The Fine Art Of Hitting The Nail On The Head

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32351, 17 July 1970, Page 3

The Fine Art Of Hitting The Nail On The Head

They call it “Handy Hints” but it might be better screened under the title of “Journey To The Unknown,” so far as the man occasionally about the house in our domicile is concerned; and there must be quite a few more like him.

This new Auckland programme. which began on Wednesday evening, brought to the screen Leonard Elliott, and there was no doubting his skill, his sure touch, and his ability to speak fluently on his subject, as if it was of a very simple nature indeed. We had the same sort of trouble with “Maths and Meaning.” No doubt the handymen of the nation will flock to the screens on Wednesdays, their cold chisels at the ready. But there is this other section of the audience, which positively blanched when Mr Elliott cheerfully announced he was going to instruct us all in the arts and crafts of wall-papering, plastering, repairing taps, replacing washers. Mr Elliott could get a job with “Mission: Impossible”

without difficulty, provided he was prepared to hold his tongue and cultivate an expression of intense concentration. So far as the not very handy-man viewer we have in mind was concerned, Mr Elliott might just as easily have been one of the “M. 1. team preparing to blow up the Kremlin, having first persuaded the Russian top brass, with a carefully-prepared dummy newspaper containing reports of the duck shooting, that it was May and time to go out and watch the parade. Mr Elliott said he proposed to mend a hole in a Gibraltar board wall. He didn’t explain how the hole came to be there, and that might have been interesting. Our b'mdyman didn’t know wha. Gibraltar board was and at first was inclined to the view that

it had something to do with a naval barracks.

With an impressive background of neatly-stacked tools, Mr Elliott cunningly made a hole in a piece of cardboard, put a string through it with a nail on one end, dropped the nail down the hole he had to repair, braced the cardboard across the hole with a couple of sticks, and then set about making and applying plaster.

He insisted that the thing to do then was to get some scissors to cut the string, on his side of the cardboard. He said at the end that “Perseverance will get us there.” He also said there would be more handy hints next week. The one we are eagerly awaiting is his explanation of how he is going to retrieve that nail and cardboard. There was no doubt Mr Elliott did a good job. But it was distressing to see that array of equipment, nothing out of place, to note his neat movements, and to watch him, while making a holder for dishes, tapping bits of dowling into holes and not reducing the whole contraption to ruin.

It might be best I not to watch Mr Elliott neat Wednesday. He tends to upset the harmony of a contented, if crumbling, home. Talking of “Mission: Impossible”: another change of tune is called for, after Wednesday’s episode. Certainly, the same long silent passages were there, the same blank expressions, but the plot this time was a clever and absorbing one. Earlier hopes that the “M. 1. team would selfdestruct have been put aside in the meantime.

“Moving” was a bright and cheerful show, with some novel photographic effects. “Studio One” was not so bright, not so cheerful. It takes itself a little seriously The competitive element takes over rather much from the sort of entertainment the programme is supposed to provide. PANDORA.