SPTV’s club sandwich merely whets the appetite

Press, 23 April 1979, Page 15

SPTV’s club sandwich merely whets the appetite

By

A. K. GRANT

South Pacific Television: choose to put all their — what might be termed “community service" programmes! — on between noon and 2.30 i p.m. on a Sunday. This is a bad idea. The programmes themselves are in many! ways excellent, as I shall re- I late. But the relentless! churning-out of seven or 15minute bursts of information on farming, Polynesia, the!

church, meat, Chinese cook-i t ing and the law leaves one • with the ineradicable im-l pression that South Pacific! bung all these programmes together because they onlyi produce them as a #facesaver, and want to get them! out of the road as quickly! as possible. This programming ap-| /proach does a disservice to! the programmes themselves, j ; For example, Vic Williams I of “A Taste of the Orient,”! •is a most engaging tele- j . vision chef, and it is most! . unfair to him that he should! 'be sandwiched between; “Butcher’s Hook” and “You and the Law.” Not thatj there is anything wrong, ei-l ther, with “Butcher’s Hook”! or “You and the Law.” Except in so far as they are I

ifar too short. The week before last, “You and the Law” attempted in seven i minutes to deal with the : Matrimonial Property Act [1976. This is a bit like trying to run a four-minute mile in one minute thirty seconds.. And “You and the Law”-! falls down also because of! the static nature of its present.ition. Simply having a| lawyer, Liz Halford, talking’* ! I

_ ( I to Jeremy Payne is about] I [the most boring way of t idoing such a programme! o | imaginable. It might work if Liz Hal-! a [ford was a sort of cross be-! a [tween Dorothy Parker and’t the Master of the Rolls,! r [Lord Denning, and if Jeremy f Payne was a cross between 11 [David Frost and F. Leeic [Bailey. But in default of[n I these two otherwise ex- j t • cellent people being any oflf [these things, the programme it [could be much more inter-js jestingly assembled, and onef [presumes it is not because! [the programme is, as 1 have I a said, a face-saver, with thejd [consequence that producerig lAlan Thurston was given a[c [budget of "$8.30 to get out c I the series. r ' Alan Thurston is also the io

producer of “Butcher’s] Hook” which equally suffers from ridiculous truncation.! Butchers, if I may essay a 1 generalisation, tend to be ar-; ticulate people, and Ken! Hieatt is no exception. Bull in seven minutes he can do precious little with meat other than show us bits of it. A good butchery programme could easily be sustained for 20 minutes, and] ought to be. i “Pacific Viewpoint” is] also a good idea, although II am unable to comment on it| because large parts of it, j properly enough, are in; Niuean, Samoan and Tongan.! I have the paranoid suspi-l cion that the Niueans, Sa-1 moans and Tongans are] being told all sorts of inflammatory things about their white racist oppres-) sors, but I have no way of! finding out for sure. All in all South Pacific] are to be congratulated for! doing each of these programmes, but can fairly be! criticised for not doing any! of them well enough, and for! making a club sandwich out! of them.