Millionaire, interviewers swamped by treasure

Press, 12 June 1978, Page 15

Millionaire, interviewers swamped by treasure

POINTS OF VIEWING

By

JOHN COLLINS

Millionaires have always come across as a pretty gloomy lot on television perhaps because they mistakenly believe it is bad manners to 101 l around the studio lighting cigars with SlOO notes while we sit at home feeling sick with jealousy and squabbling over who pays for the No. 8 Pack.

Mel Fisher was typical. He sat and tinkered with millions of dollars worth of Spanish Treasure in “Two on One” on Friday, and dolefully told his hosts, Ray

Woolf and Davina Whitehouse, that he had just won a seven-year court battle to be allowed to keep it. There is something profoundly unnerving about watching a man say that he is worth more than SI6M and stands to be worth more than S4OOM when he shows all the wild unbridled joy of someone told that most of his missing laundry has been traced.

Not that his gloominess was entirely unfounded. He had probably read the “Listener” and thought he was going to appear on a show of “good conversation and top-line acts—a relaxed talk show.” He was not to know that he would be trapped in a studio with a large, variegated owl doing a perfect impression of an

English country librarian with Thespian ambitions or that he would be interviewed by a cheery but monosyllabic cabaret singer whose most penetrating probes into the intricacies of bullion recovery and the fascinating history of the recovered pieces consisted of “Wow!” and “This bit’s got those funny marks on it, too.” Perhaps he knew that 'Davina Whitehouse would i later perpetrate a most unI funny comic monologue on I the theme of the culinary

uses of shrunken human heads, illustrated with papier-mache models of human heads and garnished with the view over her shoulder of an embarrassed band wondering what the old dear was on about. David Hartnell, who I took to be an expert in women’s fashions, gave the show a lift by demonstrating that an ordinary, middle-aged woman could, by the careful application of the beautician’s art, be made to look like an ordinary, middle-aged woman wearing false eyelashes and about four pounds of make-up. “I feel 10 years younger,” she bubbled when he had finished his trowelling, batting her enormous new eyelashes with joy, and one could almost hear the sighs of ageing sympathy and admiration from throughout the viewing land.

Friday night on both channels is usually light-weight stuff, suitable programming

considering that half the nation is shopping and the other half is drunk. South Pacific Television’s Screening of Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” was an unusual change and one that probably attracted and held a very small audience. I lasted 10 minutes; but in fairness to Ibsen I must say I would probably have lasted at least 20 if it had been screened on a Sunday when I like a wee dram a culture.

“Kaleidoscope,” which ended its run on Friday, is much more to the philistine taste. A sort of lucky dip of the arts, it never gave you enough of one item to force you into anything uncomfortable, such as thinking: as soon as interest in the Liechtenstein tussock-danc-ing finals began to flag on would come another 5minute clip of a profile of the sound-effects man at Glyndeboume or an interview with Andorra’s leading violinist.

A bit of music, a dgsh of ballet, toss in a dollop of sculpture; it has always been a rag-bag show. But then it has always been enjoyable and managed to avoid being solemn; culture for good, keen men.

1 hear that Bunny Rigold will take part in the next series, showing viewers how to build their own Stradivarius from inexpensive pine off-cuts.