The greeny yellow peril

Press, 27 December 1980, Page 9

The greeny yellow peril

Review ’

John Collins

The people picking the pictures to show behind the reader on the 6.30 news, whose main job is to reflect television journalists’ opinion of public figures, don’t like Ronald Reagan. The latest picture of the American President-elect, released bn Christmas Day, showed him as being made; of third-grade purple vinyl; and about to bite the knee; of. an unidentified person off-picture to the right. It] must be Kissinger or Nixon, judging from the direction of the Reagan lunge. Reagan, himself, whose career in films showed a liking for the clear labelling of goodies and baddies, would approve of the photo-picking system, and would undoubtedly be glad to see his mugshot among the leading, news grotesques alongside the nowcelebrated Muldoon-as-Chi-nese gargoyle illustration. In the satellite report following the purple-vinyl portrait, Reagan was depicted in a seasonally bilious greeny yellow, upsetting at that stage of Christmas Day but probably caused by some incompatibility in colour systems rather than the result . of some -tele-

photopicker’s urge to let his! feelings show. Everyone in reports from ; America these days is greeny yellow. Is this the result of different systems of reproducing colour, or is it the product of unusual unrest among the large fluorescent particles of thei Van Allen radiation belts through which our communications satellites ply their daily round, bringing reports of giant boxers, melon spitting records, and unknown chimneys toppling to beat the band? Or have the Clearasil mines finally been scraped clean, and are Americans, leaders in the West’s flight against acne and other ravages of the human spirit, succumbing en masse to terminal adolescene 1 of the facial pores? Speak: out, Television New Zealand. We have a right to know. The Queen was not yello-1

wy green at all during her Christmas message, but an impeccably tasteful pale pink. After an opening aerial shot of a palace that would house hundreds, and wearing jewellery that would fetch, enough to put quite a lot of poor and disadvantaged backsides firmly and com.fortabiy in armchairs for the rest of their bom days, she asked us to help the poor and the disadvantaged. At a time when chubby and supercharged television vicars are regularly to be found on the screen regretting that we have lost sight of the original meaning of Christmas, it is interesting to observe that the highlight of the television Christmas for many is a hurry-up about helping others from the richest woman in the world. Presumably, we are to regard our Christmas television messages and tuneups as being each in a separate compartment; so that when, among the advertisements, we receive our ritual seasonal admonishments for being selfish and materialistic and forgetting that the Saviour was bom in a stable, we are supposed to make no connection between

this and the background of any other purveyor of s tele-homily, thus avoiding scepticism about a plea for sharing by a woman wearing a rock on her shoulder whose sale would build a housing estate. Television has always been a most convoluted and contradictory medium — advertisements for Polaroid playthings in the middle of documentaries about star-

vation in the Sahel; deodorant commercials during film of concentration camps — but at no time is its selling of institutionalised hypocrisy more glaring than at Christmas.

The object of desire in the main Christmas Day film was neither, yellowy green nor tasteful pink, but blue, he writes in his desperate struggle to slide "The Blue Max” into this thing without a jerk that would w’ake the sleeping reader. The Blue Max was, apparently, some sort of swept-up Iron Cross much sought after by German stringbag pilots Immelman-tuming and outside loop-rolling above the hell .of Flanders in the days when men were men and you could take a young lady to the music hall, have

f your fill of porter, afford a i bowl or two of tobacco and ; a plate of cockles on the way home from Bapaume, ! and still have change from a ■ shilling or a mark, depending on which team you were

George Peppard was suitably unconvincing as the fighter pilot in ruthless pursuit of a Blue M&x and Ursula Andress, L Ms Andress would show

up well on a computer as having a high degree of the things that are supposed to make up attractiveness; yet she contrives to be blisteringly unsexy. I have long dismissed women’s lib-

erationists as social failures pathetically incensed by their inability to grow * decent moustache or play senior rugby; but a glimpse of the simpering, vapid roles Ms Andress has made her i own tends to fan some small spark of sympathy for the unhappy creatures. Peppard, being the star and something of an ace flyer, was absolved from an [attempt at the "Hogan’s Heroes” German accent all the other pilots had been ordered to assume. Though [got the Blue Max and Ms Andress, the former once, the latter at 10-minute intervals, he perished in the end, the victim of ambition and a plane that wasn’t al! that good at staying up in the air. There was a Christmas message in it for us all.