... Ghazals go nationwide By SUZAN LEAVY CHANNEL 4 this week called for entries for the first ever nationwide televised Ghazal competition. The Ghazal, one of India's most established poetic traditions, flourish es in the UK with new songs and vers es being written each year. Channel 4 will offer the chance for the finalists to perform on television in four pro grammes in late December. The ...

... Consistently amusing BY ANGELA MORETON Birthday, The Wednesday Play, BBC- 1, February 12. TO WRITE a full-length comedy play which manages to be consistently funny on a human--as opposed to a clever-clever, or sick, level--is no mean achievement nowadays. But in Birthday, Michael Frayn looked at everyday existence lived by everyday sort of people and he made my sitting-room echo with the ...

... Fine variety from these two shows BY JAMES TOWLER THIS is Tom Jones and The Saturday Crowd, which concluded its run last week, have both come in for a fair measure of criticism during recent weeks. Yet for all this they have provided some of the best light entertainment variety for some montns. The Tom Jones offering suffers from the fact that it is aimed at a mid-Atlantic audience and in ...

... Craven Arms Country Matters, Granada, August 20 by Patrick Campbell LET me at once declare an interest. Of contemporary writers of short stories, A. E. Coppard and H. E. Bates claim pride of place in my literary affections. It is unlikely, therefore, that I shall have much fault to find with the content of Granada's Sunday series Country Matters. At the same time this interest carries with ...

... Tinkle was sadly dull BY ANN PURSER SHOULDN'l Pauline Devaney be Pauline Delancy and Edwin Apps be Edwin Hobbs?--but the Radio Times does not make such mistakes and their off-key names are totally in keeping with N. F. Simpson's series of four plays for BBC-2 Four Tall Tinkles. They played husband and wife. Middie and Bro Paradock. living in an almost normal suburban setting and reacting to ...

... New Scotland Yard The Palais Romeo, London Weekend, May 13 by Graham Clarke ONE of the facts that a critic needs to remember when viewing a new series is that the creators of the programme and the administrative moguls who present it are not necessarily wise in their choice of an opening episode. This would seem to have been the case with New Scotland Yard, viewed now by me for the third time. ...

... O Fat White Woman Play for Today: BBC-l, November 4 by Michael Le Moignan O, dark, dark, dark. They all go into the dark. William Trevor's play provided us with seventy minutes of almost unrelieved Jacobean gloom. A brutal headmaster accidentally kills his most promising pupil by punching him in the back of the neck, in a fit of rage brought on by a wrongly conjugated French verb. His ...

... Anyone Can Play The Persuaders: ATV, November 5 by Graham Clarke PROGRAMMES of this kind are liable to start a train of thought that is much wider and deeper than anything that the programme itself achieves or even aspires to. The Persuaders is typical potboiler stuff aimed at a taste in entertainment that is at least semi-juvenile in stan dard, but, and here is the nub, it continues to ...

... Blunt and bleak and honest about itself BY ANGELA MORETON The Wednesday Play, Hello, Good Evening and Welcome, BBC I. TELEVISION took a long hard look at itself in Hello, Good Evening and Welcome, by Hugh Whitemorc. This is the first time I have seen television being so blunt and bleak and honest about itself, and it made absorbing watching. The subject was the chat show, built round a ...

... Good drama in this Scottish romance by Ann Purser Redgauntlet, STV, January 7 WE are in a Scottish romantic phase: The Borderers, very effective and exciting, and now Sir Walter Scott's Redgauntlet adapted by Ian Stuart Black for children's television. Wild moors and crumbling castles, battles between handfuls of soldiers and small pocKets oi rebels, great opportunities for scenically ...

... Series-serial to hook viewers by Marjorie Bilbow Dear Monica, Kate, Yorkshire, January 7 FIRST impressions can be no more than that, but it could well be that Yorkshire have a winner on their hands. Mark me well, I do not say that Kate is one of those astringently* perspicacious reve lations of the contemporary scene that win the highest critical acclaim and are regard ed as landmarks in ...

... Hey Brian! Yorkshire, May 22, 7.00 bu Stan Parkinson ALWAYS play safe use the tried and experienced artist, and you won't go far wrong. This was a piece of well-intentioned advice given to me when I was a junior television producer. I never did agree with it and so I failed miserably on two or three occasions. That doesn t mean that Hey Brian! failed. It simply means that all my ...