Powerful but grim

This being the Spectator’s bumper Christmas issue, we asked the television companies for a few seasonal preview discs. There wasn’t much ‘ho, ho, ho!’ about any of them. Some were merely grim: Three Kings at War (Channel 4, Thursday), for example, chronicled how three cousins — George V, Czar Nicholas and Kaiser Bill — helped, through their own stupidity, to bring about the death of millions. Channel 4 also offered a three-part set — The True Voice of Rape (Monday), The True Voice of Prostitution (Tuesday) and The True Voice of Murder (Wednesday). Uncork the eggnog now!

To be fair, The True Voice series contained powerful material. The problem was that — to protect the victims — their words were voiced by actors. So the young woman who was raped by a fellow-wedding guest described the experience in detail while apparently moving round her flat. Immediately there was a glass wall between us and the ‘true’ experience. For actors, however talented, are still actors. They sound like actors. We are getting the story second-hand. If you had seen Olivier as Othello you might have been horrified, but it would be a different type of horror from hearing a man who actually had murdered his wife.

Generally, when people describe something appalling in their lives, they do so in a low and monotonous voice. Actors can’t do that. It’s against their professional rules. In the second programme Richard Wilson voiced a wealthy businessman who often goes with prostitutes, and whose wife has affairs with other men. Of course we don’t think, ‘I’m sure Annette Crosbie, his long-suffering wife in One Foot in The Grave, would never do such a thing!’ But he still sounded like Richard Wilson playing a part.