A test that went together like a horse and carriage

Press, 25 February 1981, Page 18

A test that went together like a horse and carriage

Review

Ken Strongman

If you survived the varying styles and levels of “The Love and Marriage Survival Test” (Monday, One) you can probably survive anything — even marriage. The programme ranged from the educational through the banal and simplistic to the bizarre.

Good points were made but the trite was made to sound significant by Peter Sinclair. The whiff of something vaguely intellectual and there he is, grimacing with academic indigestion. Wouldn’t you have problems if, like ’ the actors, you lived with your spouse in one windowless room painted entirely black with Venetian blinds hanging on bare walls? Don’t you construe cooking, housework, eating, and indeed everything else in terms of sexual problems?

Of course you do; or if you don’t, you should, but mind the saucepans. This

was Monday’s programme at its worst; woman’s magazinish, and seeing sex in everything.

It was a one hour and a half mixture of history, role-playing, comment and questions devised by the Mental Health Foundation to put to studio audiences in Christchurch and Auckland. The questions were arbitrary, with many pertinent ones omitted. Not surprisingly,, most of the studio responses hovered around the safely uncommitted middle and yet were interpreted variously as “mild” or “violent.” After each set of questions, a sociologist pronounced. He was pleasant enougn but manged to say nothing other than how the studio answers tended to match research results. So what, one might ask, and one does.

No mention was made of the pointless nature of comparisons made under such conditions, nor of the

serious and • difficult nature of conducting representative social surveys. More positively, there were some interesting and surprising facts presented. That 50 per cent of New Zealand women are pregnant on. their wedding day might have raised a few eyebrows. And that men and women are not just rugby players or. ballerinas but are a complex mixture of the two might have raised a few more.

Also, the point was well put that the age at which a marriage is made is more important than who marries whom. However, some ’of this was extraordinarily longwinded.

It shouldn’t take five minutes to say that people now live longer and have fewer children than did their Victorian counterparts. . Although “The Survival Test” had its good moments, its main problem was the usual television one of stereotypes. Too

many of them were shown with not enough done to dispel them. The depths were' plumbed by Dr Frazer MacDonald, chairman of the M.H.F., no less. He portrayed all married women as either at home and suicidal or at work and therefore happy, effective mothers. I’m almost certain that there are one or ■two women that fall somewhere between these extremes.

Such stereotypes were endorsed beautifully but unwittingly by the adverts. AT times, 'it was difficult to know when those impossible Free and Lovely persons stopped and the programme began. So, “The Survial Test” was a programme of multiple levels. It was good on New Zealand facts, coy on sex (Roger Hall rather than straight talk), reasonable on aggression and argument and at times crudely stereotyped.

Unfortunately, one cannot know what effect it will have. How many married couples will have watched it together and learned something to their mutual advantage? And how many will have watched it and gone off to bed quietly thoughtful and avoiding each other’s eves?

Marriage is a complex business which cannot be dealt with by ninety minutes of television or by an arbitrary questionnaire given to an unrepresentative sample. The presenters knew this; they said as much.

Why, then, make the programme at all?