“Survey” Still Growing In Status Each Week

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32381, 21 August 1970, Page 3

“Survey” Still Growing In Status Each Week

The success of “Survey” in its first three weeks has compensated in large measure for an otherwise almost barren Wednesday evening. It is obvious that the N.Z.B.C. does not at present have sufficient major attractions to put anything but the thinnest coating of jam on the bread and butter, and Wednesday night has been close to a stale crust.

It consisted last Wednesday of “Country Touch,” “Mission Impossible" and “Peyton Place,” surrounding “Survey” and the other bits and pieces of an ordinary evening. “Country Touch" is a relaxed and cheerful show and Tex Morton’s little comic song was particularly well done. But there must be a large number of viewers to whom country and western music does not appeal, and for all its happy atmosphere, “Country Touch” is not likely to rate at the top of the popularity polls. Next week, it will screen on Monday evening, to make way for a charades contest from the Industries Fair.

On its very last evening, “Mission Impossible” had a rather different look. There were far fewer of those prolonged tension - building silences, broken only by the loud heartbeats of viewers and the soft drum beats from off stage. But the main difference was in the composition of the team. Barbara Bain, who is usually seen and not heard, did not take part in this particular adventure, nor did Greg Morris, although one suspected his presence, for a moment, when Peter Graves and Joan Collins were being pursued by a small army and large dogs, and the heavens were split by a bolt of lightning which argued the aid of rain. Peter Graves, earlier, never had it so good as when the luscious Miss Collins succumbed to his sombre charm. And he had never had it quite so bad as when he was shot, at close range and had to stagger off—after a splendid rescue—bleeding away like billy-O. In the long history of the “M. 1. team, it is doubtful whether there have been so many triumphs and reverses as in this chapter. It was like a long rally on a tennis court crowded with so many agents and double agents that everyone was looking over his shoulder long before the end. “The night seems to hold no end of surprises,” said the principal villain, very early in the piece, and it was a gross understatement.

It was an adventure story, the “Survey” piece on Adrian Hayter. Even if Hayter was reunited with Sheila II only after many years, and sailed, for the film, in New Zealand waters, even if there were simply readings from the log of his astonishing voyage, it was an adventure story. Trying to recapture the atmosphere of Hayter’s journey was no easy task, but the “Compass” team did it extremely well. The sounds and sights of the sea, the gentle revealing of Hayter’s philosophy, the simple explanations of the pressing problems a lone sailor has to solve made “Isn’t It Terribly Lonely?” a very fine documentary. Its success, too, came in part from the fact that there were not too many words.

The splendid photography of Charles Biggin and Brian Latham captured much of the beauty of sail, some of the dangers of sailing singlehanded from England to New Zealand.

Nearly three months ago, the hope was expressed in these columns that the flat Wednesday night programmes might pick up before long. The wait has not ended: all the more thanks, then, to “Survey,” for the relief it offers. With its police hunt, Baron De Thierry, and now Hayter, it has gone from strength to strength: and it is certainly fulfilling its promise of variety.—PANDOßA.