Is ‘Fair Go ’ all that fair

Press, 27 August 1977, Page 13

Is ‘Fair Go ’ all that fair

By A. K. GRANT The title of Brian Edwards’s show is “Fair Go,” but fairness was not one of the qualities most prominently in evidence when the second series began on Thursday evening. Take for example the case of the Ashley Vy-Wall wallpaper, a product designed for use by the amateur wallpaperer. It was pronounced highly unsatisfactory by a professional wallpaperer. This you may think is hardly surprising, since a professional wallpaperer is unlikely to be rapturously enthusiastic about a product which is designed to enable people to do for themselves what he would otherwise be paid to do for them. Nevertheless, I am prepared to accept that the wallpaper’s criticisms were valid and that the claims of the television advertisement for Vy-Wall are pitched somewhat high. What I complain about is Edwards’s treatment of the representative from Ashley. who tried to get the odd word in edgeways, but was eventually cut off by Edwards with a dismissive: “AU right, you’re going to stand by your product no matter what people say.”

This was grossly unfair to the Ashley man. He was certainly attempting a defence of his product, which is presumably what he was there to do, but to suggest that he was blind to reason or argument is a distorted reversal of what was actually happening. If anybody was being one-sided it was Edwards. That was bad enough. What was even worse was the programme’s treatment of the case of Mrs Iris Thiessen, a social welfare beneficiary who received from her mother’s estate a $4OO legacy and had her benefit cut back by, as I understood it, approximately $2OO. This may have been a bit tough—l don’t know, although I observe that Social Welfare benefits are paid to people who for various reasons are unable to support themselves, and the fact that such a person has received a legacy is a circumstance which the department must be perfectly entitled to take into account in assessing the rate of benefit to be paid. Edwards, at one stage, suggested to the man from the department that it was depriving Mrs Thiessen of her inheritance — a nonsensical assertion.