Regional news keeping up a deft ‘Touch’

Press, 9 May 1980, Page 11

Regional news keeping up a deft ‘Touch’

Review Felicity Price . a v • .V '•

With just over a month of “Mainland Touch" programmes tucked away neatly under the TVI belt, it would appear that Christchurch’s regional news production has managed to keep up its high standard.

On Wednesday night’s edition, the 'ebullient, brash, blase Rodney Bryant and the shyly serious Bob Sutton once again fronted a programme that was interesting and informative, with just the right touch of levity thrown in to make it all entertaining. The highlight of the half-hour programme was the interview with *‘The White Witch of Bishopdale,” Mrs Maureen Ellis, a palm reader and selfstyled psychometrist, whose hands dripped with diamond rings and whose living-room decor alone would provide a fair amount of the entertainment promised by the sign on the front door.

Mrs Ellis began her performance by reading the tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. “You’ve got a good cup there, dear,” she tpH the interviewer. But reading cups, dear, was purely for fun and for shows. Not at all serious, dear, not like reading palms. “Everyone is searching for something, don’t you think dear?” Mrs Ellis said when asked about her business. “And most people like to think they’ll live a long life,” she said, telling the interviewer she would live until she was 86.

Thinking you will live to that age must alone be worth the fee.

Seriously, dear, this is the stuff of which entertainment is made. “The Mainland Touch” has been filling a gap in

ronical television in Christchurch and filling it iully. The immediacy and ease with which television brings contentious topics into every living room in the Canterbury and Westland area must have made more than a few viewers sit up and take notice. After “The Mainland Touch,” “Fair Go” brings more of the same — topical teasers and occasionally contentions issues of interest to any viewer who has ever been inside a supermarket or bought a house, a car. or a Cadillac. A Cadillac? Admittedly, few viewers of Wednesday night’s “Fair Go” will’ ever find themselves in the position to buy a Cadillac. And not many more would have been likely to sympathise with the plight of the man who bought a Caddy in the States and shipped it back to New Zealand, only to find that he couldn’t get it out of the container and on to the wharf. And then to find, when he did, that someone had broken his ignition switch in the process.

But his complaint to the Automobile Association, made last November and unanswered until this week, just after the “Fair Go” team started making some inquiries, was understandably irksome to him. Both his point of view and the A.A.’s responses made good entertaining television.