REEL LIFE / FILM & VIDEO FILE : ‘Christy’ Producer to Talk About Family Fare : Ken Wales, the son of a minister, will speak at a church in Camarillo about the show he spent 19 years bringing to the small screen.

Ken Wales, executive producer of the CBS series “Christy,” visits Ventura County on Friday to deliver his message of family-oriented entertainment. He’ll be preaching to the choir, though. Wales’ dinner appearance is at the Trinity Presbyterian Church in Camarillo, where the interest in wholesome entertainment is a built-in feature.

Those who’ve seen “Christy,” the dramatic series about the life of a missionary teacher in the impoverished uplands of the Smoky Mountains, compare it to “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” or “Little House on the Prairie.”

The one-hour program aired midseason last year and will be picked up again as a replacement show in March or April, a CBS publicist said.

In the show, stars Kellie Martin (“Life Goes On”) and Tyne Daly routinely deal with matters of faith. Organizers of the Friday event said Wales will bring clips from the series that he’ll use to demonstrate family-oriented programming. He’ll also talk about the difficulties he encountered during the 19 years he tried to turn the inspirational book by Catherine Marshall into a show.

Wales, producer of “Islands in the Stream,” a 1977 feature film starring George C. Scott, is a longtime associate of Blake Edwards. In fact, Edwards and wife Julie Andrews were married by Wales’ father, the late Wales E. Smith, a retired minister who lived in Camarillo’s Leisure Village.

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A video documentary about an Ojai woman’s fight against breast cancer, which aired last week on KCET-TV, the PBS station out of Los Angeles, will likely get an encore broadcast.

“A Friend Called Lyle” focuses on the late Lyle Mattews, who was a masseuse at The Oaks spa and founder of Ojai’s Mardi Gras festival, which has its fifth anniversary Saturday.

Filmmaker Bob Markee said Mattews moved to Ojai from her native New Orleans. She was diagnosed with cancer in 1989.

“She asked me to document the treatment for the seven months before she died,” Markee said. “It was a very aggressive cancer. She died a week after the 1990 Mardi Gras party.”

Markee said the 30-minute documentary generated lots of response. Watch this space for news of the rebroadcast.

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Anybody out there speak Urdu? A show of hands?

Well, no surprise. It’s a dying language even in northern India where it was once widely spoken. But Urdu plays a central role in the 1993 Ismail Merchant’s acclaimed comedy, “In Custody,” screening Sunday at the Ojai Playhouse.

Better known as the producing half of the Merchant-Ivory team, first-time director Merchant created what Times reviewer Kevin Thomas called “a wise and rueful” comedy with the kind of “civility and sophistication” that distinguishes Merchant-Ivory productions such as “Howard’s End” and “Remains of the Day.”

Om Puri stars as Deven, a professor of Hindi at a small-town college, who unexpectedly gets a chance to interview the greatest living Urdu poet, played by Indian superstar Shashi Kapoor. What he finds is a tragicomic lion in winter surrounded by self-serving sycophants and two bickering wives.

“With his gallery of beautifully observed characters, Merchant has evoked a genuine sense of the human comedy,” Thomas writes. “The smallest role is sharply, comically defined, and Om Puri’s heroically patient Deven, a much put-upon middle-aged man, offers a sharp contrast to Shashi Kapoor’s selfless, majestic portrayal of Nur, a man only too well aware of his own sad decline.” The picture won the National Film Award of India for best picture, no small feat in a country that produces more films than Hollywood.

The film screens at 4:30 p.m. Sunday at the Ojai Playhouse. For more information phone 646-8946.