The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 6

THE GUARDIAN Saturday January 15, 19S3 WEEK-END ARTS Illustration by Peter Clarke Monday SOMETIME in the next century, videos of the first British breakfast TV programme will probably turn up on an antiques road show. You might as well see it live, with most of the rest of a curious notion (BBC-1 (V 30-9 am). Then we can go back to sleep. And at least-, they won't be trying to sell anything but their own expensive selves. I Love Lucy (C4.

6-6 30 pm). This is the classic episode with Ilarpo Marx and a recreation of the great mirror scene in Duck Soup. Opinions (C4 10 30-11 pm) Salman Rushdie on Racism established Opinions as important viewing, a kind of Guardian Agenda Page of the air. And now we have re-learned that one intelligent head talking direct to one immobile camera can be great television, we should be ready for Enoch Powell to defend Parliament and ho role of the individual MP. Enoch being long-winded on such matters, he is back with Part Two the following week.

Tuesday Dr Who (BBC-1, 6 50-7 15 pm): The good doctor returns with a complex plot about the planet of Manussa using the old legend of the cruel Mara as a picturesque way of attracting tourists. Vox Pop (B.RC-1. 7 49-S 15 pm) is an interesting experiment, a kind of smn nnora with real people and political opinions). What do the selected people of Darwen, Lanes, think life governed aid everything Wednesday Shakespeare Lives (CI, 6.30 -7 pm): Michael Bogdanov begins a two-part workshop on Timon of Athens. The format is still lumpy but the idea remains fresh.

This show is one of the few turns Vhas yet done" the theatre. Broadside (C4 8.30 9 pm): Last week's programme-about the victims of the Australian A-bomb tests hclned rescue its reputation from those who sneer at C4 and at feminism. This week the subject is breast cancer and new-research that suggests the patient's own attitude is a key factor in cures. The Cleopatras (BBC-2 10.05-10.55 pm): This new scries should make a stir, if only because of the complexity of the bloodlines and the period authenticity of a topless Egyptian court. The shaven heads, boobs and wobbling pot bellies should make it the bounciest watch of the week.

isaimmemti Hugh Hebert looks back over 80 years of espionage fiction from Andrew Boyle's The Riddle of Erskine Childers (Hutchinson, 1977) gives a different version of the book's origins: "As a fact I invented the whole thing, building it, though, on careful observations of my own on the German coast, but I have since had most remarkable confirmation of the ideas in it." The story tells how two young Englishmen sail along the Frisian Islands off the German North Sea shore, and uncover preparations to transport an army by barge across to invade the English coast. Meanwhile, they unmask a British traitor and one of the Englishmen falls for the traitor's daughter, the girl Childers was persuaded to "spatchcock" into the book. Naturally, they are nearly caught, but get away to warn the sleeping British. They may deny the truth and traduce old friends, but somehow, there must be a device to preserve their amateur status. Four years after The Riddle of the Sands came out, Conrad published The Secret Agent, a novel that has had a different kind of influence but one that is just as important from the Thirties onward and one that remains the greatest piece of fiction yet written within the modern spy genre.

Nothing written since has a comparable insight to the complex, motley nature of revolutionary movements, or a more profound psychological base for its characterisations. Leavis saw it as one of the two supreme achievements in Conrad's fiction (Nostromo the other, dealing with more effective revolutionaries). That is pitching it too high but not much too high. WITH spies popping up in secret listening stations, international wheat councils and on the pillows of female embassy staff, life gets tough for the writer of espionage fiction. Maybe the only reaction to the way fact has once again dimmed even the most unbelievable thriller plots is to dive deeper into fantasy.

The spy story as a modern genre is coming up for its eightieth birthday, so it's time for new beginnings and celebration. Kipling's Kim (1901) deals a little with secret service buf it is essentially a story of empire, not espionage. The genre really begins wilh Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands, published in May, 1903, and like most w.iters, Childers deeply resented the compromises he had lo make to get the story he wanted lo tell into print. He wrote to one of his closest friends It's a yachting story, with a purpose, suggested by a cruise I once took in German waters. I discovered a scheme of invasion directed against England 1 was weak enough to 'spatchcock' a girl into the book and now find her a horrible nuisance." The purpose was to warn the British about the danger of invasion, the threat of German militarism.

and about this country's lack of preparation to counter it. While the book was in the press, the government took some of the steps he was about to advocate and he added a hasty postscript. A later letter to the same friend both are quoted poses, of means and ends. Verloc is a secret agent at several levels. He is a back street pornographer, a spy for a foreign embassy, a familiar of revolutionaries and not above giving Chief Inspector Heat useful hints in return for the blind-eye treatment for his dirty book trade.

