Prime Minister Ustinov

President Richard Nixon may have been normally cool and purposeful in handling Howard K. Smith on ABC last week, but he is a chronic fumbler compared with the British Prime Minister, Lord North, fielding Eric Sevareid on CBS next week. Prime Minister who? Frederick Lord North, the chap who presided over the loss of the American colonies and who is re-embodied by Actor Peter Ustinov in a new CBS documentary project. The series, titled The American Revolution: 1770-1783, will include perhaps a dozen such "interviews" by the time of the nation's 1976 bicentennial. In the premiere, TV history has never seemed so free of pain or full of gusto.

In preparing himself, Ustinov boned up on the period and North. In preparing viewers to accept a unique approach to a potentially tedious subject, the producers show Ustinov getting his beard shaved and putting on a powdered wig and 18th century rig over his own prime ministerial paunch. Sevareid also read up on the subject for a month, but wore his usual mid-20th century suit for the filming, which took place in Wroxton Abbey, North's ancestral home, near Stratford-on-Avon.

Despite the elaborate preparations, the show works as a spontaneous interview. Ustinov did not know the questions in advance, but the facile actor-writer never had to stop the shooting and check a document for an answer. Some of the replies are clever evasions. "North wouldn't have known the answers to all those questions," Ustinov says. "It was more true to character to wing it."

Playing North as cool, rather xenophobic and wry (as his research suggested), Ustinov showed his contempt for the colonials by referring to a certain "Colonel George Washingham." Asked about another rebel leader, Ustinov could not restrain himself from a coy, anachronistic gag. "John Hancock, sir, there can be no insurance of anything while he is active," he sniffed. At more serious moments, Ustinov dismissed the Boston Massacre as "a minor incident" and, when queried as to "the core of the quarrel between the Americans and your government," replied: "You regard it as a quarrel; I regard it more as slight friction in the nursery."

Fairness Doctrine. At one break in the filming, Sevareid says, "I found my gorge rising a little." He told Executive Producer Perry Wolff: "We can't let Lord North get away with this. Someone must speak for the colonies!" Sevareid did, in fact, occasionally play American plenipotentiary rather than detached journalist and helped make the program more illuminating.

The star, unquestionably, was Ustinov. Without his insightful improvisation and mannered performance, the program would have been as forced as some of the old You Are There sagas or as deadly as a grade-school audio-visual lesson. Ustinov may do an encore when the series deals with King George III. But the next confrontation, tentatively scheduled for September, will feature either Firebrand Samuel Adams or "Washingham" himself. CBS hopes to land Richard Burton to play Adams, George C. Scott as Washington. Sevareid will do the interrogating again, though under the FCC "Fairness Doctrine" the British Empire might properly demand that he be replaced by David Frost.

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