Portraits of a lady who lost focus

Last Night's TV

THE THIRTIES IN COLOUR BBC4 THE BILL ITV1

Strictly speaking, The Thirties in Colour should be called "Toffs on Their Hols", Far Eastern sweatshops not yet having placed this particular means of production into the hands of ordinary joes such as you and me. If you owned a cine-camera in the 1930s, then you were almost certainly going to be pretty well-off, and if you loaded it with Kodacolour, you needed to be richer still, given how expensive the stock was. This wasn't a problem for Rosie Newman, who could confidently claim to be a good deal better than better-off. As the daughter of Sigismund Neumann, a Bavarian banker who had made his fortune in South African diamonds, Rosie was absolutely loaded. The family's London address was 146 Piccadilly and their next-door neighbours were called Liz and George, later to move just down the road to Buckingham Palace, after George's brother Edward had got into a bit of a scrape with that frightful Simpson women. In the only bit of footage that was likely to be of interest to anyone but a specialist, Rosie had taken pictures of their daughters, Margaret and Elizabeth, playing in the garden.

This sounds harsh, and I wouldn't entirely want to discount the patina that elapsed time can give to even the most banal bit of film. Seventy-eight years ago, Rosie's friends and relatives must have absolutely dreaded the parties at which they all had to sit in the dark looking at her endless shots of polo matches and upper- crust tea parties. But now we can view it as - in the cliche generally employed by such programmes - as a magical glimpse of a vanished era. Or at least we can try. Because the real problem with Rosie Newman's footage was that she only took pictures of things that interested her. Very occasionally, this paid off. Travelling out to India, she took a sequence of the dizzyingly wealthy maharaja of Patiala shooting clay pigeons from the deck of his liner, a pearl the size of a hen's egg dangling from his ear. Briefly you were swept into the pages of a P G Wodehouse story.

But mostly, Rosie's addiction to the exotic and the notable yielded nothing for a modern viewer that they couldn't find elsewhere in sharper focus. Arriving in Bombay, she took a picture of the faade of the Taj Mahal hotel, looking then precisely as it does now, and as it has done in a thousand postcards. What you yearned for was footage of Rosie's luggage being unloaded, or the interior of her state room, or her servant unpacking in her suite. But instead you got the standard travelogue shots. Newman travelled as the guest of the then Viceroy of India, Lord Willingdon, which meant she got a lot more caparisoned elephants and subahdars than the average tourist, but almost nothing of the political turmoil that was then gripping India. Panning across Chowpatty beach for a bit of background scenery, Rosie's lens swept past a nationalist protest meeting without faltering. The expert commentators here charitably suggested that she'd failed to notice it, but it seems quite possible that she wouldn't have been very interested even if she had, since it didn't fit her notion of imperial glamour. Commenting on her footage of the British Isles in the late Thirties, another contributor gamely tried to ramp up its dull, tourist- calendar predictability into an arraignment of an entire social class. "It's almost like her finger's in the dyke of change," she said. It wasn't, though. Rosie, you suspected, simply couldn't imagine that her friends would want to look at anything else but Highland cows and municipal flowerbeds. It took several tons of high explosive to jolt the camera to a more interesting angle, the Blitz propelling Newman out into the streets, where she captured at least one wonderfully evocative image: mountains of furniture and bric-a- brac in Hyde Park, salvaged from bombed-out buildings. That was worth seeing, but, goodness, you had to show some stiff upper lip to get to it.

In The Bill, Smiffy was concluding his undercover investigation into London gun-runners, apparently unperturbed that this hugely sensitive operation was being run out of an open-plan office, where the live feed from his hidden microphone could be overheard by any casual passerby. If I was risking my life by luring the Russian mafia into a sting operation, I'd want a little more insurance against accidental bean-spillage than that. Then again, these aren't the brightest baddies on the block, judging from the final showdown. Arriving with a lorryload of Mac-10s, Boris Villainovitch was concentrating so hard on kyurling his kyonsonants that he neglected to post a lookout outside the warehouse rendezvous, thus allowing hundreds of well-armed police to tippy-toe into place and catch him red-handed. "Well done, Smiffy," someone said. "Getting both the guns and the supplier was a great result." A sentence that I find I can't read without mentally supplying an enclosing speech bubble.

t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk

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