Viewpoint: Lobster-to-Mints Bore

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

It is an article of faith among television people that what the medium does best is cover actuality live, from beginning to end. Sometimes, though, the results are not quite what was planned. The Public Broadcasting Service's soup-to-nuts (or, more accurately, lobster-to-mints) coverage of last week's White House dinner for Queen Elizabeth allowed the average American a singular opportunity to feel for himself the exquisite pain of the pointless state occasion, an agony of boredom heretofore reserved for the powerful and the well born. There was perhaps something salutary about the 4 1/2 -hour experience but it is doubtful that any sane soul would care to repeat it.

An hour into A State Dinner for Queen Elizabeth II, one began to long for the mediating talents of a good film editor working up a show of highlights, which would have lasted about two minutes. To be sure, PBS was operating under restraints. It had been forbidden to show the guests gulping and gnawing, leaving it with more than an hour-long hole right in the middle of the program, which it chose to fill with innocuous studies of the British monarchy's past and future. At times, the severe White House restrictions on camera placement left viewers with the suspicion that the show had been staged by Andy Warhol. Finally, PBS could obviously do nothing about the choice of a tired and tedious Bob Hope and the Captain & Tennille, slicked-up country singers, as postprandial entertainment.

Surprisingly Tart. In the circumstances, the on-camera people -- excepting a resolutely benign BBC royalist named Frank Gillard -- were surprisingly tart. Low-profile Anchor Man Robert MacNeil thought the toasts banal even by the dull standards pertaining to events of this sort; Cooking Expert Julia Child -- her usual burbling self as she nibbled and chatted with White House Chef Henry Haller -- let fly publicly at the undignified quality of the showfolks' contributions; and Upstairs, Downstairs' Jean Marsh took politely dim views of everything from American vegetables to the institution of monarchy. The PBS cameras, fighting through the longueurs of the event and the difficulties imposed by protocol, did manage to make a couple of nice observations. They disclosed that in unguarded moments, the Queen has a truly sweet, curiously girlish smile. They also showed that the only glamorous male present, Gary Grant, can look as forlorn and out of it as any mere mortal when no one is paying any attention to him at a party. Such brief privileged moments, however, were not worth the network's trouble. Doubtless it will think twice before inviting itself to another White House party.

Richard Schickel

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