Television
Celts
By CLIFFORD HANLEY
NOTHING further has been heard of the BBC's curious proposal to merge Tonight and Panorama, and I trust that the project has been quietly cre- mated.
Tonight seems to be as healthy as it ever was, and still capable of producing shocks, surprises and good viewing. Its grip on the public is proved by the rash of imitations. A-R had produced Here and Now at 6,45 in a patent effort to catch magazine-addicts before Tonight can get at them. Scottish Television also put out a magazine called Here and Now, which, incidentally, was estab- lished long before the A-R show of the same name and which has developed from scrappy beginnings into a very tidy and successful pro- gramme.
In fact, the BBC in Scotland this week launched a regional magazine called In and About Scot- land (how's that for a real punchy title?) ob- viously intended to compete with the Scottish ITV show which was created as an answer to the original BBC show.
I can't think of a single reason why Tonight and all its imitators shouldn't go on as long as television. The formula is capable of limitless development. It also produced a couple of items last week with the fresh, sum- rising excitement that suddenly -makes the old trashbox worth while.
One was Whicker's report from the lousiest- looking township on earth, away up _north in Alaska. The other was Fyfe Robertson's piece on the cost of hOuse-building.
This was the kind of story that brings out the best in Robertson, and his best is superb. Nobody can match his polite tenacity when it comes to making professional apologists wriggle, and in this case he was asking precisely the question that every viewer wanted answered: How can a man build a house for £600 when the building trade is charging £4,500 for something no better?
Z Cars returns this week, of course, and a warm welcome to it. But I have to confess that I was developing an addiction to its stand-in programme, Silent Evidence. Basil Sydney had all the makings of a big crime-fiction character in the rumbling super-pathologist Dr. Westlake, and I don't see why we shouldn't have both him and the brave Newtown boys.
Mind you, there may be something alarming in sudden proliferation of Scots characters in series television. Z Cars has Jock Weir, Silent Evidence had two whole Scottish characters and, of course, we've got Bill Simpson in Dr. Finlay's Casebook; not to mention Fyfe Robertson.
Personally, I would rather take my skull in- juries to Dr. Finlay than to Ben Casey. The
Casey series is still rampant in my viewing area, and I now rate it tops for promoting coarse guffaws. The Finlay programme, with all its Annie S. Swan sentiment, is much more fun.
All the same, are we in the presence of a sinister Celtic conspiracy to take over British entertainment? Good-oh.
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