An average evening of British television. Seeking respite from the
sitcoms and soap operas, you turn to the main BBC channel, where
there is a documentary about blindness in India and new methods
of curing it. A serious subject: properly handled, an interesting
and moving one. The only trouble is that there are a pair of
narrators, two actors who can normally be seen in a popular
comedy series. They lard the commentary with specimens of their
humor; to set the tone, they start off with a series of jokes
about Indian lavatories. But then the title of the program
should have been enough to warn one—Back Passage to India. E.
M. Forster would not, I think, have been amused.

Perhaps the only noteworthy thing about this item is that nobody
in the year 2000 thinks it worthy of note. It is all in a day’s
work.

But let us leave such disagreeable matters and turn to the
pleasant town of Chichester, in the depths of Sussex, some sixty
miles southwest of London. Chichester is a small place, but it
has a long history, going back to Roman times. It is dominated by
a soaring medieval cathedral. There is an attractive picture of
the amateur musical life which once flourished there in John
Brewer’s excellent study of eighteenth-century English culture,
The Pleasures of the Imagination (1997). And over the past forty
years or so it has been home during the summer months to an