Affairs of Hearts and Minds

By Gerald Clarke, G.C.

A superb Darwin, a mediocre Edward, a fine Dream

THE VOYAGE OF CHARLES DARWIN

(PBS, Sundays, beginning Jan. 27.) Perhaps the hardest thing to capture on film is a mind at work, and scriptwriters usually resort to obvious devices: a composer tinkling tunes on the piano, a novelist tearing paper out of his typewriter or a scientist pouring foul-looking glop from one test tube into another. But revealing thought in action is exactly what the creators of this new BBC series have done, and the size of their achievement is indicated in the title. The mind they are portraying is that of Charles Darwin; the idea they are presenting is the evolution of life itself.

The series centers on Darwin's service as naturalist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, which spent five years in the early 1830s charting and surveying the waters off the coasts of South America. It was the chief event of his life. Though he had little formal scientific training, the young man, played with athletic gusto by Malcolm Stoddard, had an "enlarged curiosity," as his uncle phrased it. Darwin's native skepticism turned the voyage into a fresh, vigorous inquiry into the nature of things, and the Beagle carried not only him but mankind into a new era of understanding.

The camera follows that inquiry, from his discovery of the fossils of extinct reptiles in Patagonia to his speculations on the origins of the ancient, giant turtles of the Galapagos Islands. Slowly, step by careful step, his theory of natural selection takes shape. As laid out with elegant precision by Writer Robert Reid, Darwin's thought process steadily builds suspense, even though the outcome has been known for 120 years. Nothing is as dramatic as the unfolding of an idea so important that it fundamentally alters the way man looks at himself and his world.

For PBS Darwin is a good start to the new year. Not the least of its virtues is that it gives viewers the innocent eyes of children -- or explorers. It enables them to see the world as Darwin did, a place of delights and horrors, wonders and excitements. -- Gerald Clarke

EDWARD & MRS. SIMPSON (syndicated stations, Wednesdays, beginning Jan. 23.) Kings of England have been deposed, murdered and executed. One, poor George III, was even confined for mad ness. But until 1936 none had voluntarily renounced his throne. That dubious dis tinction was left to Edward VIII, who reigned for exactly 325 days and then gave up his crown for "the woman I love," a Baltimore divorcee by the name of Wallis Warfield Simpson.

Theirs has often been called the romance of the century, but they held the title only for want of contenders. In fact, according to this new British recounting, they were both dull and not a little dense.

The plot they followed was perfect soap opera, but history should have asked for better actors to play the protagonists.

The producers of this six-part series should have done that at the very least.

Rarely have two actors, Edward Fox and Cynthia Harris, looked so right and yet been so wrong for their parts. King Edward's charm was famous; Fox seems to think that that elusive quality can be conveyed by flashing his teeth, which he does with alarming regularity. Simpson was enormously attractive to many men; as Harris portrays her, even a dullard like this Edward would have had enough sense to pack her off to the Tower -- or head for the door at first sight of her.

This production comes alive only when the title characters are offstage, when everyone around them is arguing about what to do. Through his arro gance, Edward threw his country into a constitutional crisis equivalent in mag nitude to Watergate. How the British establishment covered it up, and then finally resolved it, is far more interesting than the tedious romance that caused it in the first place. -- G.C.

THE $5.20 AN HOUR DREAM (CBS, Jan 26, 9 p.m. E.S.T.) Discrimination can be spelled many ways, but it usually mea sures out at only five letters: money. Those who suffer its effects almost always make less than those who do not, and the fight against bias will inevitably be won on the economic battlefield. That is what the women's movement has discovered, and that is what this tough and uncompromising TV movie is about.

Ellen Lissik (Linda Lavin) works in an engine factory. She is divorced, with a ne'er-do-well ex-husband who runs at the mention of child support for their twelve-year-old daughter. Like the women she works with, she does not look much beyond a good time Saturday night. But she does know one thing: she cannot make do on the $4.30 an hour she is now being paid.

Ellen needs only 90-c- an hour more, the wages of an assembly-line worker at the factory. The trouble is that the line is for men only.

Everyone is against her. The men on the line are afraid that if she succeeds, other women will follow her and take their jobs. A supervisor hints delicately at the problem women have with "certain tensions at certain times." Other women attack her, and even her own daughter, embarrassed by taunts from the other kids, asks her to give up. Ellen persists, however, and Lavin makes the struggle of a simple woman more persuasive in its dramatic impact than a whole library of ideological tracts. -- G.C.

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