Television and Radio Children of the past to the fore again

Press, 2 October 1979, Page 17

Television and Radio Children of the past to the fore again

By

A. K. GRANT

POINTS OF VIEWING

Roger Simpson has now written • three childcented drama series for South Pacific Television: “Hunter’s Gold,” “Gather Your Dreams” and “Children of Fire Mountain,” and one might well have thought that three was more than enough. However. 1 was pleasantly surprised by episode two of "Children of Fire Mountain” on Sunday night. The acting was agreeable, the direction was expert, and, unexpectedly, the writing was sharp and occasionally wittv.

The reservation I have about the Simpson-South Pacific military-industrial

complex for the production of child-centred drama series is that I can’t work out who the dramas are written and produced for. I enjoyed episode two, as I have said, in a harmless sort of a way, but have no great desire to watch episode three, even though I have no doubt it will be just as pleasant as episode two. A programme centred on the activities of children is unlikely, I should have thought, to appeal to the majority of adults. So presumably the programmes are aimed basically at children, and there is. of course, nothing wrong with this — indeed, it is a very good

thing — but the placing of the programmes and the amount of effort put into them suggests that South Pacific sees them as more than just children’s programmes.

Perhaps they are intended to be “family entertainment,” the intention being that parents and children should sit round cosily at seven o’clock of a Sunday, all enjoying the programme on different levels: i.e., some sitting on the floor and some sitting on the sofa).

The problem here is that only a genius like Lewis Carroll can write a work which can be appreciated by adults and child-

ren on different levels: “Children of Fire Mountain.” like its predecessors. is fairly unilevular, to coin a phrase. My other ciriticism of the Simpson trilogy is that each series is set in the past. I realise that one of the oldest critical tricks in the world is to criticise a work for not being something which it never set out to be in the first place. (Archaeologists, for example, now believe that Stonehenge was an attempt by Bronze Age Man to criticise an eclipse of the sun for not being an eclipse of the moon.) And this ancient trick is the one to which I shamelessly resort when cornered.

But in the present instance I think it is fair to suggest that it is time Simpson and South Pacific came to terms with New Zealand in 1979, and produced a series about the doings of children in the peculiar society they now have to grow up in. ” Enough of the goldfields, the Depression, and Rotorua, all shimmering romantically in a softfocus haze. Let us have a series set in Otara or Moerewa. After all. even Enid Blyton set the Famous Five stories in a version of the present.