The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 33

Green Guide 5 Thursday 28 August 1 986 to a week off double acts rmmv Mil 77.1 Ht4 I bib xbhf MS We have handpicked our 5 worst bargains and listed them below, if they excite you our 200 or so better ones will blow your mind. Marantz PM45 Amp. Current model $499 Thorens TD160 $199 Toshiba VCR new heads $299 Teac X10R Reel to Reel $699 Acoustic Research AR7X Speakers with stands. $299 Jedhim Qol Dodgy diaphragms, amps that argue, cassette decks that clunk, temperamental tone arms. These are a few of our favourite things.

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Telephone 553 3696. ROMANCE is in the air again. Yes, folks, there's charm, there's wit, and there's words, plenty of words, and I'm not just talking about the budget, ladies and gentlemen, and not just about the funniest thing on TV between the budget speech and the address in reply (Yes Prime Minister doesn't rate because it's too true) but about the fabulous, the fantastic the feudine Gough Whitlam and James Klllen show. A serious subject is flag waving, and indeed what flag to wave, but that pair of elder statesmen (didn't know we had any did you?) were just sensational. So funny.

Max Gillies at last has some fair competition. Let him see if he can get an audience the way those old stagers did. Formal rhetoric! Yarns! Non sequiturs! Stories! Such tall tales. And true. Made you laugh, made you cry, whereas when they were respectively in power all they did was make 668MaroondahHwy Hitcham.

Phone: 873 5655J DSV0802 Once again the backbenchers of both teams were disappointing. It was their big day, potentially, but all we heard from them were groans and jeers, moans and ear-hears. In the immortal words of Peggv Lee. "Is that all there is?" Didn't they know they were on TV? I suppose we have to be thankful that the all too polite cameras only caught a couple of members yawning, and once during Mr Howard's go, the Prime Minister and Mr Keating falling off the front bench in amusement at some promise of a policy in the near future. WORDS, words, words.

What have they got to do with romance and charm and wit? Nothing except words are the oil that greases the joints of the creaky plots of Moonlighting, the boffo smash of Nine's Tuesday evenings. Forget politics, the gloomy prognosis for consumer confidence; sit back, relax, forget the Dlot too. Moonlighting is the show with croaky-voiced David and long-lashed Maddie at the silly detective agency. Blue Moon. Get it? I don't.

The moon, that is. Moonlighting is about the stylish New Celibacy (the old celibacy was for monks, right, just a habit) and how they never do anything together except keep up our interest with their line of patter and haplessly, helplessly solving crimes. And making puns, and singing songs, and revealing they are both over 30, but nevertheless full of style. You can tell when they are speaking witty dialogue because they underline, each funny word by pausing, after, it, giving, the, director, time, to, get, reaction, shot. Style is what it is.

West Coast Style. The stories are sillier than those on that other epitome of style (South-East Style) Miami Vice. Maddie spends a lot of time mooning around 0, 3MIH- with SICOR zoom lens 35-200mm ALL FOR A LOW mm (Snout case also avaiiaDie II Ill LIMITED STOCKS OFFERS VAUD TO 5.9.86 UNLESS SOLD OUT. PENTAX SPORT Aotofocus compoct. built-in flash, outowind, autoexposure ond many other outstanding features.

TOP VALUE AT ONLY Gough Whitlam and Sir James Killen: at last, competition for Max Gillies. you cry. Good, they were that good they made the angels fall off their heavenly clouds. Gough and James were to comedy what they once were to politics. Giants.

There you have the solution to the Saturday night thinking person's variety show. Put Gough and James on every week. Let them ring people up. Let them have a few words to say on the latest at the Australian Opera, and let them grill the Minister for Communications about SBS, satellites, and the like. Those great guys would be great on a semipermanent spot.

Delo and Daly, Gra-Gra and Bert, Happy Hammond and Princess Panda, move over. Now it's Gough and James! Should they need a barrel-person might we suggest someone who spans all manner of political spectra and the sexes, Dame Edna. What a show that would be. SPEAKING of double acts, if not double-talk, I suppose we must talk about the televisual aspects of the budget speeches. Budgets are deadly serious I know, but they are also part of TV's rich tapestry, just like another show.

Would the man from Mars be able to pick the real politician in a debate between Paul Eddington and Paul Keating? I thought both Mr Keating and John Howard were somewhat underpropped. Were they wearing a button-hole? A bow tie? Did they wave any spectacles around? Carrying any large reference books? Wielding an axe? Not at all. They were decidedly anti-theatrical unlike the performances of Gough and Dennis on their show. They didn't act like politicians, they politicked like actors. At least Mr Howard used yellow non-crackly paper and had most semioticians momentarily fazed by wearing a red striped tie and a red hanky in the breast pocket This was reverse symbology.

He spoke in a loud voice. Mr Keating eschewed anything but the big banker look, and spoke softly and barely needed a note at all. Both have learned to look at the camera. As well as refer to the chamber. From time to time.

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Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd: keep up a line of patter make puns and sing songs. in long skirts with small slit and showing a flash of leg. She (Cybill Shepherd in real life) is a big girl, and just what she had against David (Bruce Willis) is a real mystery. Two jokes spring to mind. One, he's not a politician, two, nothing against him.

Perhaps it's his jokes, because he is a livewire, screwball wiseacre and goodlooking in a lopsided kind of way. Great double acts all week. Gough and Dennis, Paul and John, sure, and then Maddie and David, it doesn't sound right, but there it is. Cybill and Bruce doesn't sound any better but there's a bit of quiet pizazz in their performances that is unusual for American television, and possibly only allowed because they are doomed never to sleep together. That electricity in the acting would be dynamite for the moralists if coupled with some of your actual touching.

AH WELL. Takes you back. David Lyle's Golden Years of Television screened an episode of Groucho Marx's primitive game show You Bet Your Life the other week. Apart from seeing the reason that the just-starting-out Phyllis Diller had a nose job, it was refreshing to see the way Groucho ad libbed his way through an interrogation of seemingly random couples. Groucho could get them to dance, tell jokes, reveal things about their 1950s selves they hadn't told their real "date" in two minutes flat.

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