For television, 1968 was a traumatic year. Not only in the minor national sense of a petty shake-up of the commercial companies; but in the larger international sense of a medium that for the first time found itself being taken really seriously.

It was the year in which the concept of TV as a harmless toy finally died. It was the year in which complacency about what TV was doing to society was replaced by concern. It was the year in which people who had never thought about TV before had to start thinking about it.

It was the year in which almost every major social convulsion – the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, student riots, the French revolt, the Chicago Democratic Convention – was followed by an anxious look at TV to discover what contribution it had made to these events.

Mode of thought

It was the year in which every mode of thought – participation, trivialisation, alienation and drop-outs, the generation gap, rejection of authority, disillusionment with politics – could be traced back to the influence in some greater or lesser measure of the TV factor.

It was the year in which some responsible people began to ask themselves whether so powerful and all-pervasive a social force could safely be left in the hands of those who used it primarily to entertain or sell goods. Should society, through TV, be left to the mercies of the hucksters and the show-biz purveyors?

On the other hand, were there not equal, or even more, dangers in making TV part of the state apparatus – as in France and Russia – and having it run by politicians? Was there no middle path for TV? Was there only the dictatorship of bureaucracy or the dictatorship of frivolity?

It was the year, also, in which in Britain and America the one group who seemed blissfully unaware of the growing importance of the medium were the hierarchy actually running it.

Obsessed by ratings

They were more obsessed by ratings than social impact; they were more concerned with balance-sheets than sociological repercussions; they were more flattered by quantity of viewers than quality of programmes.

Nothing that was being done by the two major channels in Britain – BBC-1 and the ITV – showed any awareness that the role of TV in a modern democracy had changed, and that they should do something about it.

Thus, on the issue of violence, for example, there appears to be an ostrich-like refusal on the part of TV executives to believe that the unrelenting transmission of programmes – Westerns, gangster, spy and detective series – showing that virtue almost always resides in the man who can shoot faster and hit harder must enshrine in many young minds the belief that violence is an acceptable, even admirable, aspect of human behaviour.

President Johnson’s Commission on Violence, which is now conducting hearings in Washington, has been indicating considerable impatience with the broadcasters’ contention that there is no casual relation between TV violence and social violence.

Some of the Commission’s members have already complained that the American networks have not done enough research on this issue and have been hiding behind a fog of ignorance to justify their programming. The same criticism could be levelled against British broadcasters.

Even politicians – notoriously indifference to every aspect of TV except when it concerns them or their party – have in 1968 stirred themselves from their comatose complacency about the medium.

Mr. Richard Crossman’s [Leader of the House of Commons until October, Secretary of State for the new Department of Health and Social Security from November – Ed] complaint that politics had been trivialised by the small screen carried with it imputations that other serious aspects of live – religion, education, the law, trade unions, the armed forces – were also being subjected to the same diminishing process through their appearance and presentation in a basically-trivial medium.

Mr. Anthony Wedgewood Benn [Minister of Technology], also concerned about the degenerating aspects of TV, tried to awaken, without much success, a disinterested public to the dangers of a medium that was so dedicated to providing entertainment that its resources were denied to those serious groups in society who felt they should be able to use it to put across their particular points of view.

Doctors concerned about mental health, scientists frustrated with working conditions, farmers anxious about prices, teachers worrying about standards, trade unions concerned about their image are granted a minuscule amount of TV time because there are too many pop singers, yowling groups, actors in mediocre serials and bad comics who are considered to have first, and dominant, call on the medium.

Thus a medium which could provide an opportunity for participation in the affairs of the nation, and a chance for discontent and criticism to be voiced, is constantly being denied to most interests, and their spokesmen, in society.

The ultimate effect is a build-up of resentment and frustration which has already demonstrated how dangerous it can be through the student riots and demonstrations that have been the startling international phenomenon of 1968.

Could it be that there is more than a coincidence in the fact that these students are the first ones to have been weaned on TV from infancy – and that they are the ones most distrustful of authority and the ones most demanding in their claims for participation?

Just as 1968 has shown what the consequences of TV frivolity can be, so has it demonstrated the futility of trying to control the medium for bureaucratic state purposes alone.

De Gaulle, in France, and the Central Committee in Russia still assume that they can control and subdue the forces of discontent and protest by denying them access to the broadcasting media.

They are only just beginning to learn that it is not so easy. The very presence of TV stokes up an irresistible pressure to be heard. The explosion, when it comes, will be all the more intense because of the efforts to use broadcasting to bottle it up.

These then are only some of the considerations that must be recognised when any State from now on contemplates the future of TV.

The post The year TV showed it is not just a toy appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

Someone at the ITA is finally showing some common sense, and a little courage, I would like to think it is Lord Aylestone.

Mrs. Wilson’s Diary, the political satire about life at 10 Downing Street, has been declared clean and acceptable for viewing. It is scheduled for January 4.

The controversy that kept it off the air last month, when it was due to go on, was always pretty much a storm in a hip flask

Should the public be allowed to see an actor portraying George Brown staggering around the stage waving a bottle and singing, “Give me the rum back, I’m making a come-back”?

