ABSTRACT
The Decadence Game The young man with the cross bore down on the camera. "Satan, get ye behind me and be gone from this place for ever." It wasn't one of the ritual damnings of television. It was a 24 Hours piece, inquisitive rather than inquiring, about some desecrations in Highgate Cemetery. I suppose the piece wasn't typical but it certainly had the halfhearted, middle-minded air which now fails to distinguish such programmes. This particular image, though, remained in the mind. It shows some technical sophistication that the camera could thus be willed to be absent: a convention that in many circumstances is necessary but in this case only succeeded in telling the viewer to go round the back. I wondered about the co-operation of the exorciser. People are usually co-operative enough, all their amateur acting instincts rising, when they are asked to play this particular game. Indeed it is the break of convention that now attracts notice. An exceptionally pointless discussion between the television critic of the Financial Times and the editor of Review (BBC-2) was made momen-
tarily interesting when the man from the Financial Times said there were about nineteen people in the room, filming the thing, and that this made a difference. Not so much a medium, I suppose, as an exorciser. Taking the spirit out of it all.
