On late —and rightly, too

Press, 20 April 1979, Page 13

On late —and rightly, too

By

JOHN COLLINS

The showing of the first glob of “The Norman Gunston Show” (TVI, tyednesday) must have sent the Perry Como brigade shuffling towards the Croxley. I mean, he’s so vulgar. His clothes are ill-fitting, he has little bits of dunny paper stuck all over his face to stop the bleeding from shaving nicks, and he went through the entire programme without once singing “Put it There, Pal” or “Tlte Two of Us” with an invited guest. Admittedly, I’ve watched enough of programmes such as “Two on One” and “The Club Show” to expect these performing chaps to sing off-key, stumble around the stage like an extra from “Close to Home” on

the McWilliams Medium Sweet, and have the interviewing finesse of an intellectually - handicapped Gestapo trainee. But this Gunston person just went a bit too far, and one feels that in future one should dismiss the staff early, bindfold the wife and any other remaining relatives, and retire to bed early on Wednesday evenings with a moistened rusk and a copy of “Mary Lou: The Diary of a High Country Lamb.” Either that or stay up and spend the best part iff an hour laughing out loud at a man whose idiotic, self-deprecating, rude style is a splendid break from the yawnmongering tradition of genteel joke-tellers or self-important “person* alities” who have tradi* tionally passed for television comedians.

Gunston’s attempts to interview Hollywood stars and to get himself invited to the South Hollywood Ku Klux Klan meeting

were offensive and in the worst possible taste, and quite the funniest thing I have seen on television. I never have understood the New Zealand tradition of polite humour and crass Prime Ministers, when most of the Western world works the other way round. I hope Gunston’s style catches on in local shows, and, indeed, I wish now to submit my entry for the Dead Sea Scrolls Award for Belated Reviewing by mentioning that it perhaps has, judging by the refreshingly rude approach of the latest series of “A Week Of It.” (“He’s not reviewing a show eight days old is he? Pass me the Croxley.”). “A Week Of It” was always a little too kind, a little too obvious for my

taste. But if things are to continue as they were in its first show in the new series last week, it stands a. firm chance of exchanging its present audience of young teenagers, and those pathetically grateful to it for presenting jokes they can actually understand without falling off their chair, for the burnt-out cynical hulks at present uncatered for.

Jon Gadsby’s impersonation of the Minister of Transport, Mr McLachlan, was brilliant, offensive, and accurate. Gadsby is getting thinner and thinner and better and better.

At this rate, one expects him to reach the peak of his career as a tiny genius of comedy, a sort of bac-terium-sized Max Beerbohm whose lines have to be relayed through a wondrously complex publicaddress system and whose unrivalled facial play can be appreciated only by the use of an electron microscope.