Furor over a TV Death

British viewers watched their television screens, transfixed. First came the sound of gunshots, and a woman shrouded in black crumpled to the ground. Then a djellaba-clad executioner raised his gleaming sword for the beheading, and a kneeling figure in white was suddenly red with blood. The scene, from a film titled Death of a Princess, re-enacted the double execution in 1977 of a married Saudi Princess, Mashall, 19, and her unmarried commoner lover for having committed adultery. Witnessed by hundreds in a parking lot in Jeddah, the executions were in accordance with the laws of the Koran. Shown over Britain's independent television network last week, the dramatization touched off an international furor and strained British-Saudi relations.

The two-hour "drama-documentary," co-produced by Britain's Associated Television and WGBH-TV in Boston, after will televise it for U.S. viewers on May 12, was intended as "a serious and concerned journey into the Arab world," in the words of U.S. Executive Producer David Fanning, But within hours of the broadcast, Saudi Arabia reacted with a howl of protest. The Saudi embassy in London denounced the film as a "sensation-seeking piece of fiction" and "an unprincipled attack on the religion of Islam." What seems to have particularly offended the Saudis, besides the vivid re-enactment of the executions, was a series of scenes depicting the royal princesses as bored and vacuous vixens who spend most of their time watching TV or looking for easy sex.

To soothe offended feelings, British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington sent a personal cable to Saudi King Khalid expressing his own "profound regret" over the program. To some members of Parliament, that smacked of unwarranted groveling. Complained Labor M.P. David Winnick: "It is undignified to see a British Foreign Secretary virtually apologizing to a feudal state about what has been shown on TV in this country."

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