Available on DVD now.
The Vision is a TV movie that brought Dirk Bogarde briefly out of retirement. At the time it was made television was being deregulated and satellite TV was becoming a reality. Meanwhile in the US televangelists where the latest phenomenon. Now, 30 years later, how does The Vision stand up? In the intervening years the television landscape has totally altered. Now everyone has access to 40 channels of crap and a heap more on cable and online. Meanwhile almost all the American TV evangelists have been disgraced or bankrupted (or in the case of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, both).
Bogarde plays a crusty, retired newsreader called James Marriner who, although not religious, is talked into becoming the face of a bible-thumping TV network by the passive-aggressive executive Grace Gardner played by the seductive and sparkly Lee Remick.
James Marriner (Bogarde always played tetchy well) does battle with his wife (the ever-watchable Eileen Atkins) and daughter (a youthful Helena Bonham Carter) and is reduced to opening supermarkets and appearing in margarine commercials. But his warm, endearing, twinkly-eyed qualities are perfect for the right-wing People Channel. He is approached by Grace Gardner director of the new satellite network which – amid the news, old movies and premiership soccer – will offer “wholesome family entertainment” that lean on scripture. Grace wants to make Gentle Jim famous and respectable again. She tells him in honeyed tones: “luck can be arranged”.
He will front the new pan-Europe channel providing he has no skeletons in his closet. But, guess what? The creepy music tells us whatever bargain Grace is hatching with Marriner it is a Faustian one. Not only are those behind the People Channel God-Botherers but they have a wider more sinister vision – to change hearts and minds and sweep Europe out of its ideological vacuum.
With nods to Rupert Murdoch’s Evil Empire, The Vision revels in nefarious backroom tactics of the media people that don’t stop short of blackmailing Cabinet ministers. And even if The Vision’s predictions are not all accurate – talk of a Russian economic collapse is far from the mark and the desktop hardware looks like something invented by Logie Baird – there’s much that seems chillingly spot-on. In a teleprompter piece to camera Marriner says: “World War III will start on the streets of Beirut and end right here!” And in the current climate of computer- and phone hacking, fake news, post-truth and manipulated elections The Vision has much to commend it although with the ubiquity of internet porn the concept of “wholesome family values” seems desperately quaint and so last century.