Where will it end?

Press, 15 December 1979, Page 15

Where will it end?

Bv

JOHN COLLINS

Some series seem to drag on for so long that discussion of when and how they started begins to take on theological overtones. Was "This Year, Next Year” (TVI, Thursday) the product of some wild primeval union between “Coronation Street” and “The Archers”? Is there anything in the written record to suggest when it began, or. indeed, that it had a beginning? More important. will it ever end? Is there some dreadful hint in the programme’s title of a permanence as yet unrevealed? Postcards only, please, for your replies. A detailed description of a “Points of Viewing” viewing bodice to the first three cor-

rect entries. Hidden somewhere among the meaningful pauses and the close-ups of sheep’s backsides of “This Year, Next Year” there is probably a good idea for a one-hour play about a man who tires of the utter pointlessness of life in the big city and decides to retreat to the utter pointlessness of life

in the country only to find it populated by caricatures of craggy Yorkshiremen supping ale and eating butties and being lovable and honest and rustic and trustworthy and getting cowdung halfway up their legs every time

they venture out. but not minding it at all because they’ve got life in perspective. Faced with that lot, it comes as no surprise that Harry's decided to head back to London, where he will no doubt spend the next 71 episodes or so in philosophical discussion about the meaning of it all and how a man balanc-

es his responsibilities to 1 imself with his responsibilities to his family and also whether she will consider stopping sleeping with his former colleague as it is fuelling his inner fires of self-doubt and putting him right off his Kornies. You can always hear the tap of the typewriter in the background in this series, particularly when Harry decides to have a particularly concerted wallow in self-pity and “Days of Our Lives” introspection, which he does in a low moan that is pitched somewhere' between hard-won wisdom and disillusionment, and which lands somewhere read, not heard, as though produced by someone between wet and catatonic. The whole dialogue sounds as if written to be trapped in a library who's never actually heard how people speak; and it’s

delivered at the speed of one of those languagecourse tapes that leaves enough time for the listener to repeat the phrase. Learn to Speak Fluent Yorkshire While You Sleep. It was certainly a night of cardboard Yorkshiremen. Roy Kinnear, something of a token Northerner without whom no third-rate television is now considered complete, sweated, huffed, and wobbled his way though the welcome last gobbet of

“No Appointment Necessary” in his prennial role of the short-fused bumbler