The ripples of implication still spread from this book. With Childers and Conrad as its founding fathers, the spy genre had nowhere to go but aown. The Kiddle of tne Sands was a big commercial success, enthusiastically reviewed, it was an open invitation to imitators. We are talking about what you might call the buckram bound end of the genre rather than the pulp end, but even here the spy thriller was corrupted basically by writers who picked up and played up, the more dubious aspects of the Childers book. So patriotism became chauvinism, class humour became snobbery, a naive but worthy sense of honour was turned into an uncritical acceptance of the officer code.

John Buchan a great admirer of The Riddle of the Sands was guilty of this in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) and more so in later books. But it was Sapper, as you might expect (his real name was Lt Col Cyril McNoilc) who took these attitudes to the furthest, quasi-fascist extreme in his Bulldog Drummond books, starting in 1920. Edward Phillips Oppen-heim wrote stories (many of them) within much the same framework throughout this uncomfortably scarce Goldoni bases much of his satirical hum.our (snide, witty and mildly risque in MacDonald's version) the inner conflicts between desperation and inflated self-conceit on the lengths to which insecure and jealous artistes will go in sheer bitchery and attempted one-upmanship. Only at the end, with Ali fleeting back to Smyrna, with the wily Count Lasea assuming control and preaching the virtues of cooperation, is there even a faint suggestion that sense might prevail. MacDonald's inspiration has been to mark the extreme difference between the theatricals and the others by imprisoning each of the five within a rigid costume of heavy painted paper, and by moving each prima donna against a personal, painted backdrop.

Constricted by an outsize, persona, the players-must use head, arms and voice in an exaggerated form to compensate for relative immobility. The designer, Michael Levine, has seized his chance to create heavily stylised costumes (Queen Anne fronts and Mary Ann backs, as somebody once said of early doll's houses) with immensely high wigs of corrugated cardboard like a clever exaggeration of period prints. BBC CONCERT HALL Virion Bowen W. J. Weatherby on a copyright wrangle Brought to book "It's not like that," says Davies indignantly.

I say, you don't really think it's like that, do you Later Carruthers makes it plain that Davies Was far too clear headed to blink the essential fact that at heart we were spies on a foreign power in time of peace." Carruthers has his special Foreign Office code but the distaste both share for spies and spying is clear and unconnected with that. Spying was ungentlemanly, unsporting, dishonourable, and disgusting, and to engage in it for money would be unthinkable. It is not until we reach the post 1945 books of Ian Fleming, Len Deiirhton. John lc Carre, that the major hero figures of spy fiction are professionals in the business of espionage. Yet even then, these major figures Bond, Palmer and his aliases.

Smiley are set apart from the organisations to which they nominally belong. Bond, Fleming shows, deigns to give his loyalty though scarcely his obedience to M's outfit the licence to kill is itself carte blanche for everything. Palmer in his various guises is a man from the wrong class, pressganged into playing in the power game of his betters without ever, quite, playing for anybody. Smiley, in his first appearances, seems nearest to being an organisation man But as the Karla trilogy develops he becomes more and more alone, until in the end he is working right outside the Circus, even if with its implicit blessing. TELEVISION Peter Fiddick No Problem! Shop'e Shodeiiide LET's do a comedy about There must have been many more humpback television sit-coms born of that approach than there will ever be successes, and on the face of it No Problem was as likely as any to get it wrong again.

What could be more self-conscious than having an all black British comedy series and who (some might ask) but Channel 4 would want to make such a gesture Some would be wrong. I even think Channel 4 might well have its first, much needed, comedy success. It is not that No Problem treads boldly on subjects other comedies do not reach. Five teen-to-twenties-ish black kids given the run of the Wil-lesden council house when Mum and Dad retire to Jamaica it's the sort of thing American television might have hit upon even if the British hadn't and ITV would have bought for peanuts to screen around tea-time on a Saturday. The core quintet has something for everyone (well given the age group), Fame-style.

