‘Entertainment’ adds nothing to this show

Press, 22 September 1980, Page 15

‘Entertainment’ adds nothing to this show

Review

Doug McKenzie

The title pair in “Hudson and Halls” (Two, Friday nights) are such good value in their own right that it is some kind of crime against originality that their feature is caused to be padded out with standard entertainment notions of the music and minor celebrity variety which have had nothing, whatever to do with either cooking or eating. What is even more irrelevant than the obligatory bits of song or playing on musical instruments is the showbiz interviews that follow, where all parties are so convulsed in laughter almost continuously that it is a toss-up whether it’s a slipped disc or anoxia which will overtake some or all of them first.

As beter support viewing in this context it should be quite possible to work up fascinating sidelights to the chef’s art. For example, viewers could be shown, briefly, the work of the factory that makes the little wooden pips for raspberry jam; or the historical antecedents of the garlic crusher could be traced to show that it had its origins in the simple thumbscrew. Other ideas will stagger soggily to mind. What Peter Hudson . and Davis Halls (whatever order they are in compared with their pictures) thankfully do not do is consume their final efforts on screen. For this abstinence they should be awarded the crossed iron pots with swords, diamonds and bayleaves. Generally speaking, there is more eating on screen than the spirit can cope with. The advertisements are the worst offenders. While

drama productions find it convenient from time to time to include the “business” of eating it is usually not intrusive, being incidental to the main action. But ads go the whole hog. When they are dealing with food it is because they are slling food, therefore they are going to show, at any cost, that the product is being enjoyed. The result is necessarily disgusting — grease oozing down the chin, spoons shovelling the stuff in as though it’s the first mouthful since . north-western Uganda, tongues both inside and outside the mouth covered in fragments; all in exaggerated motion. The way the ads have it, the ingesting of bodily fuel is hardly less revolting than the discharging of bodily waste.

Mis-emphasising of words in the scripts is another tiresome advertisement habit amounting very nearly to a technique.

Someone wrote some words which clearly were meant to be read: “You wouldn’t letter your home: don’t litter New Zealand.” On the screen this comes out: “You wouldn’t litter YOUR home,” obliterating the rhythm and sense of the message. The ad itself, which has people at a dining-table

(food again) throwing scraps and empty bottles on the floor, is offensive on any ground that cares to be named but that is not the point at issue this time.

These days there are two things ruining New Zealand, television, and one of them is the advertisements. When all is said and done the food slurping is only a minor point; what does matter is the number and frequency of the ads. It does not help when the corporation claims that the ad density is within this or that criterion: it is high time that the criteria themselves were amended. Since it is hard for a viewer to stop boiling when he thinks of the ads, he may as well take the chance of asking why the advertisers are able to get away with ads which are so old that it is astonishing they are not in black and. white. They engender the kind of boredom that leads to thin screams which consign the, product and the corporation in equal measure to the pit. The other thing that is ruining the TV is the ceaseless and exclusive American presence in the news sessions — items like the duck race on Friday. _ This “visual” (by definition, a matter which has no I news significance by may be interesting just to see) was so elaborate for so little that the suspicion must grow that there is now something being developed which must be called “news for tele-

vision” after the style of “movies for television.” In other words, something that didn’t exist at all until TV came along with an idea and set it up and filmed it to fill news time.