STILL AUDITIONING

On Tuesday, I went to Golders Green crematorium for the funeral of the television producer, Verity Lambert, whom I had known and adored for nearly 40 years. It was the starriest affair I have attended for a long time. Not just the whole of the old school teledrama world but many women in public life (like Helena Kennedy and – looking fabulous – Katherine Whitehorn: Verity had been due to receive a Women of Merit Award next week).

The service was presented by a woman from the British Humanist Association and that's just what I would want. She had done a huge amount of diligent work on getting an authoritative account of Verity's life and style together and it was fine except a bit heavy on the generalized grief counselling – her congregation was hardly callow enough for that – and rather too long (we could all hear V in our heads shouting for a script editor).

Lots of good friends told sweet and funny stories. Somebody enumerating the things she loved began "1: friends, 2: cooking, 3: dogs ... " so I knew why I liked her so. In fact I'd already remembered that the first Great Dane that David and I both fell in love with was Verity's some 25 years ago. He was called Arthur after Arthur Daley and he was just adorable. Now we have our own Great Dane, a daily (Daley?) reminder of Verity in our lives. At Golders Green, Alan Davies told a lovely story about Arthur (I think V had a succession of Danes called Arthur) and another about a Jack Russell who was supposed to savage Jonathan Creek and who simply refused until V stormed onto the set and the Jack Russell immediately knew, as Davies put it, "whose pack he wanted to join".

The most moving tribute was given last by Dame Eileen Atkins. She also told us that V had originally wanted the filing-out music played as we all passed the coffin to be ‘My Way’ on a 30-minute loop. Thankfully, she'd been persuaded that this was a terrible idea so she elected instead to have a piece of music that would make her feel that we all embraced her: it took us a moment to recognize because there was an unfamiliar twiddly bit of introduction but then it was unmistakably the theme tune to The Archers to which, we'd learned, V was devoted. After that came the Dr Who theme (her first hit) and then all her other theme tunes.

Later at The Groucho I caught up with some old friends I hadn't seen for years and managed to avoid several more I didn't need to be reacquainted with. The trouble was that there was so little finger food – and it was an hour appearing – and, as we'd been standing at the crematorium from 12.00 until 2.00, and then made our way into town, I for one was ravenous so I finally fled in search of sustenance. Verity certainly wouldn't have approved of that. She always kept a full table.

What struck me forcibly was that, while almost all of these people were in their 50s, 60s, 70s and indeed 80s, hardly any of them had had an on-screen credit in years. The best they can do now is lecture and teach on some fantasy-orientated “media course”. Of course they all talked of “projects in development”, the purgatory through which programme-makers have to suffer these days before they are consigned to the flames of damnation. Yet here was the cream of British television drama of the last 50 years. Apart from the mysteriously all-licensed Stephen Poliakoff (who wasn’t there; his sponsors in television are people who know almost nothing of drama), there are no questers after originality in teledrama any more. When any of these people puts up an idea, they get no special hearing because none of the commissioners has any knowledge of anything broadcast earlier than last Easter.

But of course nobody in any field wants experience, coherence or cogently argued points of view. I wrote the following letter to The Guardian at the weekend:

Dear Sir,

I am often asked why I no longer write letters to The Guardian. Would you be kind enough to publish this explanation: I indeed still do write to The Guardian with my accustomed alacrity but my efforts are no longer favoured to the extent that they were favoured by the present letters editor's predecessors, as may be gleaned from the new edition of the collected letters to the paper.

Yours faithfully

W Stephen Gilbert

Needless to add that they haven’t published it.