Pulled up by his own bootstraps

Press, 24 June 1981, Page 18

Pulled up by his own bootstraps

r Review!

Douglas McKenzie

Through the medium of a West of England radio station comes a morality plav. "Shoestring" (One, Mondays) is as ambiguous in its development as it is in its title; Mr Eddie Shoestring seems to have at his instant

command all the resources he needs for spending his days doing good works instead of working at what ever his job is at the radio station.

This includes deriding the station's legal adviser for his

opinion about what Mr Shoestring is engaging the station's time on at a given moment, and patronising the boss. How do people get dream jobs like that? In the event, Mr Shoestring modestly has strong doubts that he might have messed up the solution this time; but in the empathy of the screen this makes him not a meddler, but human.

All detectives, especially private ones, have to have a dress characteristic; Mr Shoestring's is not a raincoat or a lollipop but a permanently slipped-down tie to go with his suit, even first thing in the morning.

Otherwise he looks like nearly everyone else, except for his extra keenness of glance, and his readiness to talk on phones, drive cars.

and have a drink; and. of

course, his amazingly free attitude to his boss.

Perhaps this is because he sometimes comes up with a good solution for the problem of the week. For a long time the kids have been looking at an afternoon show with an almost impossible title, but which has been judged good enough to get on repeat in’ their prime time — and rightly so. Struggling under the incubus of the words

“The Mad Dog Gang Meets Rotten Fred and Ratsguts,” this, programme, has just completed its re-run on One. It is a splendidly realised piece of fun in a New Zealand upcountry setting with preposterous characters on the adult side and some natural youngsters, especially Julie Wilson who is a burgeoning comic actress of some distinction.

Rotten Fred himself (Walt Brown) in a broken-down shack which couldn't actually exist because it would break the county's undisclosed planning scheme in about 50 respects, and its disclosed scheme even more, was gentle, disreputable. particularly lovable as far as the kids were concerned, and obviously smelling to high heaven along with his dog, but the kids wouldn't notice that in such a marvellous, friend.

At last Fred, properly named "rotten” in the animal and vegetable sense, is gone, no doubt in a fruitless search for another shack outside the by-laws, and the gang are left to try to find a new life. John Bach, an admired man of many parts, even if

he does appear in advertisements, played the looney vigilante to perfection, his long face being just the right shape for uneasy expressions and cries for risky action which he has no intention of carrying out himself.

It's not surprising that the' script is also good when 1 there are writers like lan; Mune and Arthur Baysting on the job. < While it is always hard to know just what children will accept as a good show, “The, Mad Dog Gang" has a degree of lawlessness and a willingness to embrace trouble which must make it almost irresistible.

Like the Australian filmmakers of earlier days, their New Zealand counterparts find their children’s adventures out of doors at present, in the countryside or on water. Nothing is being lost while this general development is finding its own level.