The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 8

8 Friday February 27 1970 ARTS GUARDIAN The sage of AQUARIUS LEE LANGLEY talks to HUMPHREY BURTON about his fortnightly arts programme Aquarius (ITV) which after only four editions has about 6,000,000 regular viewers Schleslnger and Ken Russell that wtl worth while. "I suspect too, that imconaolouily I model a lot of what I do on Hinr Wheldon, who had a very personal approach to his work." Leaving the BBC proved far mot painful than he had anticipated Ilk leaving home Is supposed to be. I dont think I ever really believed it would come to it, I loved all the secrecy and. excitement; meeting and planning what we were going to do we became contractors, 1 suppose I saw myself as a kind of Trojan horse marching through the walls of the ITV with all sorts of splendid and radical ideas He believes that what he's doing la a proselytising job he's out to make converts. When I suggest that people don't retain much of what they aee on television, he disagrees I do think the straightforward conversation piece goes in one ear and out the other.

But I believe people will retain something, learn something, if you give them powerful distillation. You have to try and give them a sense 'of Rodin or Wagner or whatever, and then let them go on from there. TV is changing public tastes, I'm of that "The great thing about this lob if that it's a wonderful opportunity to educate yourself at the expense of ITV. You're learning all the time. If someone comes to me with an idea I don't like, I say oome back again and convince me.

Then he may come up with something that makes me realise It's something we should do, and in doing sd, he may have stumbled on a better way of doing it That's good for everyone." He wants to keep the programme flexible: there maybe as many as eight items, or one, as with the forthcoming "Aquarius Guide to Pop." On Good Friday, the entire programme ia devoted to the Verdi Requiem'' from St Paul's Cathedral. "We want as much variety of content as possible some people may switch on for Barbara Windsor, but they'll stay with us for Henry Moore." Around six million people are already regular viewers, which seems to prove his point. "People are curious, hungry for information. But not everyone has been blessed with a secondary school education. So you have to explain things a little, concepts whlca are too often taken for granted and bandied about.

And it's no use saying Beethoven, of course, was the great German composer who wrote nine That, of is deadly. I think we occupy a 'very pivotal position in TV: to those who really know, one Is as a child. To those who don't, one is a sage, and the ladies In the canteen congratulate you onkaowi ing so Humphrey Burton on the set of "Aquariui on the left, Hill of Jean-Luc GWard rPHE yellow silk kipper tie Is from Blades and costs almost as much as a shirt did Id simpler days. Toe smooth, dark Cerutti jacket" 45 quid from Harrods" was actually bought for him by the props department, but wearing it makes Humphrey Burton feel so good that this morning he's borrowed it, to set off the saffron yellow American shirt. Tonight, when his forlnightly programme Aquarius goes out on ITV, Burton will be introducing the show in one ot his shirts from Mr Fish or Asser and Turnbull.

And if you're wondering what all Oils has to do with his function as editor and front man on what is emerging as television's leading arts magazine, stay tuned. Already, after only four editions, "Aquarius" giver you the feeling you're meant to enjoy it. This is no accident just as he relishes the fringe benefits of success. Burton enjoys his work, and wants to spread the pleasure around. He sets the tone himself, coming on with an engaging I think you'll like this" approach as opposed to the didactic lecture-hall technique that can creep into what the trade calls serious programming." Burton at 38 is attractive in an easy moving, deceptively somnolent way.

Good living has slightly blurred the clean-cut good looks, but added to the benevolence of his manner. He says he tries to feature a woman in every programme because he likes pretty women and thinks the public does too. I think it makes the programme more accessible and I care about that. I don't want to get at people or worry them." On the box he gives the impression of being cheerful, reassuring, friendly, and relaxed. Off it, he seems much the same.

In temperament I'd say he fits his own description of a former colleague he's not arrogant but he's not humble either. He has that pecu- liarly English gift for managing to function with sharply efficient professionalism while retaining toe appearance of a somewhat diffident dilettante; succeeding without seeming to try. He says he has the ability to get on well with all sorts of people and is tolerant to the point of crass-ness, which could explain how, a few months after he resigned from London Weekend Television, he is back working for them as a freelance. Burton left the BBC after 12 years, first in radio then in television, to become a founder-member of London Weekend. After the highly public internecine blood-letting last year came the mass resignations, Including Burton's.

