Not the show to have everyone crying for Woolf

Press, 15 April 1980, Page 21

Not the show to have everyone crying for Woolf

By

FELICITY PRICE

Now I know what it’s like living in one of those many outposts in the New Zealand countryside that can receive only one TV channel. It’s no fun, I assure you, when you want to see something’ on TV2 but have to make do with just listening to the sound because that’s all you can get. Having every intention of watching “The New

Ray Woolf Show” on TV2 on Sunday night, I couldn’t very well do a review about something I had simply heard, as though it was a radio programme. So, after hasty leavetaking and a speedy trip home, I fell in the door and switched on the telly just in time to see the vivacious Tina Cross flirting, pouting, and making love to , the television camera. She sounded brilliant, but she overdid the vivacious bit. What made the viewing difficult was the fact that the singers’ dubbed voices were slightly different to what their mouths were saying. It was like watching one of those foreign movies.

It wasn’t just with Tina Cross that the dubbing was out of time — it was with all the singers.

Chic Littlewood and Ray Woolf both suffered from runaway mouths, and when the lead singer from the “Highlights,” or whatever their names were, forgot his words and his voice kept right on singing regardless of what his mouth was .doing, it was really a bit poor. The visit to John Hore’s farm was an excuse to

show some nice, pretty, standard slow-motion shots of horses cantering round a field with John Hore’s voice singing in the background. At least they didn’t get him to pretend he was actually singing while he was sitting on his moving horse.

The comedy interludes, if that’s what they were supposed to be, were far from funny. They even showed one episode three times, presumably in the vain hope that one of them would haye to turn out humorbus. But the only funny bit was ■ the taped laughter, which seemed to ' ve a mind of its own.

When nothing was funny, the laughter box went beserk, veritably wetting its knickers,, but then when someone delivered the punch-line (such

as it was) there was silence. Right .at the end of the show, we saw a brief view of a studio audience, which seemed a bit unnecessary. Unless it was them laughing, and not the laughter box after all. But I fail to see how it could have been a live audience laughing — unless they were filled with nitrous oxide at indiscriminate moments. • Nevertheless, “The New Rayi Woolf Show” is indubitably better than his old one, and is streets ahead .of the eminently forgettable “Two on One.” But I am' sure once they get over the problems of runaway voices and laughter machines, the viewers are less likely to be totally bewildered at just who is saying or singing what. Surely they could have recorded it live?

I was left with the impression that I would have been better off- 'to have stayed in the country and made do with just listening to it on the telly there. Perhaps . those people who can’t get the TV2 picture are not so badly off after all.

POINTS OF VIEWING