Creature comforts

Press, 30 August 1979, Page 15

Creature comforts

By

A. K. GRANT

I have not read the books by veterinary surgeon, James Herriot, on which the series “All Creatures Great and Small,” screened by South Pacific on Tuesday nights, is based. However, I understand they have been enormously popular, and have put veterinary surgery right up there alongside romances between nurses and doctors as a source of popular medical literature

Having not read the books. 1 suppose I am debarred (somewhat grudgingly) from analysing the causes of their success. Bu' whatever it is that the books have got. I don’t think the television series has got it. The character Siegfried Famon, to whose practice it appears James Herriot Is attached, may, for all I know, come across in the books as a lovable eccent-

ric, a Yorkshire prirna donna with his feet firmly planted in the muck. But as played by Robert Hardy he is irritating rather than enchanting. This may be because Mr Hardy’s style of acting never varies: he looks and sounds just the same as he did in the days when he was after the top job in “The Troubleshooters,” ■that series set in the days when oil companies were objects of glamour rather than hatred.

(Talking of that, should not Television New ZeaSan/ already be getting under way with scripting for a series set near Ashburton and based on the life which centres round an enormous plant which converts fodder beet into ethanol? The programme could be called “Beet.” or “The Troublegrubbers”.)

There were one or two good bits in “All Creatures Great and Small”; in particular the scene where Herriot, after an afternoon

on the parsnip wine, has to deliver a calf under the disapproving eyes of an audience of agricultural Methodists. And certainly his girl-friend-to-be, Helen Alderson, played by Carol Drinkwater, is extremely comely. She is a new face to me, but I would have no objection if she became a familiar one. Howevc., I doubt if this is likely to occur because I don’t propose to watch “All Creatures Great and Small” again. Not unless somebody makes it worth my while, that is. All under-the-counter payments intended to influence my television reviewing should be directed

to my accountants, Messrs Computer, Printout and Fees, P.O. Box 99999 Christchurch. Witholding tax of seven and a half per cent should be deducted at source.

POINTS OF VIEWING

The director-general of TVIJ has announced his channel’s policy on access by the Prime Minister to the channel for major political announcements. “Our policy is very simple,” the director-gen-eral (Mr Morris Martin), said. “The Prime Minister can come on our channel any time he likes. We don’t care whether his announcement is major or minor. That’s for him to decide.

“The only requirement we stipulate 1* that we be permitted to punctuate his address every five minutes with a commercial break. The amount you can charge advertisers for a 30 sec. spot In the middle of a Prime Ministerial announcement is literally cosmic.”