Afternoon TV good for calisthenics

Press, 2 December 1976, Page 19

Afternoon TV good for calisthenics

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R. T. BRITTENDEN.

Television provides much solace to many people, and it is a safe assumption that everything screened pleases someone, only if it is those responsible for the production.

But television today is looking just a little tired, with a rash of repeats, and some pretty dreadful

junk scheduled for some of the more popular viewing times. However, those who have complaints about the evening programmes should be required to take.a course of viewing in the’early afternoon. It brings about a salutarv revision of stan-

There are good afternoon shows, or at least one — “Today at One” usually holds interest. It j$ the plethora of platitudes. the heavy over-sen-timentality of the soap operas which really startle the occasional afternoon viewer.

We know of a lady who had taken off a stone doing her exercises while watching them; but without having had a seat in the stalls at these performances, we can guarantee that her writhings are as nothing compared with ihose seen in such as “The Young and The Restless.”

This was really glorious. The script must have been written by someone driven out of his mind by deadlines and production schedules. It had just about everything in it which gives the soap opera its own special place in the scheme of things.

The first 10 minutes, accurately timed, introduced

dear old dad, coming back home goodness knows how many years after leaving his wife and family. It seemed singularly appropriate that two of his grown-up children, who had invited him back across the threshold, should have timed the homecoming to coincide with a goose dinner. The family reunion, harrowing m the extreme, had father full of selfrecrimination, the workweary wife looking as if she had never left the kitchen save to suffer all the rebuffs life has to offer. There was a son there, part of the devious little sub-plots which are sprinkled through these things with the abandon of Mr Graham Kerr with parsley. It was quite clear he had lustful thoughts about the beautiful girl his brother had married — the brother who was bitter about father and resolutely refused to put his feet under the same table as the prodigal dad. Oh yes, his daughter had eloped only two days before father ended his domestic fast and there were hints that no-one knew much about the new' husband ... all this carried along with many deeply morose moments, close-ups of introspective stares.

One of the first rules in writing soap operas is to impose severe rationing on smiles. One genuine one a programme perhaps, one strained, or .tremulous.

After going through this emotional hoop, the television audience had a fearful time with “Days Of Our Lives.” It started with a young wife in a hospital bed; an

old flame of her husband was on the medical staff; and there were lots of unhappy people, an impending divorce, with the erring husband having psychiatric treatment, and if memory serves the wrnrd “abortion” cropped up pretty early.

Not too many laughs in that lot.

But then TVI presented the daddy of them all — in a purely figurative sense — the smiling Dr Marcus Welby. This was really powerful stuff — a poor little misunderstood girl who had run away from misunderstanding husband and went off with a philandering marine bioolgist. She wound up with — shsh. — a nasty social disease, and the threat of an operation which would have ended her ambition to have a pack of youngsters crawling round the door of the rose-covered cottage.

Children, of course, by arrangement with the now-understanding and ever-loving husband, and not with the marine biologist. She was spared this fate: but the audience is not to be spared Dr Welby. He will be back again next week, toothy smile and healing hands. It is to be hoped he does not always cut into the time available for TV2’s never-ending “Search For Tomorrow” — all tears and no vale. But one has to admire TVI. When it pursues a policy, it leaves no sentimental stone unturned.

Heaven help us all, those Waltons are back again next week, in another of the repeat programmes.