Competent acting in ‘Moynihan’

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34129, 15 April 1976, Page 4

Competent acting in ‘Moynihan’

(By

MARGARET CHAPMAN)

In the words of the small girl in the commercial, “It didn’turt,” That is one summation of Tuesday’s viewing—it contains a couple of the week’s best shows and a couple of the worst. It is painless stuff, apart from the odd nasty thing that happens (“The Sweeney” managed to crush a man to death in his own car scrap-yard). “Close to Home” pursued the course of many a prewedding day in New Zealand households, although I have never seen a group of people cope so awkwardly with dinner on their knees. It was quite hilarious. They shared one trait in common with “Moynihan” — nobody ever poured a full glass of anything. Perhaps this is an economy move on the part of TVI.

Apart from that, “Close to Home” skirted delicately and decorously around most of its subjects, although at episode’s end we were treated to a view of someone the credits listed as “The Stranger.” He will probably turn out to be that rather wan looking bird’s uncle. That would be par for the course on this programme.

Just as predicted when the series started, “The Six Million Dollar Man” is really into ESP (or American tele-

vision writers are). This week, a teen-age supertelepath helped the superhero to find the baddies. They are getting into dangerous ground here as they will soon run out of variations.

Moynihan, in spite of protests from some, remains the best action series New Zealand has produced. As they said, lan Mune is Moynihan and that is half the battle. Even the fact that we have seen him in a very different role lately has not detracted from the series.

Mune is ably supported by Walt Brown and Louise Pajo but I am not so sure yet about Sheila Hammond. She was just a little unconvincing in Tuesday’s episode. The competence of actors in the relatively small supporting roles, such as Ray

Henwood’s doctor, prove that New Zealand has talent. * * % The unhappy marriage of the News and Tonight continues. We get 10 minutes of news with film clips and then away we go for 20 minutes of what proved once again on Tuesday to be trivia. The item on the Beatles was well researched, and well edited, but why was it there? They were in the news recently with rumours of a reunion, but this was hardly relevant to New Zealand.