TAKING LIBERTIES

Last week's 'Radio Times' blazed with a declaration of intent - 'ALL ABOUT WOMEN' the cover promised 'Marvellous Maggie Smith on the hard slog of being a top actress'; 'My husband is going to the Moon' by Dotty Duke-Dotty being her name and not a reference to her sanity; 'How Good is Princess Anne? - The Expert's Verdict'. A fair question; "The Rolls-Royce wives, Eleanor Bron, Megs Jenkins and Mary Whitehouse... plus lots more all about women and all by women'.

It seems the BBC took a big breath, stretched itself to the full heights of tolerance and dragged itself protesting into the stormy 1970s. The winds of change have apparently contrived to steal beneath the glass doors of the Television Centre and blow gently down the corridors of power. Not real change, that is, but a grand gesture of recognition, extended with all the polite magnanimity of the massaging medium.

This column was to receive the first body-blow from the Corporation-Women's Lib amalgamation.

Last week's review had had the temerity to suggest that the Marx Brothers are great fun. According to Margaret Hinxman, however, Groucho, Chico, and Harpo, (Zeppo didn't get a mention-not, I would say out of admiration, but mistaken ommission) are the arch 'male chauvinist pigs' of them all. The fact that they themselves constitute their own principal object of ridicule seems to offer no redemption for the quartet, alas!

To • this particular Women's Lib attitude I offer the Groucho sado-psychotherapy: 'You're heading for a nervous breakdown, why don't you pull yourself to pieces.

After all, the female liberationists' have really asked for this act of generous contempt which has been bestowed upon them by the BBC.

Juliet Mitchell, one of their more intelligent spokeswomen, claimed in her book 'Women's Estate', that women constitute 'an international class'. This nonsensical, anti-Marxist analysis was bound to be adopted with ardent enthusiasm by a ruling class which can only benefit from a blurring of class lines, i.e. that Princess Anne and the wives of the Rolls-Royce workers have common class interests!

So no female was excluded from the all-embracing united front of the 'Radio Times'—Mary Whitehouse figuring large under the banner 'Mrs Whitehouse: Member of the new AvantGarde'. Had that heading been written prior to the Reformation one might have understood it.

All comedy programmes of the week (with the exception, I insist, the Marx Brothers) were easily surpassed by the comments voiced by or descriptions of these women.

Pamela MacGregor-Morris, Equestrian Correspondent of "The Times' was quoted thus on Princess Anne: 'The Princess has innate ability. She's got natural balance, looks almost part of the horse. She's also got the rare gifts of hands.' Jimmy Tarbuck in his comedy show on Saturday was hard put to it to cap that one, although he did his 'best'. He jumped on the Women's Lib bandwagon with a take-off of Helen Gurley Brown, editor of "Cosmopolitan', the magazine backlash to the emancipation of women.

Then take Irma Kurtz, who in this edition of 'Radio Times' to beat all editions of 'Radio Times', actually produced this prime turkey in her piece on Maggie Smith: 'Maggie Smith at home (all the best actresses have real ones) is Mrs Robert Stephens.' Well, there you have it, all the best actresses have real ones. What Groucho would call a wise quack.

Seriously though, I suppose one could have detected the odd tinge of 'male chauvinist piggery' in Groucho from last Friday's 'Horse Feathers' Perhaps this rude appeal: 'Are you Miss Bailey? Come on, come on, one of us is Miss Bailey and it's not me? Or this cosy remark (also to Miss Bailey): 'I love sitting on your lap. I could sit here all day if you didn't stand up?

There is, of course, inherent in all comedy, an act of aggression against some hapless character. But then Independent Television's *Love Thy Neighbour, a racial situation comedy, is undoubtedly a better example of pleasantry erected on prejudice, of bellylaughs based on bias.

You laugh in spite of yourself and spite is the operative word, as all the eternal clichés of black and white co-existence are chortled out. The white man. is the supposedly archetypal, suburban home-loving idiot. His Labour-voting, drinking, black neighbour the typical, uptight Spade, blowing blasts of Black Power and brooding rythmn all over the local pub.

The whole thing can only stand the assumption that the average English working man is as thick as a post and twice as backward. And to really ensure the liberal niceties, the producer contrived present the English couple as a trifle plain, going gradually to seed, while the Caribbean pair are young, vibrant and powerful.

Black is Beautiful.

The whole thing is a sort of Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte versus Alf Garnett sparring match, with Tarzan on the sidelines providing cultural trans ference.

A more formidable black and white confrontation was provided by the programme Something to Say on Thursday night, when a platitudinous Peregrine Worsthorne faced a bellicose James Baldwin.

Cold, white, upper-middle class, personalistic, constipated consternation from Worsthorne was met by blazing, black, diarrhetic, articulate outrage from Baldwin. Both men live by the wordin Baldwin's case volcanic artistry, in Worsthorne's petulant insistence (as always • with the bourgeois in corner) on precision-the purity of the New Oxford Dictionary providing the sole defence mechanism against the accumulated black anger of centuries of exploitation.

The word 'ghetto' which James Baldwin uses with explosive frequency caused Peregrine Worsthorne dire vocabularic discomfort. 'Ghetto', he protested, was not „the appropriate word describe Harlem — 'slum' would do, but 'ghetto' was, and the dictionary confirms it, for Jews.

I have since checked the word 'Peregrine' in Chambers. As an adjective it means foreign or migratory, as a noun, an immigrant or a kind of falcon. Hard cheese for one of the pillars of English ultra-chauvinism.

The Marx Brothers will appear or vour pleasure tonight ir "Duck Soup'