One sister is a fashion queen, another a motorbike kid, the third unwittingly cast as the little-mother one boy is a hip-talking DJ, the other a snake-keeping health food freak with distinctly period and so did the preposterous William Le Qucux, who had the nerve to write in his Who's Who entry that he had intimate knowledge of the secret service of Continental powers; consulted by the government on such matters. Forecasted the war in his book The Invasion, 1908." That, of course, was five years later than The Riddle and when you have read that braggadocio entry, it is no surprise to see that the only clubs where Le Queux can claim membership arc the Devonshire and the Swiss Alpine. The blackballs must have been falling like raindrops. Sapper's first Bulldog Drummond book had the subtitle Adventures of a demobilised officer who found peace dull," and that might have served as a description of Buchan's Richard Mannqy and a dozen comparable characters from the spy thrillers of the Twenties and early Thirties. It was against the kind of thriller peddled by these four highly successful writers Buchan, Sapper, Le Qucux, Oppenhcim that Eric Ambler staged his revolution in the middle Thirties.

Ambler's characters are not members of the gentry or upper classes, or bored, demobbed captains. (Some detective writers of the time had the same weakness for amateur sleuths with private means.) Ambler wrote about middle class professional men or technicians engineers, journalists, sometimes a businessman who were caught up in the secret me that the ethos of his piece was every bit as authoritarian as Plato. Using the fashionable techniques of minimal or process music, so called, it embarked on half an hour's worth of rhythmic cycles with much variation of harmony and texture but no dynamic level below forte. It was exhausting to listen to and exhausting to play the Sinfonietta's wind and brass certainly won the right to drink the Horse and Groom dry afterwards. Wolfgang von Schweinitz's Die Brucke a continuous setting for tenor (Martyn Hill), baritone (Stephen Var-coc) and small orchestra of a passage from Kafka's The Bridge appeared equally imprisoned in its one-dimensional for a and expressionist idiom.

The voices sang together virtually throughout, providing a foreground for music which relied a lot on reminiscences drawn from late Mahler and Schonberg. The most substantial work in this BBC College concert was Vic Hoyland's Michc-lagniolo (which is the version of Michelangelo's name that often appears as his signature). Conceived as a personal psychological portrait of the artist, its text draws from Michelangelo's own poems, letters, and other writings, on the Latin text of the vespers and lines from a Goethe poem. Hoyland's work has been performed before as a theatre piece, with an actor complementing the baritone solo, thus adding another layer of meaning to the portrait. Even in concert form, it is a powerful piece, much influenced by Berio, but keeping all the ingredients in focus.

The 12-movement structure is related to Michelangelo's paintings in the Sis-tine Chapel, running from Genesis to the Last Judgment but its effect is not one of forward dramatic development so much as a series of concentric circles expanding outwards from the baritone contribution (once more undertaken by Varcoc) through the chorus and the orchestra. The diverse and brilliant talents of the Sinfonietta and Keuschnig were well employed undertaking this riveting performance of a work that will repay our attention. world by accident, or more tellingly, because of the special knowledge their job entailed. His first novel came out in 1936: The Mask of Dimitrios, one of the great classics of the genre, in 1939. It was at this period that Grahame Greene too began dipping in these waters.

But unless you class him as one to himself, Greene lias never been a genre writer. It was Ambler, among writers of spy novels, who restored the grey gritty sense of reality that marked The Riddle of the Sands and Secret Agent. The far-fetched, glamour-garbed spy story went on at the pulp end of the market, but at the serious end it more or less disappeared until Fleming brought it back in the Fifties. It's true that the rococo Bond glamour is largely a product of the films, but the obsessions with rich, exotic locations, expensive gadgetry, high living and high body counts both in bed and in the morgue are there in print too. Deighton and le Carre in turn were to revolt against that.

But their books were all centred on professionals trying hard to be amateurs rather than the other way round; it was the crucial change the war had brought in spy fiction, if not in MI5. Fleming may have been the last of the exotic, as opposed to the merely rich, writers of spy fiction. The glitter fades from the job. The days when the boastful Le Queiix could list first among his recreations revolver practice are over. Thank goodness.