"When they asked me to take on "Aquarius' as an outsider, I thought about it for a long time before accepting. I don't think I'm having my cake and eating it. Certainly I. didn't resign as a gesture, just to go back under another cloak. 1 don't have the company car any more, or any of the other privileges that went with being a senior executive.

I'd sell my shares tomorrow if I could, in order to be completely independent, But as a free Jance I decided I must go where I'm asked." As head of London Weekend's Drama, Music, and Arts Unit, he compensated for the backroom, unsung activity by producing the occasional show himself, like the specials on Andre Previn and Bernstein, and Strindberg's Playing With Fire which will go out later this spring. Not that he was unhappy as an executive "I get rather cross when people say how much happier I'm looking now. I like everything about being in television I like wheeling and dealing, I like flying off to America or Rome or Vienna to fix something in a hurry. I even like going to meetings." The considerable pressures which he has never avoided have also proved to be destructive: his private life has been the major casualty. Burton was born In Trowbridge in Wiltshire.

His mother used to be a midwife and his father is Chief Examiner far the GCE at Cambridge University, where Burton read Music and History before spending a year in France on a scholarship studying the development of the public concert. Clearly music has always been central in his life. He was recruited to "Monitor" as a production assistant, and ended as its editor. In 1965 he won the Guild of Television Producers' Award for creative work in the field of music on television. He talks about his early days on "Monitor" with an almost Housmanesque nostalgia, looking back to a land of lost content "Those were days of high adventure: every programme was a first.

Just to take a camera along and film Henry Moore working or Colin Davis conducting was an event, breaking new ground. And finding talent like John review ELGAR'S "THE KINGDOM at the Royal Festival Hall by Neville Cardm Pop in the political arena by Geoffrey Cannon Sir AdrUn Bouit: RFH IN THE ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL last night, Sir Adrian Boult and the London Philharmonic Orchestra and choir, backed up by four first-class soloists, tried devotedly and expertly to. get Elgar's oratorio "The Kingdom" off the ground, but, as far as I could respond, in vain. As Mr Kenwigs might have put it, laconically but expressively, "No wings." Over a long period of his life Elgar was obsessed by a ambition to compose a vast oratorical sequence dealing with the life and good works of the Apostles. Fortunately for us, he gave up the project after finishing The Kingdom," else we could easily have been deprived of the symphonies and the violin concerto.

"The Kingdom," like "The Apostles," contains arresting moments and tedious quarters-of-an-hour. Elgar could fire Gerontius," with the flame ot his genius because Newman's poem has a singleness of purpose, and concerns matters affecting every thinking man or woman, whatever his or her creed or theology, for we all, sooner or later, have to cope with the Gerontius problem of faith and fear. In "The Apostles" and "The King dom," there is little unity, with a certain dichotomy; Elgar's meditative lyrical flow is blocked by exegesis, by a sort of scriptural commentary. The discussions in, "The Upper Room" between Peter, John, Mary lagdalene, and the rest are occasionally like a quasichoral, symphonic setting in a Church assembly. It is a blessing that Elgar tired of the theme if he had not he could have deserved the taunt Delius snapped at Parry" If he had lived long enough he would have set the entire Bible to music." Elgar's power of projecting himself dramatically was weak; that is why he could not write anything like an opera.

