For more than 20 years, slow-burning Ronnie Allen has been television's Mr Safely Sexy at supper-time.  He has carved a career from solid soap but now he's facing a real-life drama.

 

After 14 years in Crossroads Ronnie is to be axed from his role as motel boss David Hunter.  Central TV have announced a new look for their thrice-weekly saga - and it won't include Hunter.

 

Ronnie, born in Reading, went to RADA, then briefly to Hollywood.  But he returned to become Britain's most enduring soap star.  He began as the dream-boat editor Ian Harmon in Compact in the early sixties.  Then he switched to the series United, palying soccer club manager Mark Wilson.

 

In 1971 he found his niche, behind David Hunter's important desk, as motel boss of Crossroads, and his role - Coping with Crisis.  These have included; a terrorist son; a fragile marriage to a worldly novelist; the power-mad ploys of business partners and his demands of Sarah, the lover from his past who is now having his child.

 

Now his crisis is for real.

 

Ronnie has a few months before he and screen wife Barbara (Sue Lloyd) walk out of the Midlands motel for good - or bad.  Will glossy American soap operas win him?  Will he turn up as a long-lost English relative of Joan Collins in Dynasty or Sue Ellen in Dallas?

 

Whatever is going through his mind Central are taking a huge gamble in letting him escape the motel.  Whatever you think of David Hunter's creator - the granite features, lacquered looks, stiff suits and even stiffer acting - he has been a part of British TV for nearly 15 years.

 

But if dreary David must go, why not awful Adam Chance, sickening Sid Hooper, hiddeous J. Henry and pathetic Paul Ross too?  David Hunter has done what he was scripted to do.  Those writers are getting the bullet.  Ronnie should be spared.

 

All right, he's wooden.  But wooden it be better if he stayed?