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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol 35 no. 20. 1972

Pop~Eye

Pop~Eye

Every McLeod has a silvery lining, so they say, and for the NZBC and its patrons (us) the return of Monty Holcroft to the editorship of the Listener will be welcome. Rumour has it that Holcroft has come back like a worried parent to an ailing child and that the specific objective in his return is to save the jornal's independent editorial policy. Readers will remember the eminently sane and well balanced editorials Holcroft wrote during his eighteen years in the job, including some powerful anti-Vietnam stuff at a time when such opinions were virtually heretical.

The persistent rumours about McLeod's mismanagement of the Listener and his unpopularity as a superior upstart and gross intellectual snob are totally unfounded. Another snide claim to the effect that the vast improvement in Listener profitability has really been the work of its Business Manager is equally spurious. Get it?

It is good to see NZBC staff at last getting up on their tiny hind legs and barking over this business. For years they have accepted that inept administration and half willed policy making is (heir inescapable principles proved strong enough to overpower their sacking-paranoia and led them to speak their grievances in public. About time too. Kudos must also go to David Excel. Des Monaghan and the whole Gallery team for the fearless way in which they put Lionel Sceats through the hoops on their programme. Sceats's evasions and back-trackings revealed to everyone the tip of that horrible Public Service iceberg which is made up of hardened inefficiency and dangerous meddling in amateur power politics.

Television's preoccupation with imported shit continues to amaze. It is of course, a fact that the NZBC is desperately short of money. Gilbert Stringer's version of Fantasy-land, Avalon, is costing an obscene amount and that, added to colour conversion and the ever-increasing cost of staffing, the second channel, even if it still wants it. The obvious answer to these problems is to close down the regional channels completely and concentrate all production at Avalon. But this would raise such a holocaust of public wrath that the Corporation would never consider it seriously. Meanwhile, the continuing depression never that local production on a reasonable basis is further away than ever. But a quota system must come - and soon - if ever local output is to improve. Pressure from the Arts Council, the TVPDA and Actors' Equity is pouring on and we must all support these efforts vigorously.

Coronation Street star Peter Adamson (Len Fair-clough) is coming to Wellington in November or December to star in a production by Murray Recce of Pinter's The Dumb Waiter. Co-actor in the two-handler will probably be Grant Till.

Pukemanu II is scheduled lo start screening from Channel One on September 14.

Did you sec all those incredible Einstein shots in The Ten Days Which Shook the World? Historical nonsense, most of it, but far out just the same. Most "radicals" sat at home watching it, while 44 Kelburn Pde. was being occupied by The Squatters.