Lots of bull

Press, 25 August 1980, Page 15

Lots of bull

Quite a lot of “Hunchin’ Down the Track” (One, Friday) consisted of slow-mo-tion pictures of men as big as bulls jumping on top of calves as big as corgis and tying string round their feet. If this was done particularly quickly, the rodeo commentator suffered a public infarction at the microphone and all except the calf rose to their feet in a dusty swoon of admiration and yelled and cheered. Or, rather, a.-whooped and a-hollered. This was a totally unironic film about a cultural oddity, the New Zealand rodeo circuit, physically still in the world of the .A. and P. show but spiritually deep in the heart of Texas; and you’ve got to get the lingo right, mate, no, pard. The title, for example.! How could anybody be so lacking in irony that they could think of travelling to Warkworth for the national rodeo competitions as hunchin’ down the track? The weird transplanting of nine-teenth-century American culture into late twentieth-cen-tury rural New Zealand would, in the right hands, have made a superb subject for a documentary; but split screens, lush colour, phoney segments and all. it had as much feeling as a well-made advertisement for jeans. The spectacle of New Zealand cow-cockies and farmimplement repairmen limping around like Gary Cooper in checks and stetsons and high-heeled boots was as bizarre as the photographs one occasionally used to see of Vietnamese children in big-peaked caps playing baseball or bushmen in bowler hats.

Yet it was all accepted, and presented, at face value, as if there were nothing strange and bizarre about Fairlie pretending to be Abilene. When the slow-motion shots of people trying to sit on unwilling farm animals began to pall for even the convinced and the unsceptical, set-ups were grafted in, travelogue-style: “Hello, boys. Doin’ nothing at the week-end? How about coming out to the farm and helping in some live deer recovery from helicopters?” Having spent the week jumping on hapless cattle and knocking them

over, the good ole boys spend the week-end jumping on deer and knocking them over. But, oh,the scenery.. This film certainly showed that New Zealand has some of

the world’s most spectacular scenery for jumping on animals and knocking them over. A beast could not wish for a more photogenic fate. “Do not berate me, oh my darlin’

If I should close the garbage early.

For I must slip into my stetson

And squash a tiny calf near Fairlie.”

On “News Stand” somebody new called Robert Boyd-Bell vented his dismay! that some newspaper stories don’t have by-lines. He called them anonymous. Since there is no reason to have a by-line on a piece that does not contain opin-j ion, is not written in a very' individual style, and is not a: personal feature, column, br ; report, he was well off the' oeam; but no more off the; beam than other “NewsStand” contributors these days.

It would be pleasant and instructive to have a weekly programme in which someone who knew what- he was talking about compared the performances of our newspapers. Saturday saw the pilot for a new series, “Terispeed and Brownshoe,” which will begin on Wednesday on One. Jeff Goldblum, as Lionel “Brbwnshoe” Whitney, is a sympathetic sort of Jewish Donald Sutherland; the rest of the show is routine carchase and overacting.

It’s hard to judge a series from just one show, “The Rockford Files” being an example of my disliking the first one and repenting forj excellent episode after ex-1 cellent episode, mainly be-i cause one man, James Gar-; ner, has such a way with aline that he can carry a whole show. Pilot error.

Review John Collins