Variations on a fancy theme

Press, 14 June 1978, Page 17

Variations on a fancy theme

By

KEN COATES

It is wonderful how these TV scriptwriters get away with variations on a simple theme. Take Monday night, for example. On TVI there was a programme, “The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin,” a rather apt title because that incredibly dim-witted Reggie is all the time, falling, rising, slipping and sliding like a complete idiot. Therein lies the answer as to how the programme gets viewers. predominantly male. We imagine how much more

successful and smoothly sophisticated we would be — that is, if we managed to pluck up enough courage to invite over someone we fancied while our wife was out on a Sunday visiting her hippotamus. Not that we can understand why Reggie’s secretary was at all willing with such a clown. Reggie’s fantasies are, of course, not at all like our own. We would be far from home, in some wild romantic spot with someone we fancied, rather than running the risk of having her climb down a drain-pipe in nothing in particular. Then on TV2 came a new series, called “Men of Affairs,” which is a play on words, nudge, nudge, with more variations on the same theme. This programme has an unlikely-looking Minister of the Crown (Alf Garnett in disguise) who fancies a well-endowed blonde so much he gives her a job as his secretary. He presumably is living proof that idiocy is no bar

to the top jobs in politics and proceeds to botch everything up, aided and abetted by another lunatic politician. It all goes to show tnat such carryings-on will never meet with success which is television’s • way of saying, “get into her clutches, my son, and she will drag you down.” “Men of Affairs” presumably has a political setting because some producer who had been working bn current affairs thought it would be a good idea to shoot yards

of film with a big blow-up of Westminster behind Alf Garnett’s, sorry, the Minister’s, desk. The script was terrible — even the variations on the theme palled when linked with the old wrong-letter-with-flowers trick. And how many times can the programme get away with the “ha ha, you’ve got a wig and you are bald” routine? Monday night’s vewing could hardly be called ho-hum. I mean, take that item featuring the world domino flattening record. Wow, 100,000 dominoes, or was it 97,500? The story about the Soviets now having more nuclear warheads than N.A.T.Q. paled into insignificance, and anyway, the young lady reading it all did not seem to be at all perturbed, so why worry? Then there were a few pathetic black corpses somewhere in Africa . . . followed by a soothing commercial, “marvellous to help keep your skin smooth, soft and supple.”