Elgar's best biographer, Michael Kennedy, summed up The Apostles and "The Kingdom" miscarriages cogently we can see the wheels go round." Elgar sought to identify the characters in The Kingdom (and "The by a strict system of leading motives, so obviously applied that they remind us of the old pictorial balloons," or Debussy's visiting cards." Yet fine musical minds have ranked "The Kingdom" above "Gerontius," Sir Adrian himself and Samuel Lang-ford, who wrote, in these columns, that though "The Kingdom" had not the unity of "Gerontius," as music, it was certainly better." In thought-out craftsmanship, maybe. The chorus 6 ye Priests," and the solo off Mary, "The sun goeth down," have the unmi9 takable Elgar spell but too much of the score of The Kingdom reminds me that Elgar composed from the same stuff to more convincingly imaginative ends elsewhere. Many passages in The Kingdom are much too English oratorical of its period there is even a hint of the odour of the pew and of well-thumbed Bibles, and the sanctimonious voices of clerical cadential exhortation. Yet the sincerity of Elgar comes through The Kingdom sometimes, disarmingly. The prelude is even more nobly vulgar than the prelude to "Gerontius." Seldom has piety produced good music and this remark goes not' only for Elgar but for even greater composers than Elgar, not excepting Bach.

Sir Adrian, our most authoritative Elgar conductor, brought, as I say, all his faith in "The Kingdom" to bear on this admirably encompassed performance. There was ample light and shade in the choral singing and it is by Elgar's use of the chorus that he revitalised oratorio in his day. The London Philharmonic Orchestra played as instrumentalists should who know the score of "The Kingdom" backwards and the soloists, Margaret Price, Norma Proctor, Alexandra Young, and Benjamin Iuxon, especially, each would have deeply gratified Elgar himself by their various solo contributions! Which is saying much. Pari fiercer i Aid yth AFTER HAGGERTY by Philip Hope-Wallace DAVID MERCER'S new play "After Haggerty," struck me ai lone and uneconomical, but having a' sort of specific gravity, not to say destiny which one can't but respect It fa the same with Clifford Odet's, but he generally managed to extract the tooth at tbe end after all the writing about and agony, whereas Mr Mercer leaves me neither surprised nor satisfied at the last curtain. I trust it will not be said that this is my reaction because I am a drama critic, which is also the profession of the spinelest hero Bernard (who roused my envy in the course of the play by receiving both a wreath and a coffin, while I never had more than a casb-on-delivery plastic lavatory seat).

The latter might have been appropriate the lavatory jokes coaxett laughter more times than I felt like joining in, but it would be unfair noi to mention mat a strong section of the audience laughed joyously, and had good cause to at the funny impersonations of two odd-job painter's men (one the statutory homo, of course) well played by David Wood, with mate John White. There is also a magnificently heavy Yorkshire father, ex-engine driver, a character Priestley might have rounded out, which is played with bovine steadiness by Leslie Sands, and not without a touch of pathos at the last But sympathy was what I tried in vain to feel for the hero and the sad, foul-mouthed American shrew, Haggerty'i abandoned mistress, who break in on our hero who has leased Haggerty's flat. Billie Dixon plays this unprepossessing woman with bleak ugliness, as is no doubt intended. Bernard is played with great comic resource and likeable openness by Frank Finlay, but the part is no-" Willie Mossop is an ineffectual Marxist, a heavy drinking drama critic, and we see not one but (it leemed) dozens of sketches of him lecturing feebly on the drama in foreign parts through an interpreter. Very little seemed to be made ot hii politics or his job.

The concern seems to be a self-liberation from a father-dominated childhood, exemplified In the clash between the visiting Yorkshire dad in retirement, the American bitch, and the bickering paper-hangers. Poor Bernard's problems and the woman's too are dealt with obliquely not that this need be a bad way in the theatre. But I wish I had been able to feel more deeply involved. The role of the unseen Haggerty and his infant son, Raskolnikov, was not by the end clear to me. Decor, a bare flat Alan Tagg, Director David Jones.

Anthony Quran? Drjt THE SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN, in Manchester by David Bridgman AIRPLAY latest album, Volunteers, (RCA LCSf 4238), has a sons', "We can be together," that is a restatement of Allen Ginsberg's Howl." We are all outlaws in the eyes of AmericaIn order to survive we steal, cheat, lie, forge, hide, and dealWe are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent, and young. We are forces of chaos and anarchyEverything they say we are, we are." As these words were played and heard all over America (the album went as high as 13 in the Billboard charts, and has now done millions of dollars worth of sales) Ginsberg himself was testifying at the Chicago conspiracy trial. And, as part of his testimonial, he recited Howl." When he came to the passage "Moloch the vast stone of war Moloch the stunned governments," he raised his voice to a roar, pointing an outstretched finger at the 74-year-old Judge Hoffman. So, at the same time, music merges into some combination or invocation and incitement, and a trial merges into theatre as the hippies, and the older men who were beats twenty years ago, join forces. It's easy to point out words on albums like "Volunteers," or Steppen-woirs Monster, (EMI SSL 5021) or the Doors' The Soft Parade (Elektra EKS 75005) and find anarchistic babble, magnified and therefore made menacing by the medium of top selling records.

