Comic-book excesses

Press, 21 November 1981, Page 13

Comic-book excesses

Apeing the Wild West for entertainment is all right if it is done in moderation; as far as the TV song-and-dance people are concerned this apeing is a fetish and a fixation.

Thursday on Two had an example of it in the “12 Bar Rhythm ’n’ Shoes” show. It also comes up fairly regularly in “Radio Times." The worst of Wild West copying by New Zealand players is not in the grotesque attempts at Yankee voices, or in the bar women embarrassingly overacting the fodder for you-know-what upstairs, as bad as these aspects are; it is in fact that the performance of the men pretending to be chaps in chaps in the western United States about 100 years ago is much too close to the actual performance of jokers at home right now. This, at any rate, was the case with the show referred to on Thursday. The hopeless, slithering drunks in the bar were no more than jokers, playing themselves on an average Saturday night anywhere from the East Cape to the West Coast, when half the police force is out trying to stop these humorists from filling the outpatients’ department.

The climactic brawl in the Wild West bar was simply too realistic to be classed as entertainment at this level. The people who devised it must have been out of their mind. Either that, or they were suffering from excessive reading of Monday court reports.

Punching women in the face and hitting them across the stomach and over the shoulders with wood happens to be too much a part of the New Zealand way of life,

when the booze has done its job, to be simulated on the screen as though it was good show fun and diversion. It was clumsy and ill judged. Not to put too fine a point on it, this final sequence in “12 Bar Rhythm ’n’ Shoes”was dirty, scrambling, brutish and unpleasant. It’s no surprise that they changed their clothes and the locale for the picking up of all the flowers in this final episode.

Perhaps it was of no importance at all that the repeat series was showing in the formative hour up to 6 p.m. A few hours later, on One, was a show whose mood could hardly have been more different. This was "The Flame Trees of Thika,” where nothing happens at all — not even a photographing of the wonderfully pretty tropical flame tree. Everyone knows by now that truth is stranger than fiction; what might not have been realised is that for some TV programmes “stranger” has the specialised meaning of “duller.”

Viewers are told that Elspeth Huxley wrote a "griping autobiographical novel.” Something unfortunate, then, must have happened to the novel during its journey to the screen — something like its losing of its grip. By definition an autobiographical novel is a difficult and contradictory medium, since it has to make a successful job of combining fact and fancy. In the case of the "Flame Trees” the amalgam wavered under the stress of a surfeit of autobiography and a dearth of novel.

The result is the investing of quite trivial personal inci-

dents with a sinister portent which lay uneasily on the breast of the Kenya of the day, except that the irrelevant pictures of scenery and animals were marvellous to see. In truth, Miss Huxley’s . book — or the TV version of it — is too honest to be the stuff of which drama is made. If only she could have broken out, now and again,

[Review ]

Douglas McKenzie

into the real conflict of a novel! But then it wouldn’t have been an autobiography.