Vai Doonican makes welcome return

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32461, 23 November 1970, Page 4

Vai Doonican makes welcome return

Val Doonican made a very welcome return to CHTVS’s Friday evening programme, his show seeming certain to be a particularly popular one again. If the mixture was pretty much as before, it is none the less acceptable for that.

Val Doonican ha* a captivating Irish speaking voice and is a fine singer. While there are some quite elab-orately-staged numbers now and then, his show generally carries a refreshingly unpretentious air. He had two worth-while comedians with him, Norman Vaughan and Peter Goodright. Sometimes, inevitably, the allusions to British affairs are lost on a New Zealand audience. But Peter Goodright is a splendid mimic.

■ It is difficult to know whether “Mod Squad” is holding whatever audience it won when it began. This viewer found it interesting, because of its introduction of three young people as the key crime investigators; and those who like a dust-up or

two in their entertainment must have admired the con-vincingly-staged bouts of fisticuffs. But the language, even after the several lessons of the last few weeks, is a little difficult for those who do not regard the covers of L.P.’s as required reading.

A startling aspect of “The Sunday Drivers” in this series was its setting in a car-crashing circus. Presumably the crowds and the crashes echoed reality. It really is hard to understand how anyone can spend a Sunday afternoon watching motor-cars being driven up and off ramps to crash on top of other motor-cars; especially when all the vehicles seemed to be considerably more desirable than any we have owned. Saturday night’s “Companions in Nightmare” was a successful thriller, although it relied upon tried and proven methods for its frights. There were long minutes spent in very murky atmospheres, there were shots of gloomy-looking residences, the odd bolts of lightning, with a bit of wind and rain thrown in. And it wound up, as all good stories of detection are expected to do, with all the suspects parading together with the police listening from the next room.

But this long—9o minutes —film about some famous, neurotic people taking a group-therapy course under a psychiatrist, and discovering that there is a psychotic among them held the attention pretty firmly. Whenever one of the group’s wordy selfexplorations threatened to become too long, there was a shock for the audience to startle him into awareness again. Yet there were times when the principals did seem a little tedious.

An extremely competent cast played in “Companions in Nightmare.” Melvyn Douglas, Gig Young, Anne Baxter, Dana Wynter, and Leslie Nielson were splendid; Patrick O’Neal, as Jeremy, was outstanding. “Father, Dear Father,” is funny enough to make its nearness to the knuckle forgiveable. Saturday night’s episode was the better for the appearance of a very old friend, Bill Fraser, remembered by many with affec-

tion for his role as Snudge. There have not been many more hilarious comedies than “The Army Game.”—PANDORA.