Promising beginning deteriorates into boring, half-baked injustice

Press, 22 January 1988, Page 19

Promising beginning deteriorates into boring, half-baked injustice

Now and again/a television reviewer faces a dilemma from which there seems no escape. It is probably not unlike the feeling that must assail the New Zealand cricket selectors as they wake up each day. “First Lady of the Law” had everything going for it — an obvious spin-off from the successful “Hanlon," the same writer (Ken Catlin), the beginnings of feminism and the documentary format that TVNZ excels at. With some relish, your intrepid reviewer clutched his reviewing pen and settled with a contented sigh, gin and tonic within easy reach. This would be an easy one. There followed an hour of considerable boredom. The quality was there in the production and the style, but the content was wanting and the format tedious.

Ethel Rebecca Benjamin was apparently a fine woman, kicking against the male personages that dominated the law at the turn of the century even more than they do now.

The start of the programme was promising, a well-paced setting of the scene, and Ethel Benjamin looked to be formidable. Anger began to simmer at the bigotry, prejudice and discrimination rampant in society, and it was good to hear from women like Judge Sylvia Cartwright, who have fought through it. Then came the , first clue that the programme might not live up to its promise. The disembodied female voice commenting in the background said of New Zealand in 1900 or so: “A rough and ready social structure made it more flexible than most.” This was by way of explanation why it was second only to Canada in admitting a woman to the bar. “A rough and ready social structure” might also make a country more rigid, more insular, more ignorant, or indeed more anything else than anywhere else. From this point the programme deteriorated into talking heads and talking non-heads. There was no film and very few photo-

Ken Strongman

bn television

graphs of Ethel Benjamin, the best of them being shown what seemed to be every few seconds. The gin and tonic was running out fast and the reviewing pen was becalmed. Some records exist. Ethel Benjamin wrote a little, particularly in the form of protests to the Law Society. Apart from anything else, she and the female lawyers who have followed her wanted to go

to the Law Society dinner and the men did not want them. It is hard to see why in either case. Anyway, her writings did not exactly effervesce. The high spot quoted was “When young I would amuse myself with a dry old deed.” What could it have been? About three-quarters of the way through, the makers of "First Lady of the Law” came clean. The disembodied voice said, “Our documented knowledge ends there,” which was 1908. They had not had much of it up to 1908, and their lack of anything else did not deter them from filling the remaining« quarter. From Ms Benjamin, it was straight unto the suffragettes with all the usual bits of film and the now overly familiar attitudes. There was not really enough information about Ethel Benjamin to make a programme. At the end we still did not know what drove her, why she was as she was, or even whether or not her Jewishness was important. To make up for this

obvious deficiency, we were treated to a halfbaked discussion of semifeminism by successful female lawyers. This has been done better by others. As though in realisation that this was not good enough, the hour faded off into concern with the current rather conservative state of the law profession. “The social side of the law is still an old boy network.” Maybe, but in some ways the women are propping it up, by wanting to be part of it. One suggested that she wanted the same sort of lunches that the men had with one another. The only thought which remained at the end of “First Lady of the Law” was some amazement at how much society had changed in 80 years and more amazement at how much it had not. Although this thought was worth while enough, TVNZ did not do itself justice with this programme. It was not up to the dramatic standards of “Hanlon,” and lacked substance or sparkle.