Swift Let-Down In “Ironside” Story

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32382, 22 August 1970, Page 3

Swift Let-Down In “Ironside” Story

The making of television thrillers must become, after a while, a rather tedious task, and as with workers in many other fields there seems to be among those who produce the screen suspense stories and masterpieces of detection a tendency to take short cuts fairly frequently. The “Ironside” programme on Thursday night was a case in point. For most of the hour Robert Ironside was in action. This story of an attempted prison escape by three convicts who kidnap the warden and wound him, and hold his wife, Ironside and sundry others as hostages, was satisfactorily tense and gripping. This is by no means a novel situation, but it was done quite convincingly. But not for the first time, the story collapsed abruptly only because, it seemed, it was time to stop the show. This fizzle was a disappointment But it is quite common in this type of programme. Familiarity with the ways and moods of desperate criminals is not an advantage everyone enjoys, but it did seem a little strange when the ringleader, who might have been expected to be somewhat on edge, found it in him to produce a few shafts of sardonic ' humour during this critical hour. Not that they were not enjoyable: we liked bis reference to the threat of retribution if and when they were recaptured. He said that as the gas chamber had not been used for two years, it might as well be turned into a “sauna bath for the screws.” There were other such deathless phrases. “Ironside” is by no means poor quality entertainment, of its kind; but it does rather often fall away too quickly, and it does suffer, as do so many other serials, from the strict adherence to a pattern. This one demands that Ironside and his team should gather at the end, and make a couple of jokes. * St * Miles O’Shea may not be familiar to viewers but they are likely to remember his performance in “Pity Poor Edie Married To Him,” which was in the Galton and Simpson comedy series on Thursday. This was sometimes a little crude, a little bawdy, but it was in patches distinctly funny, and better than some of the earlier comedies in this series. Miles O’Shea was delightful as the malingering husband who was genuinely shocked when it was suggested he should get a job. Although he lacked the polish of Fox-Ingleby, he

was very much in the mould of this A. G. Macdonnell character from “The Autobiography of a Cad,” which established firm limits for the delightfully despicable. The “Journey To The Unknown” series departed this tihie from the eeriescary in favour of a murder by computer. It was bound to happen: and there will be further adventures into the electronic age in a series coming up soon called “Out of The Unknown.” The Thursday night show, “The Madison Equation,” was set in the unfamiliar atmosphere of a sophisticated computer organisation and it was a fair to average murder mystery, with the only nervetingling bit the final disclosure that it was not a whodunit but a whatdunit: the machine was the guilty party.—PANDORA.