There's more to it than that. First, a good number of rock bands, through the use of the rhetoric that's implicit both in songs and in performance, through the efficient transmission of their ideas, through becoming catalysts of new ot forgotten free styles of living, are now, themselves, effectively politicians. The visions of society which were, once, the prerogative of statesmen, are now preached by singers. Dylan has many nelrs. The programmes that now can be heard in song don't read like documents.

They're meant to be heard, like speeches. And, because they're song, they are metaphorical and allusive. To take an example Creedence Clearwater Revival's wniv and the Poorboys (Fantasy F2762, released in Britain by Liberty). This is a band not often seen as political, because their music is well-humoured and Invigorating, and extremely popular: the album is number three in "America, now. But you don't have to be dull to be serious.

It came out of the sky is a track on "Willy and the Poorboys," with a theme like the Dillards' The Biggest Whatever." In each song an enormous unnamed something drops out of the sky, somewhere In the American countryside. It's not an object, but a metaphor for an idea, too big to be assimilated into the old ideas just as the world would turn upside down for anyone who saw an ant a foot long. The guitar work on the Creedence track is inspired by Chuck Berry: hard, exhilarating, self-confident. And that's no accident, either. Berry was one of the first American Negroes to assert in his music not that he deserved fair treatment (that implies inferiority, even if only of power) but that he was owned America, as much as any other man.

He didn't drive down a transcontinental highway in his Mustang on sufferance. The Jefferson Airplane claim the same right as Berry: to contradict received American mores, but, at the same time, that they're Americans. That's the theme of the film, Easy Rider," too. And the stance is dangerous, as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin now know. Creedence, in a gentler way, with different voices, state the same theme.

LONDON GALLERIES by Norbert Lynton BARBARA HEPWORTH'S recent work fills the two Marlborough galleries in Bond Street. Overfills, perhaps. Sculptures, paintings, screen-prints and lithographs it all adds up to a remarkable display of activity by an artist in her sixties and recently troubled by ill health. But her sculptures seem to need more headroom than they get here. Some thought her Tate exhibition was too full, but the Tate seemed to have enough air for her sculptures to be able to breathe.

Here they feel imprisoned. Everyone who knows Miss Hepworth's work will have his preferred sort among the variety of her output. Mine have always been, and will surely go on being, her wood carvings usually large, rounded, with large hollows in them and often holes and, secondly, those stone carvings that look almost natural as though the chisel had only hastened a refining of the shape that the elements would have achieved over millennia. There are enough of these to keep Western Powers, particularly the United States, do not get a mention, indicates the simplistic contrivance of the plot. And the Pope's final decision is incredibly glib, a too-easy answer to the problem, which presumably is meant to reassure as well as inspire audiences.

The film's aspirations are also cheapened by the prominence given to a redundant love triangle involving a television reporter, his working wife (a doctor), and his socialite mistress. Anthony Quinn invests the Pope with a humanity and dignity which even manages to survive such an embarrassing scene as his off-duty encounter with the romantically troubled doctor. Olivier, as the Russian Premier, merely has to look purposeful in baggy suits, and Oscar Werner, as a Jesuit controversialist, is the only character who appears to touch reality at any point. EASY TO SEE why "The Shoes of the Fisherman attracted a Hollywood producer. It was a best-selling novel, dealt with a "big theme" (the Catholic Church's role in the search for peace), and, in its Vatican settings and ceremonies had a ready-made spectacle fit for colour and the wide screen.

