TV CRITICS: ZINGERS & STINGERS

Hooray! At long last a readable column from The New Yorker's television critic. A couple of her zingers in the current issue:

• CBS's "Two and a Half Men" [is] a show that seems more dependent than most on the cattle prod of its laugh track, and [it's] one that I have watched some two dozen times with a sporting interest: I want to be present when Charlie Sheen demonstrates that he has more than one facial expression.

• ["My Name Is] Earl" had me grinding my teeth from its first image -- a bobblehead dashboard figurine. I sensed that I was being handed a big can of whimsy and sent off against my will to camp camp.

She doesn't quite achieve the altitude of the zingers in Clive James's weekly columns in the Observer a quarter century ago, but then what other television critic has?

Here's a sampling of his stingers -- all but one of them ledes -- on subjects high and low from a collection of his columns, "Glued to the Box," dating from 1979 to 1982. They are a time capsule, of course. But they preserve a particular sensibility (one we don't always agree with, though never mind), as well as some of the period's social and political history:

• Antibes was the venue for this season's first international heat of Jeux sans frontières (BBC1), a television phenomenon which encapsulates the Europe of the present and presages the world of the future. It is omnilingual yet inarticulate, multicoloured yet homogeneous, frantic yet static, contrived yet banal. It is a girl from Urps-am-Gurgle dressed as a duck ...

• A repeat series of Shoestring (BBC1) and a brand new series of Minder (Thames) helped convince the viewer, by way of these two deservedly popular vigilantes, that good triumphs over evil in the end. Back in the real world, a rapist was let off with a £2000 fine because the girl brought it on herself by hitch-hiking after dark. The news that you can rape a hitch-hiker for only two grand will no doubt soon spread.

• As if to demonstrate that the tangles democracies get into count as nothing beside the horrors of tyranny, Idi Amin made an appearance on the Nine O'Clock News (BBC1). Exclusively interviewed by Brian Barron, Idi spoke from his mysterious hideout, which nobody except everybody knows to be the Sands Hotel Jeddah. That the BBC agreed with Idi to keep his whereabouts secret bespeaks a certain old-world charm, like the punctiliousness with which, during the Second World War, they are reputed to have paid Hitler's royalties into a Swiss bank account.

• Goodbye Gutenberg (BBC2) deserved its repeat. Here was a vision of the fully computerised future, when all the electronic machines in the world will be linked up and our bodies will consist entirely of transplants. There is nothing more thought-provokinng than the spectacle of a Japanese engineer and a Japanese computer having a long conversation in Japanese.

• Bad sight of the week was on TV Eye (Thames). Chinese whose fingers had been cut off in industrial accidents were to be seen having them sewn back on or replaced with toes. During the long operations, which involved micro-surgery of staggering intricacy, the patients stayed awake, presumably so that the visiting round-eyes from TV Eye could interview them. Some of the patients had had whole hands or even arms sliced off. These, too, were replaced. The cause of the accident was usually some such piece of machinery as a circular saw. Thousands of Chinese per year have digits or limbs removed in this way. Apparently it is deemed more interesting to explore surgical techniques for replacing the missing appendages than to devise safe machines.

• As was revealed on Newsnight (BBC2), Madame Toussaud's must have been all set for a Reagan victory. Within minutes of the announcement an effigy that looked nothing like him was being lifted into position, while the effigy that looked nothing like Carter was taken away to be given a new haircut and labelled as someone else -- Gary Cooper, perhaps.

• Fronting In Evidence --The Bomb (Yorkshire), Jonathan Dimbleby overwhelmingly proved that nuclear weapons were a bad thing. Anybody still harboring the belief that they were a species of Christmas decoration would have found the programme a rude shock.

• Rod Stewart and his wife, Alana, talked to Russell Hary (BBC1). Although obviously still employing a hair preparation based on epoxy resin, Rod evinced a new maturity.

• Mrs. Mao, up for trial in China, was looking well pleased with herself on all channels. She was back in show-business.

• The Making of Mankind (BBC2) is much more interesting now that it has reached a stage where Mankind started leaving consumer durables lying around. The hunter-gatherer phase reached its peak during the last Ice Age, during which the hunter gatherers, while waiting for the bison to show up, whiled away the time in deep caves by painting pictures of such astonishing accomplishment that you marvelled all over again at just how lousy our own artists were during the Middle Ages.

• With camera shutters crackling around her like an electrical storm, Lady Diana Spencer, as she then was, had a little crisis. Off she went in tears with all the world's media in pursuit. Perhaps the whole deal was off. Perhaps she would become a nun.

• Introducing The God That Fled (BBC2), narrator Christopher Hitchens announced that "the programme contains nudity and some scene of physical and psychological violence." No doubt the viewing figures were thereby enhanced. In the immortal words of Ronnie Scott, the bouncer was outside throwing them in.

• Albert Speer, the only top Nazi to make it all the way through into the television era, died of old age practically on camera. He was making a programme for the BBC when he finally gave up the Geist, leaving one with some curiostiy to see the as-yet unscreened tape, in order to ascertain how long his expression of innocent bewilderment stayed in place after his canny soul had departed.

• Chopin loved his country but resisted all appeals to go home, on the principle that whereas in Paris art was eternal, political turmoil in Poland was merely endless. Perhaps the only appropriate response to the week's events, for those of us who could do absolutely nothing about them, would have been to put on an old record of Rubinstein playing Chopin's second piano sonata and slowly consume a bottle of whatever they used to drink in Poland when they could still get it.

• Bad sight of the week was in an episode of Horizon (BBC2) dealing with high-speed and time-lapse photography. Sped up several hundred times, a gang of maggots devoured a dead mouse. Before time-lapse photography was invented it was always assumed that maggots, though they travelled in packs, did their actual eating on an individual basis. But time-lapse photography reveals that they dine as a group. "They are swimming in one another's juices," explained the voice-over. First they were all over the mouse's head like a cloche hat.Then they were around its neck like a feather boa fluttering in the wind. Then they were around its waist like a grass skirt worn by a particularly active hula dancer. Then they were sliding down past its hips like a dress being rapidly removed by an impatient lover. By this stage you had to remind yourself of the necessity to breathe.

• Always the best thing of its kind on the air, Minder (Thames) has been particularly nutritious lately, with George Cole's portrayal of Arthur Daly attaining such depths of seediness that a flock of starlings could feed off him.

• "I have a gift for disaster," said Richard Burton in The Medusa Touch (ITV). "I am the man with the power to cause catastrophe." He spent the whole movie taking the words out of your mouth.

The whole columns, too, hold up beautifully, which goes to show it's not just the wit of his ledes but the power of his reporting even on the most trivial subjects that make them readable so many years later. And powerful reporting, perhaps more than wit, is what's really lacking from The New Yorker's television criticism.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands