Tiptoeing around the angel

By MICHELE HEWITSON

How much that is new can we expect from a documentary called Wrestling with the Angel, (TV1, tomorrow 9pm) based on the Michael King biography of the same name?

That rather depends on your expectations of "new", and of the device of documentary.

King's lovingly, meticulously constructed biography of that strange angel in our midst, the writer Janet Frame, was written with Frame's blessing, but her co-operation came, wrote King in his author's note, with "two preferences".

She did not want him to write a critical biography in the sense of an analysis of her writing. And, how tantalising this has always been, that he did not "quote verbatim from my interviews with her".

King, sadly, like his biographical subject, now deceased, was a gentleman biographer. This is worth bearing in mind while watching this documentary, based as it is on that biography, and on which King was employed as a researcher.

His death came before the interviews with him for this documentary were finished. And with him went a promised memoir and a supplementary biography of Janet Frame.

So, perhaps the interviewers for this documentary hadn't got around to asking what has become of, and what will become of, King's taped conversations with Frame.

Perhaps it is too sensitive a subject. Or that both King and Frame are still too sensitive for us to be able to regard, yet, as subjects.

Not that anyone is suggesting there is any silly scuttlebutt to be collected on either - she was a writer; he was a writer.

But King was fond of dropping the odd hint that there was more to be discovered. This was a little teasing game he liked to play; a clue here, a clue there, while he chuckled away knowing that you couldn't possibly solve the [unspoken] riddle unless you knew what he knew. And, because he was a very good journalist, he wasn't giving any clues that would lead you anywhere.

There are some interesting allusions to the unspoken in Wrestling with the Angel (the documentary.) In an interview with Frame's sister, June Gordon, she says of the character Chicks, based on her, in Frame's first novel Owls Do Cry, that "I can only put it down to the fact that she was jealous of my marriage and my family. But I forgave her, I think".

That "I think" wasn't followed up. Should it have been? I think so. It could, of course, have been a joke. The Frame sisters were close, and they shared a lively sense of humour. But preceded by an assumption of jealousy, this was worth exploring.

Mostly Wrestling with the Angel is straight bio interspersed with readings by Geraldine Brophy - but why do we have to see her reading? Because she's got red fuzzy hair?

We are reminded that Frame liked doing normal things: eating icecream, playing ping pong. Because we're still not sure that she did normal things?

Tiptoeing around the Angel? There is certainly an episode of tiptoeing around Frank Sargeson that would cause even the most compassionate of biographers to wince.

Sargeson, we are told, had "turned his back on a career as a solicitor" ... He had been found guilty on a charge of indecent assault on a male. That pretty much did for his career as a solicitor.

There are other little irritations. Meaningless reconstructions: a phone swinging from its cord to signify a distressed call made. Some truly alarming playing about with Brophy's hair and some special effects to signify ... something.

There are, though, some touching, funny interviews with Frame's friends.

Anything new? We're not expecting revelations, but we might be entitled to expect some more imaginative re-telling of Frame's well-known story.

Perhaps that is still to come.