Arts – Today's Television.
By CHRISTOPHER DUNKLEY.
07 July 1992
Financial Times
Can it really be 25 years since we watched Joe Brown, Chris Bonington, Dougal Haston and the rest climb that extraordinary column of crumbling stone, The Old Man Of Hoy ? It can. Chris Brasher did the commentary as the climbers dragged themselves up the 450-foot sea stack by their finger nails. It was an historic outside broadcast, and today Brown, Bonington and Hamish MacInnes, with some of the film crew involved, look back on their achievement (6.50 BBC2). There follows the first in a three part series called Disabled Lives (7.40 BBC2), which sets out to tell what happens when somebody is suddenly disabled and has to change his life overnight. In the case of policemen Philip Olds, who was shot and paralysed, the final outcome was suicide.
Firm Friends, the ITV drama series about two women who team up to go into catering (and about Special Branch, and race relations – a subject on which it manages to be genuinely funny – and crooked property dealing) is proving highly entertaining (9.00 ITV). So is the BBC1 drama series Boys From The Bush. Nadine Garner as the awful Arlene is emerging as a splendid comedienne ( 9.30).