No news is good

Press, 24 September 1980, Page 19

No news is good

No television news on Monday. Buildings toppling, grain silos exploding, frogs racing, and melon seeds being spat recordb r e-a k i n g distances th r b ; u gho u t America silently- and unreported. Satellites rusting unused in. space with no Flip Sherreh to introduce reports abaht lemb sells to the Yarpee-Comn Mahkut. No industrial NEWS read with ,AN,.almost unbearable.'.,,,,’ and RANDOM emphasis that TOTALLY destroys - any attempt to FOLLOW,-' meaning. No photograph of the Prime Minister looking like a dyspeptic Chinaman and no report about the bowel habits of his official tour party. Most blessed of all, no team sport. Long live the strike and the Production Workers’ Greater Coprosperity Sphere. The televison people would do well, for their own good, not to let the news drought go on. for too long, lest viewers lose the addiction. It has been reported by those who have gone more than a week without a news injection that the need to know who had frank and meaningful talks with whom and what is the latest thing that has made the Prime Minister angry, fades gradually and is replaced by a feeling approximately resembling peace. In the interests of research your reporter once went nearly three days without even word of a light road accident or a half-time score, but the experiment ended in an embarrassing breakdown in which a pitiful figure was seen lying in a gutter snatching weakly at bits of old newspaper blowing by.

“The Auckland Chamber Debates’’ (Two) certainly caught the flavour of Par-

liamentary debate .this week.- Jim Hopkins, strangely subdued where he is usually' strangely unsubdued, spoke for -the motion “That profit is a dirty word.” It sounded like a speech from- a decade or two. ago, entirely appropriate to the return to semi-public, life of Tim Shadbolt, the rent-a-radical figure of the sixties who- has spent the last few years running, a small business. He made the sort of speech one would expect from a man who has spent the last few years running a small business. Shadbolt was in harness with a Wellington lawyer, James Young, who said that profit should not be thought of as a five-letter dirty word. He will be relieved to know that it isn’t: it has six letters. He also injected some interest into a generally drab affair by asking the audience to “look at what Lion Breweries have done for opera.” This was dangerous ground indeed. His entire defence of profit could have been lost if the audience had begun to think about what Eion Breweries have done to beer.

The usual superstar profile, that of Rodney Bryant, was replaced because of the strike by a very French ’ piece by Catharine Laporte-Coolen, or words to that effect, about the American film performer, Gene Wilder. Once again, unable to stand silence, the French makers of this series had a small nightclub band going through their first rehearsals at the back of the sound track. As if this were not disturbing enough, Wilder and Mel Brooks, who was also interviewed, indulged in the traditional method of

dealing with a foreigner: they answered her questions almost phonetically as if she were handicapped and occasionally addressed the camera in up to two words of what one took to be French.

Miss Laporte-Coolen, to name but a few, seemed to like this technique, cuddling up to them in a very French way and generally behaving in a provocative manner despite the drawback of looking like an axe in a wig. Among other things on “Kaleidoscope” (Two) Angela d’Audney talked to a woman for a quarter of an hour about how to make a tutu. Viewers who followed the’ interchange closely would undoubtedly have been able to go waay and run up their own tutu. Viewers who did not stay awake during this valuable commentary on art can order their “Points of. Viewing” “Kaleidos-cope-viewing” tutu from the usual address.

Each viewing tutu, similar to the “Points of Viewing” viewing bodice but without the asbestos anit-Bob Lowe blinkers and with more intricate ruffling in the lower viewing area, come complete with a strap-on kneepad on which the viewer can chart “Kaleidoscope” efforts to fill up 70 minutes With arty stuff every week without spending more than $lO.

While “Kaleidoscope” fiddled with its tutu in prime time, a superb film of Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming’’ was sneaked out in the dead of night. Some would say this is Pinter’s best play; Cyril Cusack, lan Holm, and Vivien Merchant sustained its atmosphere of menace and black, understated, puzzling humour to perfection. -. .