A night that failed to fulfil its promise

Press, 1 December 1978, Page 11

A night that failed to fulfil its promise

By

JOHN COLLINS

In spite of the simpering reassurances of one of those grinning young men the television stations employ to tell us how good the programmes have been, are, or are about to be, Frederick Forsyth’s play, “Money with Menaces,” (TVI, Wednesday) really wasn’t all that gripping. Admittedly, * have some prejudice against an author who has made millions of dollars by writing three books that I could quite easily have written

myself but have not quite got round to doing, what with painting the shed, twiddling the thumbs, etc; but I think It was more than envy that held me back from enjoying Forsyth’s story of the wages clerk who opted for a little bit on the side, as it were — in fact, rather a large bit — and found himself being blackmailed by some cad who took snaps of him as he was doing naughty things. Instead of cursing himself for his carelessness in not wearing a balaclava and ski-goggles at the

time — surely an elementary precaution under such circumstances — the clerk, who turns out, in one of those "surprise” endings that become glaringly obvious half-way through the previous propramme, to have been a bit of a dab hand with bombs during the war, blows both the blackmailer and the lady of his choice up with a boobytrapped cash-box that the blackmailer will now never know did not contain the cash he so pressingly sought.

All a bit neat, a bit wooden, glib, and typically Forsyth, not to mention the dreadful waste of a woman who seemed to have outstanding potential. If Forsyth really had any talent, he would have had his bomber-clerk desjgn a bomb so complex and cunning that it annihilated the blackmailer but only stunned the young lady into permanent submissiveness. Perhaps I would have appreciated the play a bit more if I were not still recovering from several weeks of addicted viewing

o. Colin Welland’s series, “The Wild West Show,” several linked plays about North of England rugby players that had a completeness and a feeling for language and character that seem bound to make any television plays seem pedestrian in comparison for a while. I know from a source within television that the same computer that prepared the electoral rolls is used in placing television programmes, but it was nevertheless surprising and disappointing that Welland’s brilliance should be tucked away late on a Friday night when such garbage as a repeat of “The Governor” wastes Sunday evening prime time. The “Survivors” (TVI, Wednesday 7) also seemed a bit wan, and perilously closer to the “Doctor Who” level than even the last few episodes of the previous series. Mysterious German doctors with accents straight from "Hogan’s Heroes,” stiff-upper-lipped army officers determined to do the right thing, mysterious goings-on up at the big house in the woods. Only the recluse professor’s death-ray and the midnight rendezvous at the abandoned windmill were missing from this Sydney-Greenstreet-on-horseback stuff.

POINTS OF VIEWING