Marxist theory is also needed - something Lansbury never had.

YORKSHIRE: 11.00-3.00 London. 4.15 London. 4.30 Matinee. 4.55 London. 6.00 Calendar, weather. 6.30 Hogan's heroes. 7.00 London. 11.45 Weather.

GRANADA: 11.00-3.00 London. 4.10 News. Peyton Place. 4.40 Paulus the 9o0 Londonice nie. 6.3B Get Smart.

News. 4.12 Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

6.35 Crossroads.

News. Women today. 4.15 Week. 6. 500 cospot: 1035 London. weather. 10.40 F troop.

Wrestling. 12.02 Police news. he has lived as an entertainer and comic and latterly as children's writer and poet.

It's a commonplace that the best comics usually experience and express some of the personal cruelties and inanities of modern life in an especially acute way.

Milligan has long drawn his aggressive, disruptive and gentle humour from this source: some of the greatest inventions of the BBC-radio Goon Show were his, and in his television appearances old technical boundaries have often been broken down.

He was brobably the first man to bite the lens ot a television camera, and to throw a bucket of water at it. His refusal to meet the rules of a show often led to hilarious confrontations and collapses.

But behind it all, certainly, is a despair.

This film recreated some of Milligan's suffering during a breakdown. But it was done in a way which could bring little understanding to anyone watching who didn't--already A REQUIEM FOR MODIGLIANI BBC 2, November 249.45 p.m.

DIRECTED BY FREO BURNLEY: A SIMILAR statement can be made about Fred Burnley, who directed last week's 'Omnibus' on the painter Modigliani (BBC-2, November 22, , 9.45 p.m.).

Called 'A Requiem for Modigliani', it stylishly and expensively done. It was utterly romantic and arty.

Modigliani died aged 35 in 1920 in Paris.

The 'Radio Times' blurb says he died of despair and self-neglect, and in a very limited way the programme showed some of his suffering from' tuberculosis and the alcohol and drugs he used to relieve. it.

But Peter and mistrust, neglect hopelessness that the painter experienced.

The relationship with Jeanne Hebuterne was movingly done, but perhaps only because it is so much easier to trade off the cinematic cliches of the past in misrepresenting this area of experience.

But we learned nothing of this painter's view of the world, beyond the reproductions scattered round the locations. • That he wanted to be a sculptor is clearly important to recognizing the forms of his work; but apart from alluding : to his rudeness to bourgeois collectors and his total lack of any profit from his work, we knew very little appreciate the meaning of such misery.

It was meant not as a sharing, apparently. Rather it was Milligan beating at the world's horrors with his despair.

Sometimes it was moving to hear of his suffering; frequently the tale was told in a way that led to the suggestion of self-pity.

The film ended with Milligan berating the audience with questions about 'normality'. Quite properly, the battery of questions showered disdain on given values-but they shed no light. ...

It's true, as one psychotherapist has put it, that it is normal in the US to try. to Modigliani (PETER McENERY) and leanne Hebuterne (MARIANNE BENET)

more about him ly the end of the film than at the beginning.

That his work was hugely exploited after his death is well known.

The film pretended to record the simple emotional truths of the last five years of his short life. Such anguish was clearly accepted as the price of creation rather than • the result of the lottery of capitalist society.

Three of those years (he died in 1920) were during the First World War. produce a son at 18 who is pleased to go and drop napalm on people he has never met and knows nothing about. But formulated in that way it leads only to more despair: for the questioner and the questioned.

Goldschmidt's work continues to show the same technical interest as in 'Bernadette'.

His understanding, though, remains determinedly shallow.

Milligan at least shows the scars of a real struggle to make sense of the world, however forlorn and misguided his route. Goldschmidt seems merely to 'use' his subjects without penetrating to their One would never have guessed from the film.

The bohemian myth was traded upon at every turn, reaching its climax in a tricksy presentation of the suicide of Jeanne, nine months pregnant, on the day after her lover's death.

That it also contained some photography at the frontiers of television between the artist and his nude model also need not surprise us. Pubic hair has long been fine for art programmes with small ratings.

Artists of all sorts continue be exploited in all ways!