Archer's double triumph

Press, 29 July 1987, Page 19

Archer's double triumph

Last Saturday was certainly a memorable 24 hours for Jeffrey Archer, former British M.P. and best-selling author. Not only did he win millions of dollars in damages and costs against London’s “Star” newspaper, with the “News of the World” still to come, but a political drama series, “First Among Equals,” based on his book of the same name, began screening on Television One. It would be nice to think that TVNZ placed a call to Mr Archer’s suite at the Dorchester, or wherever he was celebrating his forensic triumph, and that the champagne flowed twice as fast when the British nation’s leading author and plaintiff realised that he was in a prime-time slot on New Zealand television.

his advantages, except that he is married to a very nice doctor. There could be trouble there, if Simon’s ambitions start to cut across the grain of the doctor’s social conscience.

Not having read the book, your reviewer is looking forward to watching the skeins of this plot ravel or unravel as the case may be. (They might, of course, Maurice Ravel, but so far there is no hint of a dead French composer turning up anywhere.) The acting is accomplished, and it doesn’t matter if the characters are rather two-dimen-sional. So are most politicians.

There were new series popping up like mush-

If it occurred, the phone call might even find a place in the novel and subsequent script which Mr Archer will surely base upon the Monica Coghlan episode. What a story! Sex, politics, hush money paid to prostitutes: Mr Archer only has to adapt the title of one of his earlier works and call the new one “Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, Monica.”

“First Among Equals” looks distinctly promising, even if it is shaping up to be rather black-and-white colour television. We are to follow the careers of four young M.P.S. One, Charles Seymour, is the one we are all going to love to hate. He has every thing: lots of money, smart wife, air of insufferable superiority to all within his orbit. His opposite number on the Labour benches is Andrew Fraser, also from a privileged background, but a much nicer chap, except that he is a rotter with women, making a good start by humiliating a putative fiancee.

The other Labour bloke is Raymond Gould, barrister, homely but loving wife, bit of a bumbler, but a thinker and a man who cares deeply for ordinary people. Then there is the

charming but seemingly rather feckless Simon Kerslake, on the same side of the House as Seymour but without most of

rooms all over the verdant pastures of Saturday and Sunday night’s television. Immediately preceding “First Among Equals” and “Rude Health,” yet another show about doctors. This one had its fair share of feeble medical jokes, and one could not accuse its authors of having gone in for much in the way of original plotting, Saturday’s narrative turning on the old posted-which-must-be-re-trieved device. But the programme is worth watching for John Wells’s performance as Dr Sweet.

Wells, author of “Mrs Wilson’s Diary” and the “Dear Bill” letters in “Privte Eye,” hardy survi-

vor of the satire boom of the early sixties, is extremely amusing as Sweet, playing him as the sort of man who would not only vote for the Charles Seymour of “First Among Equals” but would like to be like him. Sweet is a middle-class medical Alf Garnett, voicing sentiments the audience would publicly deplore but secretly enjoys hearing expressed. Nothing wrong with that, provided you are honest about what you are enjoying.

According to my reckoning there are nine series about doctors currently screening on TVNZ, counting “The District Nurse” but not counting “Dr Who.” Doctors are