CANTEEN John Fordham James Moody JAMES MOODY, the saxophonist and flautist from Georgia, is once again heralding a new year in a London Jazz cluh 12 months ago the venue was Ronnie Scott's. Of all the leading instrumentalists of the Thirties and Forties who have adopted an orderly approach to their work Moody has worked ceaselessly in recording studios, hotel bands and touring outfits his has been one of the most engaging personalities. This is partly because lie affects such a quietly certifiable demeanour of plausible nonsense in his introductions, and partly because he occasionally sends up the imperious acrobatics of the master saxophonist in his playing. Moody is accompanied at The Canteen by the Colin Purbrook Trio, which on the opening night trotted sturdily along beside the leader without jogging him too much. Moody worked his way through a fairly conventional repertoire of fast bop, delivering the standards with a crisp swing and very dense and crowded phrasing in which the notes ricocheted around like billiard balls.

Frequently hurtling off into excursions. Moody probably played too fast and too much in his opening set. which gave the music a rather inflexible quality. However, Moody's mischievous side came out in a rendering of Secret Love, which he avoided playing in the lissom, rather bland form that the tune invites but broke up instead into the main theme and a bubbly, sidelong commentary on it that sounded like two saxophonists eneaged in dialogue. The effect was to draw ironic attention to the idioms of the instrument since the bop years, a form of subversion rarely practised by those musicians who have themselves spent a lifetime polishing the language to its present rather impassive sheen.

Moody's chock is comfortably up to living with such contradictions. It contains what were to be some of the staple elements of spy fiction for the next 40 years: amateurs stumbling into espionage, the threat to the very existence of the nation, the love interest causing acute trouble with loyalties, the jigsaw nature of the central puzzle. More important, The Riddle of the Sands expressed and codified what was perhaps a popular moral repugnance felt for spies. When Davies suggests to his reluctant shipmate Carruthers that they should pursue the man fhey believe is a spy, Carruthers every inch a Foreign Office civil servant muses: It's a delicate matter. If your theory's correct, spying on a spy make copies even multiple copies for fair use.

Just as there is no precise agreement as to how much can be quoted fairly from a book without payment, so fair usage in copying materials doesn't seem to be precisely defined. Under the copyright statute it would appear that copying is allowed provided there is an overriding justification and no economic harm done to author or copyright owners. But what constitute overriding justification and economic harm are open to argument at present, and that's where the loopholes begin. Publishers have already proposed several revisions to tighten the law and, if the lawsuit against NYU ever reaches court, it may develop into complicated legal hair-splitting as to what exactly is fair usage." Three previous cases against companies allegedly reproducing substantial sections of copyrighted materials without authorisation one case involved photocopying certain scientific journals were settled out-of-court. Defendants, even when they thought they had a case, pleaded guilty to save legal costs.

Universitites, schools, public corporations and private companies have all been warned off in this way. Research libraries are also alleged to be major copyright offenders and rumour has it that a test case is being prepared against one of their number. In defence of many campus copyists, few bookstores stock backlisted books and students may find many selected by teachers hard to obtain or impossibly expensive. If teachers aren't satisfied with the few anthologies available and select work from various books, the cost becomes astronomical for already hard-pressed students unless photocopiers are used. Publishers undoubtedly have a good case against many copyists, but they should be careful it doesn't rebound on them and turn into a damaging revelation of their own restrictive and antiquated practices.

The Secret Agent is not about spying in the straightforward sense although its central character, Adolf Ver-loc, is employed as a spy by the London embassy of ah unspecified European power. But his control at the embassy, dissatisfied with routine reports, wants Verloc to ferment acts of anarchistic violence among the revolutionaries he knows, to bring pressure on the British government to sijm an international convention on anti-terrorist laws. Conrad's concern is not espionage itself but an ironic examination of the use of violence and of criminality generally for political pur other-worldly tendencies. The most radical thing that nas happened in the first two weeks was the garden shed exploding, and that was only because the white nutter posing as an archaeologist left his detonators when they carted him away. No Problem, written hy Mustapha Matura and Far-rukh Dhondy and played with high-powered energy, is directed by Michael Dolenz ex-Monkce and recently Metal Mickey's keeper, which would lead one to expect the touch of the sit-com pro.

It is created by the Black Theatre Cooperative which may explain the confidence and full-blooded relish in the characterisation. I wouldn't dare to single out any of the players, thus far, but all five principals deserve their credits Victor Romeros, Janet Kay, Judith Jacob, Shope Shodeinde, and Chris Tum-mings. Nor would I say that ill human life was there but I haven't heard such a delightful range of accents and speech styles in one programme for a very long time. GLASGOW Cordelia Oliver Impresario Of Smyrna THE Impresario of Smyrna is 18th century farcical comedy with next to no plot and a great deal of dialogue, a daunting combination that Robert David MacDonald, directing the Glasgow Citizens' Company in his own translation of this Goldoni rarity, has turned to his own advantage. An Italian count (Peter Rumney) is seen attempting to bring together in an uneasy alliance five outrageous prima donnas (a tenor and four sopranos, including one large outrageous castrato) with the promise of an introduction to a certain Turkish impresario.

