Television
Child's-Play
By CLIFFORD HANLEY
`Top CAT' has returned, an event which clearly has more importance for television's largest audience than any of the, high-toned experiments in drama or education on either channel. Non-human heroes continue to have the edge over
mere people among the young- est viewers, and I regularly confirm this old discovery by sitting with my back to the screen and watching my sample audience during the children's programmes.
Top Cat' interests me strangely too. •(The BBC retitles the show Boss Cat, for reasons which I have not discovered.) It seems we aren't going to have any more Bilko, but the immortal sergeant lives on in this two-dimensional moggle, which doesn't only speak with Bilko's voice but has the Bilko character precisely duplicated, including the cunning, the idiot lechery, the gambling fever and the loyal suckers gathered round him. Is it possible that this represents a Trend? Even the best human series wears out in time' Actors die (Robert Newton), or decide to.. go straight (Dudley Foster), or throw their uni- ' forms at somebody and stamp out cursing (James Garner). But you never have any trouble, personal-relations-wise, with line drawings. MY theory isn't entirely lunatic. Superman'slive hero actually committed suicide because he wanted to be a real actor and couldn't escape from his type-casting. Now we have a cartoon Superman based on the live series whichwas_ based on the original strip drawings. It's still preposterous junk, but as junk goes, I would saY ; that the cartoon version is more acceptable. The case of the Flintstones is not really :e different. Barney and his mates are, if I maY the phrase very loosely, original creations. Bug take away the prehistoric gimmick and old you've got left is a perfectly ordinary fashioned domestic situation comedy, a tucY, Joan-Jeannie amalgam. This form of entertain' ment, with human beings, died of inanition over
" five years ago, but the cartoon reincarnallu0
l, isn't only durable, it has captured an intellectual audience which would never have wasted 3 moment on live 1.ucy_ cot- As an old cheap gag-writer I find the „se, stones wearisome, and I feel I ought to tio've approve of them in principle, as I disaPPr. b.. of `Top Cat.' All the same, I find myself 101 if ing both programmes with a puzzled infere'
they catch my eye. I too am a sucker.
Supercar, a British product obviously aimed ;n0 at earning dollars, is a science-fantasy job 1.1b` rather macabre marionettes with rtlae3be. as much as it would bother Equity. partly American accents. It glazes me over, A n a r tlY cause of those gruesome puppet faces an (do
r
because of its dreary commercial surrende the Americans use fake Briddish accents in the
it
hope of selling series to us?). But once rnoresee has the child audience perfectly rapt, to a deg
that no live SF series has managed. ore
I honestly begin to suspect that as More writers and actors are sucked dry, and as ideas peter out at birth, we may end uP Wes, r Plasticine Z Cars, a glove-puppet Ena Sharp and Maigret played by a hand-inked Plejc smoking koala bear. The prospect disturbs 111
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