The great viewer stopper

Press, 29 September 1979, Page 13

The great viewer stopper

By

JOHN COLLINS

POINTS OF VIEWING

The room is lightening now, and it is time. The first weak rays of dawn’s gleaming lance are gilding the casement with the mantle of the new day’s bloom, something roughly along those lines, life lifts its sleepy head, etc, etc, and I can almost make out the paper and the quill, and, cold and lifeless in the comer, the huddled cadaver of my dog. Shep.

I was not to know. It is only a few short months since I let him watch “The Club Show” (before it was struck down alas, too young, too young) and, though it left him quite mad, it did not seem to do him any harm. Yet just two minutes of “The Neville Purvis Family Hour,” and he gave a small, choking cry (Woof, woof, something along those

lines, I am not a flaming animal inpersonator), and was gone. Now, as I sit here in the gloom, I am left with only happy memories of our days together and four hundredweight of nourishing Jellimeat with marrowbone jelly. It has never been properly dark the long night through; the flames from the burning outhouses

have only just begun to die, and with them my hopes for my burgeoning cottage industry and all who depend on it. The barn is gone. So is the workhouse where the old women hand-stitched the “Points of Viewing” embroidered viewing bodices (now heavily reduced, but still available in most sizes). The factory where my

artisans cut-and-pasted for me old television reviews from the “Lesotho Clarion” and the “Plumber’s Almanac and Tide Tables” is just a pile of smouldering timbers. I have sent my best constables to scour the estate for those who led the mob in its orgy of destruction. But, in truth, I cannot find it in my heart to blame them. No-one not of true breeding, no-one whose resolve has not been tempered in the crucible of “Two on One,” the fire of “All Things Being Equal” should be expected to withstand Neville Purvis.

Only the numbness born of hours of locally-made disasters kept me sane, kept me from rushing through the hamlet with my workers and dancing naked with them at the runic stones before a burning effigy of lan Cross *o a medley of pop-

ular marches played by the Skellerup-Woolston band. Faced with Neville Purvis, the untrained mind, alas, must fail; and the quill itself seem brittle. Can words express such distaste? Puerile. Revolting. Childish. Offensive. Depressing. All these and so much more. Amateurish. Foulmouthed. Selfindulgent. Gauche. But so much more again.

The “Neville Purvis Family Show” is so bad, it’s world-class. It is inconceivable that any television channel anywhere at any time has ever shown, is showing, or will ever show such an appalling, talentless, pointless, tasteless, hopeless, witless load of old cobblers.

Come back, Ernie, come back, Glyn. AU is forgiven. Bring back “The Club Show” and drive Purvis from the screen. Surely Shep has not died in vain.