TV REVIEW : GILBERT & SULLIVAN & GIMMICKS

‘It really doesn’t matter” is the catch phrase of the best-known number from Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Ruddigore.” It also seems to be the rationale for the gimmicky staging that this comic opera receives in “The Compleat Gilbert & Sullivan” series on PBS tonight (8 p.m., Channel 50; 9 p.m., Channels 28, 15 and 24).

Immediately after host Douglas Fairbanks Jr. speaks of the “whole new dimension” that TV offers Gilbert & Sullivan, we find the opening chorus embellished with bedroom, bathtub and chamber-pot gags--a new dimension indeed.

Directors Christopher Renshaw and Barrie Gavin throw everything into “Ruddigore”: antique bicycles and pogo sticks, croquet and cheerleaders, beach chair capers and seaside sideshows, plus technically crude camera/editing tricks galore.

Somewhere along the line, Renshaw and Gavin attempt to link Gilbert’s lampoon of 19th-Century melodrama with those Gothic horror films of the 1960s. Thus the production teems with dry-ice, cobweb and graveyard effects--and thus Vincent Price is top-billed as a more-than-usually husky and hoarse Despard, the baronet compelled to commit a crime every day.

Price deftly spoofs his frightmeister image, but even the most indulgent Elvira fans may blush at the stale, silly comic business he executes. Moreover, that former D’Oyly Carte paragon, Donald Adams (Roderic), nearly vanishes amid delirious, not-very-special effects during his definitive rendition of “The Ghosts’ High-Noon.”

Ann Howard chews the scenery flamboyantly as Mad Margaret and Keith Michell nimbly ricochets between styles as Robin. Sandra Dugdale as Rose and John Treleaven as Dauntless steady the proceedings with conventional, well-sung performances (though his “Parly-voo” ballad is cut). Alexander Faris conducts the London Symphony Orchestra brightly.