In View
The plot is simple enough. A squeaky-clean wide-eye blonde singing star, realising the limitations of being a 35-year-old schoolgirl, decides she will become a sex object overnight.
Olivia Newton-John, that slice of niceness whose on and off-screen image has always been as well-brushed as her teeth, has thrust herself into a provocative, if not altogether convincing, new role as a “raunchy” and “sexy, sultry entertainer”.
Strange times, are they not? One moment we are being alerted to sexism and our contribution to reactionary images of women; the next we see Julie Andrews baring her soul and trying to turn Mary Poppins into a scarlet woman.
Well, I suppose if it’s fair enough for the jolly proper, much-scrubbed, and chipper Ms Andrews, then it’s fair enough for Doris Day, Marie Osmond, and even the nourishing Ms Newton-John. After all, being a goody-goody must sometimes be hell.
Olivia casts her own mental gymslip aside tonight in a $1 million package that is really little more than a superbly produced television commercial for her latest record album. It is a sometimes imaginative, sometimes pretentious, entertaining, sexist one-hour ad masquerading as a TV programme.
The show, ‘Olivia New-ton-John: Physical’ (Channel 7 at 7.30), was, in fact, made by Capitol Records in the United States and sold to the American network ABC. The publicity machine won a bonus when two of the songs were considered too sexy and had to be re-shot.
We get the unexpurgated version here, though I doubt that the writhing writhing singer will create too many shock-waves. We have, after all, already been treated to a glimpse of “the new image” in videotape clips on shows like “Countdown”.
There are no links; no breaks for guests or comedy patter. Olivia sings, dances, and acts out the songs from her ‘Physical’ album in surrealistic scenes apparently dreamed up by director Brian Grant and Marcello Anciano.
The photography is dazzling, arty, and teasing, presumably aiming for the drooling Pavlovian responses any self-respecting advertising agency expects as it embraces Olivia and a host of drippy Latins that include young boyfriend Matt Lattanzi.
Thus we bounce between blubber and bodies beautiful for the number ‘Physical’. wander through the tumbleweed in ‘Recovery’, and see the singer hitching a ride on a couple of dolphins during ‘The Promise’. The song ‘Stranger’s Touch’ becomes Sam Spade nostalgia and there is a night-mare interpretation of ‘Silvery Rain’.
Olivia may be able to turn the tennis headband into an essential low-fashion accessory, but she is struggling to take the sex symbol nonsense seriously. And in tonight’s “videodisc” pack-age, that is her saving grace: the “sexuality” is a parody, delivered through laughing eyes.
by Brian Courtis
More from the Physical TV special.