Ali, he tells them, is in Venice for the purpose of forming a company to take opera- in the Italian style" to his native Smyrna. Times are hard and work Thursday Images Of War (BBC-2 8.05 Ahram Games was a graphic designer called up in the second world war who convinced the War Office that barrack room noticoboards could be dramalcally improved. This, the second nf seven programmes, tells the intriguing and nostalgic tale. The Citadel (BBC-1 9.25 pm): The 10-part serial of A Cronin's novel tries so hard for verisimilitude that it even uses Cronin's own house in Aberlaw. With Ihe NHS again under threat, the issues Cronin raised (to the fury of the medical profession) should find a modern echo.

Friday About Britain (ITV, 1.30 pm): Groombridgc Cricket Club recreates its first recorded match of 200 years ago. Introduced by John Arlolt, the match is a vehicle for a summery blend of cricket and nostalgia, interspersed with the biggest cricketing tea ever served, including a boar's head. The Siianish Civil War (C4, 8.0-9.0 pm): James Cameron has written this week's programme about the idealists' battleground, the volunteers who came to fight for each side and the failure of the Western democracies to come to Spain's aid. Martin Walker Radio Today: Discords of Good Humour (Radio 3, 7 15 pm). A new programme concept the revised repeat," dealing with the multi-aliased Flann O'Brien.

Lots of Irish voices and jokes. Tomorrow: A' Cacaphony of Cultures (Radio 3, 5 15 pm). Second programme in a correspondent's eye view of India. This time, and more interestingly, focusing on the film culture India's hugely popular cinema. Wednesday: A Closer Look (Radio 3, 9 0 pm).

Eng. Lit. on the Third. Vernon Sranncll studies two Keats odes (On A Grecian Urn and To Autumn). Friday: Woman's Hour (Radio 4, 2 2 pm).

Manchcs-tnr-based edition host-d hy Marjorie Lofthouse. Catherine Cookson, modern myth-maker and author of incestuous family romances (full of lines like Why docs it always have to be like rape is interviewed. Monday-Friday: Black Londoners (Radio London, 7 3 pm). One of the best examples of local radio. A magazine programme with the slightly mine-H'tistish Alex Issues dealt with are important and interesting.

Occasional musical OVER the past five years copying books has become sn prevalent in American universities that the Association of American Publishers made it known that it planned to make an example of a major university and sue it for copyright infringement. At first this was regarded on campus as a big bluff to scare educationists into obeying the rule that nothing can be reproduced without permission. But the threat didn't have the desired effect, and so the association has gone ahead on behalf of nine publishers and sued New York University, ten of its faculty members, and an off-campus copying centre. The NYU faculty members come from a variety of academic disciplines and are accused of 13 instances of copyright infringement, including copying without permission, selling unauthorised copies, and creating unauthorised anthologies of copyrighted material ranging from John Zinner's The Implications of Projective Identification for Marital Interaction to Truman Capote's study of a murder case. In Cold Blood.

There was an immediate outcry from the university at being singled out for copying practices common on every campus, especially as NYU doesn't seem to be the worst offender by any means, and various university officials throughout the country have expressed concern at the idea that an institution should be held responsible for alleged infringements by individual faculty members whose selection of textbooks (or copied material) is an independent choice. Publishers claimed that widespread copying meant the loss of millions of dollars in income and. like the movie and broadcasting copyright holders who are trying through the courts to check home video recording, they are determined to take legal action. However, the case, according to some educationists, is not as clear-cut as it seems. They claimed that amendments to the Copyright Act allow teachers, scholars and researchers to London Sinfonietta LIKE SLAVES chained to the galleys, the London Sinfonietta pressed forward through the endless repeated rhythmic patterns of Louis Andriessens Die Staat, never daring to challenge the firm direction of Peter Keuschnig.

Devised in relation to Plato's writings on music in The Republic, Andriessen's work attempts not to recreate some kind of ancient Greek music, but rather an independent conception with some vague pretensions to commenting upon musical censorship. Paradoxically it seemed to Tuck Lucy.