Indeed, the design and camerawork in the film, which has its British premiere at the ABC, Deansgate, Manchester, on Sunday, are impeccable, but, as so often, a big theme engenders a movie of small stature, one with a patently contrived plot and superficial treatment of religion and politics. The story supposes that a Russian Pope the first non-Italian Pontiff for over 300 years is asked to mediate between Russia and China to avoid a third world war. The fact that the me happy. One piece, "Makutu," in lignul vitae, is among the finest she has ever done. She would probably say that her success was due to the superb piece of wood with which she started, but it is of course her uncovering of the beauty of the material, the process of education (literally) she has engaged it in, that produced the triumphant object.

John Wragg's show of sculpture at the Hanover Gallery implies two developments: one towards the sort of assembled image that David Smith used to make before he concentrated his compositions into almost pictorial groups of forms, and the other towards surrealist images of a Max Ernst sort. The former are big and seem to me rather too random to warrant the importance rze tries to lend them. The latter have much more power, (Hepworth Marlborough Fine Art, 39 Old Bond Street, and Marlborough New London, 17-18 Old Bond Street, until March 13. Wragg Hanover Gal-lerv, 32a St George Street, 1, until March 19.) Steptoe Galton and Steptoe Simpson by Nancy Banks-Smith Hercules though. thought It funny." Simpson speaking.

So softhearted, as a matter of fact, that he fishes with bread he can't put maggots on a pin.) The new series is neither updated nor uptight. There'a no 'by Christ that needed saying'." It is different only in the aense that five years make a difference. In one not-yet-recorded episode, a homosexual, but not the handflapping figure of farce, comes to the yard and fancies Harold. They wouldn't or couldn't have done that five vears ago, Harold. "It has been done in drama, but with drama people are looking at somebody else," said Gallon.

"In comedy you are more likely to get through, because they are looking at themselves." Their shock quality is not the kind that jams switchboards. The shock is seeing yourself. Thinking back, their best work told me something snaking about myself that I already knew. But didn't know I knew. qualifications to say I was." Simpson left school at sixteen.

The last year was just misery. My mother desperately wanted me to go into the Civil Service. I had uncles who worked for Chelsea Football Club, and uncles in the Gas, Light and Coke Company and one who drove a car. He was in the Civil Service. I reacted against the Civil Service, of course, and went to work as a postal clerk for a shipping company.

That's where I learned to type. Might just as well gone into the Civil Service as a postal clerk." They both regret not going to university. The best thing that happened to them, from where I sit, is that they didn't. The second best is that they did get tuberculosis, so met in a sanatorium. They were Harold Steptoe and.

though the nearest pub to their office is now Claridges, they still identify with Harold. In the new series the Steptoes haven't changed. They've killed off in New York, the Steptoes would have been Jewish the Christians would have said Jesus not another Jewish comedy and the Jews would have objected that they aren't all rag and bone And so through all the Irish, Mexican, German permutations of American poverty. Besides, sponsors prefer happy families. The lovely wife, the cute kids, the husband who writes television scripts.

Purusing the comparative thinness on the ground of television script writers, it is surprises how thick and fast they come in American comedy series. Though Galton and Simpson are television script writers, with, for all 1 know, lovely wives and cute kids, they write from their frustrated, formative roots. They both come from South London. Galton left school at fourteen, or school left him when a bomb dropped near by. He went to work repairinc bomb damage.

"I knew I was better than all this but I had no IT is a matter of humiliation to me that I am still not sure which one is Galton and which Simpson. This is entirely their own fault. I dont blame them for growing to the same unreasonable height but to grow identical beards is calculated cussedness. When I met them they had come from a confusing lunch with the Boulring brothers, who are also virtually interchangeable. And serve them right, 1 say.

They write, in case you have been Inside, insane or in Spain for ten years, Steptoe and Son. Or wrote il. It ended five vears ago and returns next week, due mainly to the public's engagingly chuckle-headed conviction that it never went awav. Repeats perhaps persuaded people that the Steptoes were not dead, just gone to earth. In between times Gallon and Simpson have been in America trying to launch Steptoe there.

There were ethnic problems. If the series were set.