More and more on less and less

Press, 28 November 1979, Page 19

More and more on less and less

By

JOHN COLLINS

We see less and less of the Prime Minister on television these days, but there's more and more of him to see when he actually fronts up, so the over-all supply (measured in viewing minutes per cubic metre of Prime Minister) has probably not diminished much. But, though there is more of him, he is certainly still giving very little away in interviews.

There is always an air of suppressed violence about a Muldoon television interview; it always seems on the verge of a slanging match, a Prime Ministerial walk-out, or some marvellous currentaffairs “On the Mat” in which carafes of water and microphone leads are used to murderous and entertaining effect. A Muldoon interview, such as that with Jim Hop-

kins (“Dateline Monday,” TVI Monday) about New Zealand's recognition of the pass murderer, Pol Pot, as the legitimate, though at present indisposed, rule of Kampuchea, is always both gripping television and yet distasteful. Gripping because viewing the process by which an interviewer must tiptoe round in an attempt to draw the Prime Minister

into anything remotely resembling a civilised interchange between two intelligent adults without having his head snapped off is as entertaining and as tense as watching a. rather new postman trying to retrieve a letter from the guard of rather an experienced bull-dog. Distasteful because, if I may' carry this ridiculous metaphor to the point of insanity, because the contents of the letter.

as it were and even so to speak, are of interest to me; and if there’s one thing the Prime Minister makes clear when interviewed it is that he just does not accept the interviewer as a representative of the viewers, the public. Questions are dealt with as attacks rather than attempts to gain information, interviews always degenerate immediately into glowering matches, and the viewer at home generally learns nothing about the subject at hand, however much be may learn about the Prime Getting Mr Muldoon to discuss Government policy in the reasonable manner one has come to expect from, say, a British or an American politician, is one of the biggest problems facing current-affairs programmes. Jim Hopkins in recent months has handled this daunting task well, remaining calm where a lesser man might have run, naked and berserk, from the studio, and having lots of well-researched questions to throw against the wall of unresponsiveness. But he might have made much more of a fist of the Pol Pot business.

His attempts to pin Mr Muldoon down on New Zealand’s morally indefensible if politically expedient policy of recognising as the legitimate ruler of Kampuchea the mans who has made strenuous and largely successful efforts to wipe the Kampucheans off the map, were not as well pressed as his arguments usually are. Mr Muldoon, where he might have been forced to wriggle off the hook, was once again allowed to ignore its existence and swim away, an implacable political carp.

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