Promising look to new series

Press, 8 December 1976, Page 23

Promising look to new series

By A. K. GRANT The Hon Greville | Carnforth, hero of ‘‘The • Carnforth Practice,” the i new series which started I on Television One on > Monday night, is billed in i “The 'Listener” as “. . . a hard worker — provided that the case before him interests him. If it does not, he leaves it to one of his staff and goes out to see what is happening in the district.” This must make the series a matter of concern to the Law Society. Many solicitors modelled themselves on David Main during the heady days of his series, but Main was a hard-driving, hard-working person who got on with things. If the new mode' for the legal profession is going to be the sort of person who leaves all his boring files to underlings while he strolls around the Botanical Gardens or sees what is happening in the Square, then lawyers are going to become even more unpopular than they have been for the last 700 years or so. This cavil aside, the first episode of ‘‘The Carnforth Practice” looked reasonably promising. Perhaps the most promising thing about it was that it was written by Allan Prior, one of the good “ZCars” writers. It was also distinguished by, as always, a fine performance by Leonard Rossiter. It seems rather feeble of the 8.8. C. to resort to making a hero the younger son of a peer in order to give him a bit of glamour. If the stories are any good then Carnforth

ought to hold our attention even though he be the younger son of a ferris wheel proprietor. “Monty Python'’ disappointed. The problem with writing zany and surreal sketches is the difficulty of ending them. In order to end such a sketch you have to pass out of the realms of the zany but humourous into the realm of the merely pointless. Thus on Monday, a very nice sketch about a court martial was ruined when everybody put on pixie caps and started chanting. One is, of course, grateful for the laughter the sketch engendered before its sad conclusion, but one’s memory of the sketch has a pali cast over it by the insufficiency of the ending. And the “Monty Python" team rely far too much on saying the merely shocking and hoping it will somehow seem, funny. Thus Eric Idle, in a sketch on television potentates, tossed in, apropos of nothing, the observation, “My fie’s in an iron lung.” Now there is nothing inherently funny about having your wife in an iron lung, but I will concede the possibility of such a line being funny in some context, although I find it difficult to imagine what that contest could be. But simply to drop the line in is to do what every small boy does, and get the pleasure that every small boy gets, from shouting out the various synonyms for human excrement. And it is no funnier.