Telesurvivor

Press, 22 October 1980, Page 20

Telesurvivor

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John Collins

Reading about an interesting event is certainly not the same as being there. Reading about the man. who managed to sell ■the Eiffel Tower to an American tourist could never compare with watching it happen. Sometimes television can be closer to an event than books. Watching Mr. Muldoon handle his present crisis, on television, using television, in the last few days has been an edifying experience. It has been almost like watching a man sell the Eiffel Tower to the same American tourist for the second time.

It is beginning to look as if Mr Muldoon is going to survive his crisis, and. if he does, his performance on television in the last few days will have contributed greatly to his survival. Like magic putty, the chastising gargoyle head of years of news and current affairs can be moulded by some internal heat in a crisis to a benign and slightly puzzled expression. Whatever the outcome of National’s unusual display of emotion, amid all the analysis of rights and wrongs, a little energy could usefully be left for looking at the crucial role of media performance in our national Mr Muldoon seems to be able to kick the media football around for years and then stick it up His jersey when the public demands a display, of the size of his cnest. After all, when we’ve bought the Eiffel Tower again, there’s always-the Taj Mahal. The new mask slipped a bit in' the news on Monday when Tom Scott, a' “Listener” columnist, arrived to beard Mr Muldoon at a press conference, rather in the manner of a schoolboy emerging from behind the scout hut smoking when he has heard the prefect has a broken leg. Like a wealthy housewife who has spotted a : mouse, Mr Muldoon called for Scott’s removal. “Are any of my staff here? . . . Take him away.” Marvellous. If we could only have a ; leadership crisis every week, there

would never be any need for Arkansas frog-licking competitions on the news. High above the crisis, lan Taylor, formerly of “Spot On,” was being led up a cliff by an articulate climber draped in pieces of metal in "Something Ventured” (Two). Last week Taylor went down a river with a canoe, and sometimes in it, and stalked a deer.

This programme makes superb use of New Zealand’s main asset: it is a fine society to make a scenic flight over. But, unfortunately, as with virtually all of the last year or two’s spate of scenic This-ls-New-Zealand programmes, there is something missing. In the case of “Something Ventured” what is missing is a touch of adulthood and an extra camera.

Taylor, like Yvonne Moore, and others who try to make the transition from children’s to adults’ television, seems stuck with the light delivery one might expect from a children’s programme, “Spot On,” perhaps. An extra camera could have been useful for giving close-ups and a sense of height that was not captured. by . the stand-off-photography used for Taylor’s climb.. Perhaps -the close-up man was : away, ... producing 'Me the extra-* ordinary giant pictures of Norman Mailer’s' mouth and teeth that filled an unsatisfying portrait, of the writer as an old man in "Kaleidoscope” (Two). An orthodontist’s delight.

Footnote: The review of Sunday’s Wordsworth programme which appeared in this column on Tuesday was written not by myself, despite the byline, but by Doug McKenzie. For me to claim such a piece, however accidentally, is like McGonagall claiming a poem by Wordsworth himself.