Motives

radio prototype, In the Psychiatrist's Chair, and you and I, as flies on the wall, have enjoyed the advantage of the visual close up as the surest sign of the interviewee's relaxation and honesty, as well as of their less attractive opposites. Petula Clark, for example, while never anything other than honest, was instantly and visibly far from relaxed when her bland half regrets about being young, rich, and famous were swept away by Professor Clare's gentle search for her mother, virtually absent from all previous biographical accounts. Indeed, throughout the series it was his persuasive lightness of touch which allowed the interviewer to gain insight without pushing inquiry into interrogation and without dwelling interminably on the superficial and banal. Thus he encouraged George Best through a series of confessions over past weakness, although he never, it emerged, extended repentance into reform. Alternatively, he could directly dismantle the facades of those to whom the studio light was like the smell of the greasepaint. John Stonehouse presented his escape to Australia as a symbolic suicide, destroying the naive idealist he had been and giving birth to the cynical realist he now was. Here Professor Clare was at his incisive best. Wasn't his present view of an evil, selfish world, he asked, simply a distorted continuation of his earlier altruism ? Only Stonehouse himself was in doubt. Admittedly his method could fail him: Sid Weighell remained cocooned in impenetrable self satisfaction, and you longed for the suggestion that this very egocentricity had led to his ignominious downfall. Occasionally, even when he succeeded, the opening was ponderous-and, as Dr Wilkinson hints, predictable-with the pursuit of a (psychodynamically) gigantic mother. And yet no single line of inquiry bore more fruit-for example, Petula Clark's sudden ill ease, and George Best's cmphatic assertion of his mother's physical beauty. The studio setting was stark and artificial but interestingly you remained unaware of it when the subjects themselves were not. Bernadette McAliskey, ending the series, presented a lively enthusiasm for her impression of society's divisions-and clearly considered it her duty to admit the public to her own certainty. If the programme's own motive was to admit the public to the secrets of psychiatry, then this was always a pompous and unattainable target. But it seemed rather that such glimpses were a secondary bonus and that the characters of the subjects themselves were the principal items on display, whites of eyes and all. LouIs APPLEBY