POINTS of VIEWING

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33253, 16 June 1973, Page 5

POINTS of VIEWING

“Gallery” on the Budget was adequate

• What does it mean to me? This is the question most people ask on Budget night and those who depended on Thursday’s “Gallery” for an answer should have been reasonably well satisfied.

But even so, “Gallery” did no more than would be expected of it on such an occasion. Professor John Williams got things rolling with an economist’s point of view and then the opinions of the various business and sectional ■spokesmen helped viewers to identify better the Budget’s i salient points. However, Budget night is I the Minister of Finance’s big ■night and there must have been many people anxious to jsee how Mr Rowling would ‘fare against the predictable i criticism his Budget would receive from the man he replaced in office, Mr Muldoon. Perhaps the script did not offer him much scope, but Mr Muldoon did appear a little more subdued than one might have expected. He got the occasional jab in, but Mr Rowling parried most of ithe punches and when he did suspect he had been hit below the belt he quickly, yet calmly, put the record, i as he saw it, straight. Mr Muldoon’s assertion 'that the Budget was nothing more than a political docujment lost whatever impact I he might have hoped such a

description would have when Mr Rowling agreed with him that this, indeed, was a political document. * * « Augusta Fullam, this week’s murderess in the “Wicked Women” series, certainly qualified under the heading and Vivien Merchant was very convincing as the wantonly passionate Augusta. Set as it was in the East, the story could easily have been mistaken for an offering from “The Somerset i Maugham Theatre,” but, of course, the “Wicked Women” series is based on real people. Even so, it would b( interesting to know how.mucl licence the writers are given Augusta Fullam, no doubt,

filled her much older husband with arsenic, but many of the other parts of the story were j not so easy to accept as fact. Still it made for reason- i ably good drama. » * ■<: It was just as well that the Budget contained no shocks' for the average New Zea-1 lander — if, after Mr Whick- i ier’s findings, we can ever! again believe such a person exists —for later the sight of* all those New Zealand wickets falling in the cricket test: at Trent Bridge was sorry enough viewing for one night. But, of course, in the cricket here was some comfort in mowing that there are better hings to come. —K.J.M.