We’re going to turn it off!

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34047, 10 January 1976, Page 5

We’re going to turn it off!

(By

A. K. GRANT)

During 1975 Mr Mul-i doon made much play ofhis intention to deal with the “Pommie wreckers,”: by which he did not mean immigrant Corn- j ishmen holding lanterns aloft and crying “Arr, Jem lad.” as they stepped off the plane at Auckland, but British trade unionists who, according to the Right Honourable gentlemen are sabotaging the normally equable conduct of: New Zealand's industrial j relations.

We wish to draw his attention to a much more insidious and deadly form of English immigrant, and that is the perfectly ordinary, decent one who likes watching several hours of soccer per week. Thousands of these have come here since the war and they are responsible for the fact that while we get almost no coverage of the Australia-West Indies test series, we get, on both channels, more soccer than you can shake a stick at. What with “Sportsnight” (TVI, Wednesdays), “World Soccer” (TV2, Thursdays), and “Sportsworld” (TV2, Sundays), we are being shown soccer to an extent which must have an unhealthy effect on the minds of impressionable young people. Only last week there was a case before the court- of a young man who claimed that the reason he had attempted to play the game of soccer for which he was arrested was that he had, immediately before the offence, watched a game on television.

We say to the Prime Minister: let the Immigration Division conduct a survey of all English persons and deport any who admit to j watching there or more hours of soccer per week. The screens will then be left (free for us true-born Kiwis |to watch eight or 10 hours of cricket per week. These thoughts were prompted by watching Derby County play Everton on “World Soccer” on Thursday night. In fact we quite enjoyed the game, but then lwe also quite enjoy watchI ing the equally pernicious

i full frontal nudity and exi plicit sex on the rare occa- ’ sions when we get the ; chance. The programme also shattered an illusion. We had ■ always thought that our All Blacks were the world’s most inarticulate sporting heroes, but the interview with Derby County’s Charlie George after the game made the average All Black on tour, with his greetings to those at home, (“I’d just like to say hullo to Mum, Dad, Aunty Ede and all the boys in ‘E’ Shed”) sound like a ! combination of Jacob Bronowski and Noel Coward. I We hereby make a free | offer of a chant to all those i who are as satiated with soccer as we are: “We’re going to turn it off. We’re going to turn it off. Ee-aye-addio, we’re going to turn it off.” We had not watched “Van der Valk” before, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The sweet tuneful theme contrasted with the bitter nature of the story, in which the villain gets away with the murder of his wife, although not before Van der Valk has ruined the rest of his life for him. One could tell one was on the Continent from the fact that Van der Valk’s wife, Arlette, kept grizzling about the fact that they were not having any sex life while! Van der Valk was on the Van Teeseling case. Heaven forbid that any such complaint should ever bei addressed to a British policeman, and in particular! not to Chief Inspector Adler of “Softly Softly”. The maii| would go to pieces in an instant.

“Cannon” spent his time scrambling around Colorado, bringing to justice a trade union leader who had murdered his opponent in a forthcoming election. The episode was reasonably suspenseful, although our knuckles only turned to offwhite, rather than white itself. The extent to which organised crime has penetrated the American trade union movement, and the contrast with the conduct of our own trade unionists, is pointed up by the fact that not one American trade unionist this century has been offered a knighthood.