Wanted: One-armed men!

by CHARLES CURRAN, the Conservative MP for Uxbridge, who has appeared in Granada’s Who Goes Next? discusses the programme and its regular team.

YOU are a TV producer. You have to pick a team for a discussion programme. What kind of men do you look for? There is only one answer: one-armed men!

It is no good picking someone who, when asked his opinion, says, “Well, on the one hand, you can take this view. On the other hand, you can take that. There is much to be said for both sides.”

Of course there is — about nearly every disputed idea on earth, from votes for women to the eight-ball over. But two-armed men are a bore in a TV argument.

For a lively discussion programme you need one-armed men; men who refuse to squat on the fence and who come down with a bang on one side or the other.

That is what you get in Who Goes Next?

You have seen the programme on Monday evenings, I dare say: three men marooned in separate hutches, like rabbits; each required to supply 30-second answers to questions about current events. There is no time for waffling.

The questions are framed by the producer. His name is Milton Shulman. He Canadian, a theatre critic who looks rather like a well-dressed sleepwalker.

But this is misleading. For he is a connoisseur of wrangling. He takes a genuine pleasure in pandemonium. So he concocts questions to make his team disagree.

His regular performers are Richard Crossman, Labour MP, Peter Thornycroft, Tory MP, and Malcolm Muggeridge: three kinds of one-armed men.

Crossman is 52, son of a High Court judge, a public school and University Socialist (he went to Winchester, like Stafford Cripps and Hugh Gaitskell) and a natural partisan. I doubt if he knows the meaning of the word “neutral.” If Crossman saw two flies having a race across a windowpane, he would instantly back one of them to win.

Crossman is a believer. Muggeridge is a disbeliever. He disbelieves in all sorts of things. Show him two flies racing across a window-pane and how would he react? I would expect him to say that they are overrated animals, that the idea of a race between them is absurd and that the whole thing is a put-up job.

Yet Muggeridge is an ex-partisan. His father was a Labour MP, and he himself was once a Socialist. At the age of 30 (he is now 56) he went to Russia. His close-up view of Communism made him write a book called “Winter in Moscow” — a funny, brilliant, bitter study in disillusion. Since then he has travelled across the political spectrum to the point of becoming deputy editor of a Tory newspaper. Now, he is in no man’s land.

If Peter Thorneycroft, the third man in the team, saw those two flies having a race, he would look up the stud book, decide which of them should win on form and back it, simply as an intellectual exercise.

He is a complicated Tory. At a guess, I would say that his heart is on the Left and his mind on the Right. This mixture makes him puzzling to orthodox politicians. He is very able, with a streak of what the Irish call devilment.

He became an MP at 29, a Cabinet Minister at 42, Chancellor of the Exchequer at 48. In 1958, after 12 months as Chancellor, he walked out following a dispute about Government expenditure. Now 50, he has a crowded past and a speculative future.

There is one really big difference between him and his team mates: he has helped to govern this country. He has sat in cabinets, bargained with foreign Powers, learned at first hand how men are ruled.

Widely as they vary in temperament, outlook and cast of personality, the three have something in common. All of them shrink from the stock phrase, the catchword, the formula that means nothing but sounds impressive. They all have muscular minds.

Moreover, all of them. I am sure, agree that there is one phrase in the English language which is more majestic than any other. If the Recording Angel wants to capture their attention on the day the world ends, he need not bother about his trumpet. He need only say: “For the sake of argument.”

At those words, Crossman, Muggeridge and Thomeycroft will instantly start up, forsake everything else, and join in.