... 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 ...

... 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 ...

... 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 ...

... The Solarium Menace, BBC-1, May 24, 9.25 by John Phillips IF ever there was a classic example of television's voracious appetite for material to fill the ever-hungry maws of the drama series, then this contribution to BBC-l's new thriller series was it. Watching it one became so aware of the factorylike flow production methods which the medium must perforce apply to its artistic endeavours ...

... The Team ATV, May 21, 9.00 by Michael Froslick---- WHEN I used to go to the, cinema as a little boy, some of the men who were not engaged in making the great days of Hollywood great, made films about racing cars. They one and all involved the boss's daughter and a secret carburettor they were one and all very bad. Since then Grand Prix and Le Mans have taken the cinema no more than half a step ...

... Public Eye: Well there was this Girl, You See Thames, July 14 by James Towler SINCE the departure of Badger (The Misfit) to far off shores, series drama has been in the doldrums. The trivia of Hine and Brett, not to mention the return of Kate, has made the reappearance of small time investigator Frank Marker all the more welcome. Here is someone you can actually believe in and that is ...

... Paul Temple: The Quick & the Dead BBC-l, July 14 by Patrick Campbell WATCHING Paul Temple again is like turning the clock back twenty years. Within the context of the progress made by television drama in general and by series in particular in the last decade, Temple is a period piece.. Indeed, were it not for the fashion-consciousness of Ros Drinkwater who plays Steve Temple, one might ...

... Drama programmes- by Elizabeth Allen IF ANYONE was in any doubt that The Death of a Young Young Man was set somewhere in Liverpool-land. the graffiti on the walls of the back-to-back houses, through seamy slums to prospective slums in the high-rise flats, put the matter right; where the tough, earthy language flows freely from the adenoids, and the most derogatory four-letter word is ...