The day the Games owned the screen

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33753, 28 January 1975, Page 4

The day the Games owned the screen

The network finally i awoke fully to the. Games on Sunday and,! surviving the experi-i ■ lence. could hardly seem' •'to leave them alone: thereafter. Even the! main news gave the! .Games pride of place. Resulting from all this at-’ tention was an outstanding’ I coverage — the best part of' 'five hours over the whole: day. This performance was; quite in line with what the! N.Z.B.C. had accustomed its! viewers to at the Com-: monwealth Games. Television again made the j most of weight-lifting, espe-’ : cially by the trick of having. 'a back-stage camera. This must be the only sport' where viewers actually see more than the people on the! ‘spot. [

The only thing the viewers had too much of was the ■ kids running all over the track at the “lap of honour” lin the later events. ; What started as a spontaneous move by a few jolly youngsters to run out to pat 1 their hero and perhaps jog a i little with him eventually became — because the officials either lost control or Thought it didn’t matter — a idisruptive free-for-all. ! It was a mild case of ! legalised hooliganism. Wee daddies were so thrilled with j their “look at me running on i the track, everyone” that I they quite forget what they were supposed to be there for; and the winner, overtaking them, had to tap Them on the shoulder in order to get through. Not 'serious, just distracting and ■ unnecessary. Sf # >i« Cilla Black led off the other (that is, the non-

(Games) part of the pro-i [gramme. Miss Black may be the ! most comfortable of tele- ! vision’s performers. No shocks, no surprises; it is unsafe to add “nothing" because she has a very large — and, no doubt, vociferous — following. Her candid-camera interviews are beautifully, re- 1 hearsed, and her guests are so impeccable that it can be assumed they have been checked out right down to their blood groups. Finally Miss Black does the fade-out with the Great Redeemer bit, just like the photographs of the tall rock overlooking Rio. For many of us at that stage it is just the sort of reassurance we I need. * He ! “Father, Dear Father” seemed to have everything on Sunday, even including humour this time.- Moreover, it had Games topicality: Dave Bedford was mentioned. A genuine mention, too; nothing to do with the first part of his name. The cricket match with wild cheering and another wicket gone on each ball shown was something that New Zealand viewers of Plunket Shield highlights are quite used to. This kind of sequence is always very funny; the difference on the “Father” episode, though, was that it was, in fact, played for laughs. Father was, as usual, attempting to protect his daughters from the world. And who more experienced than he to know the perils.

When one of them picked up and inquired the name of what we seem to remember was called a ball box, Father said it was an umpire’s hat. After his earlier discovery of what comprised a half-bra — “I had thought it meant only one” — one realises how near he was to making a boob with the umpire’s 'hat. * *

“The Regiment" spent a lot of time on scene-setting and blocking in of character. The only real action concerned Private Bright who, much to the disgust of his uncle, Regimental Sergeant Major Bright, progressed in two days the two steps to full corporal. At this rate the R.S.M. will have a lieutenant in the family by two-thirds of the way through episode four. — D.M.