Battalion of Barons needed

Korvettenkapitan Georg Johannes, Ritter von Trapp, also known as Baron von Trapp, was the sort of Austro-Hungarian navy officer, sir, of whom there should be more.

Dunedin would be a better place if a battalion of identical Baron von Trapps were imported.

Imagine them drinking at coffee shops, serving at supermarket checkouts and paying for their parking tickets at the council in their military jackets, high white collars, medals and sharply creased pants.

What a much better little city we would have.

Alas, Baron von Trapp, fictionalised in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music, and described by his children as a decent, gentle family man, left this world before cloning was developed.

He had a very smart moustache, a smooth round face and the sort military bearing, so very lacking in the young nowadays, that is worth a facsimile.

But a small view into his life can be viewed next Sunday on Prime, when Climbed Every Mountain screens at 8.30pm.

The gent who presents Climbed Every Mountain, despite being from the Americas, would also benefit Dunedin.

The documentary is hosted by Nicholas Hammond, the actor who played Friedrich, the eldest von Trapp boy, in the 1965 film musical starring that redoubtable woman deeply attractive to men of a certain class, history and age - Julie Andrews.

There is something very likeable about the well-spoken Hammond.

He was 13 years old in 1964 when he flew off to Salzburg in Austria to take part in a film now seen by one billion people round the world Almost 50 years later he has come back to Salzburg to get answers to some questions - including why the musical has never gone down well there.

We discover some interesting facts.

According to the real von Trapp children, for instance, who now live in Vermont, Maria von Trapp was not quite the charming woman Julie Andrews portrayed.

The woman who wrote the book the musical and film are based on is described as a woman of indomitable will, but ''complex''.

Her daughter Rosemarie laughs as she says ''she sent me to psychiatrists''.

The children did not sing about lonely goatherds or do-ray-mi - instead they sang ''austere sacred music and alpine melodies''.

But the Baron comes through mainly unscathed.

He kept in the background once the family moved to the United States, where he was not comfortable with the tawdry glamour of the stage.

It is clear from Climbed Every Mountain he would never have played in a young person's rock band or smoked marijuana.

And the show is worth watching just for that.

- Charles Loughrey

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