Mary Tyler Moore show improves

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32862, 10 March 1972, Page 4

Mary Tyler Moore show improves

Rather unexpectedly, it must be admitted, the Mary Tyler Moore show seemed to us to be the best spot on Wednesday night’s viewing. The use of the newsroom staff to a far greater extent than usual turned a very ordinary comedy into a really amusing one.

Murray, Ted and the boss have contributed some of the best lines to the Mary Tyler Moore Show and although Miss Moore has

distinct charm, she is all the better for the company she keeps—these three, and the friend played by Valerie Harper. The show was funny because its principal aim was a parade of Ted Baxter’s vanity, and this objective was achieved very capably. Ted is the man who was described as “going steady, with himself.” Ted Knight plays Baxter very well indeed and the whole script was brighter than it is as a rule.

An account of two men engaged in disarming a German parachute bomb 25 years after it had landed in Kentish Town should have made “He Who Dares” really gripping fare. It was another example of how fact, which should have more dramatic impact than fiction, failed to realise its full potential in this film simply because the audience knew all would be well. In fiction, there is the faint but chilling prospect that something will go wrong. Of the courage of Major Fletcher and SergeantMajor Hambrook there was no question: they deservedly

won George Medals for their feat. But again “He Who Dares” failed to capture the drama of the first programme in the series, “The Last Blue Mountain;” in the climbing story, the audience was not told the final outcome of the expedition, and it was not obvious. This time, it was a quiet, unpretentious documentarystyle affair, with other bits of bomb disposal film dragged in to help it along. Major Fletcher did contribute a line, at the end, which was shocking in its under-statement. He rather had the feeling, he said, that if bacteria were used, bomb disposal in the next war would be a very difficult job.—PANDORA.