The ITA felt that such a scene was “contrary to good taste or offensive to public feeling.” The fact that a character named Brown had been doing exactly the same thing for many months at the Criterion in London’s West End did not, in the authority’s view, make a tolerable.

Nor did they feel that their decision to eliminate these lines should be reversed by the mere fact that almost every paper in the country, in reporting the incident, had already printed the offending lyric that was presumably against ‘good taste.’

On this major issue, Lord Aylestone or somebody dug in his toes, and London Weekend TV decided to cancel the transmission.

It is an interesting sidelight of this silly squabble that one of the major causes of the elimination of the Lord Chamberlain’s power to censor plays was the argument that TV, as demonstrated in the satire shows, had more freedom to comment on politics than the theatre.

Freedom

Now we have the reverse situation of a play that had already been seen by many thousands in London — and had been passed by the Lord Chamberlain – but could not be shown to a wider public on TV because someone at the ITA had greater sensibilities about political satire than even the Lord Chamberlain.

Second thoughts have however, won the day. Mr. Brown and the bottle have been eliminated. In its place the telly public will see instead “Mr. Brown” asking “Mr. Wilson”: “What happens if you’re run over by a bus?” which is followed up by “Mr Brown” singing the lines. If destiny calls me, can I refuse? Though bright lights appal me I’m still bloody big news.” Sung, I am assured, sans bottle.

By such a narrow margin is good taste maintained, the public saved from offensive feelings and the dignity of politicians preserved.

The larger question raised by this issue is the nature and extent of the freedom to be given to broadcasting authorities in their handling of politics and politicians.

Compared to the lethal barbs that were shot at Sir Alec Douglas Home [Prime Minister 1963-4 – Ed], Henry Brooke [Home Secretary 1962-4] and Anthony Eden [Prime Minister 1955-7] in the hey-day of the BBC’s satire phase, Mrs. Wilson’s Diary is comparatively amiable stuff.

Such, however, is the fear of politicians for the television medium that what they will countenance from cartoonists, newspapers, music-hall and theatre, they will do their damnedest to throttle on television

Yet a recently published book, Television in Politics, by Jay G. Blunder and Denis McQuail, would seem to indicate that TV is not merely the terrifying, formative monster — anarchically reshaping political attitudes – that politicians think it is.

Based upon a sample of 748 electors in the West Leeds and Pudsey constituencies during the election campaign of 1964, the authors conclude that TV only marginally influenced voters during this three-week period of intensive electioneering.

Smug

The book also revealed that the Liberal Party, given more TV time, did better because of this extra screen exposure; that party political broadcasts were useful in imparting knowledge about the issues; and that there was not sufficient hard evidence to determine just how much leaders like Home or Wilson helped or hindered their parties by their TV appearance.

While accepting the validity of these largely obvious findings, I feel that in its writing down of the significance of TV on politics the book may lead to some glib and smug conclusions.

I suspect that the reason this detailed survey has produced such undramatic results is because its area of investigation has been too narrow and too limited.

It was surely obvious that a short, three week campaign could have only marginal impact on attitudes already hardened before the campaign began.

The converted would look only for confirmation for their opinions; the unconverted — the much smaller segment of the electorate – would use TV, along with other sources, for making up their minds.

Conditioned

But what caused political altitudes to harden in the first place? What part did TV have between elections, in determining the polarisation of political opinions?

Only in two areas does this book touch upon this much more important issue. The electorate overwhelmingly rates TV as the most up-to-date, impartial and trustworthy medium in aiding it to weigh up political problems.

The survey also showed that voters have little faith in the integrity and honesty of politicians. No less than two fifth of the voters found politicians “usually” unreliable and misleading. Only 15 per cent. thought they were fairly reliable.

Since TV is to be trusted and politicians are not to be trusted, how much of the attitude is conditioned by the former?

It is the long-term impact of that is surely more important than the short-term. If a child is conditioned all his formative years to watch his leaders cavorting in a trivial and superficial environment, is it any wonder that he views the entire political spectrum with contempt?

Is not the five-year period between elections – as we watch it on TV – more significant in determining how people will vote, and their attitude to political leaders, than the short burst of three weeks’ frantic activity during an election campaign?

The post The significance of George (with or without bottle) and how you vote appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

For a moment, at least, there is an uneasy hush about the question of politicians and TV.

Having been hit by the verbal blunderbusses of two Cabinet Ministers – Richard Crossman and Anthony Wedgwood Benn – charging them with trivialising the political scene, the TV executives are brooding about the accusation and, as yet, doing nothing about it.

Now, in his Granada lecture Richard Crossman asked why the minority of people interested in politics should be given less TV time than minority groups interested in sport, music, drama or religion.

He estimated that the minority really keen on politics would be “far more numerous than all the opera-goers and the balletomanes put together, and at least as numerous as the active Christians.”

“Sixty minutes a week of straight outside broadcasting would seem a lot to us,” he said, pointing out that this was the time allotted to all-in wrestling.

Privileged

But what Mr Crossman failed to ask himself, and what few politicians are prepared to face, is whether or not any serious or concerned aspect of man’s activities can hope to benefit by increased support or respect if it becomes a recognised and accepted ingredient of a medium which is itself fundamentally trivial.

Tie one sector of our communal life that TV has continually given a privileged position in terms of hours has been the Christian churches.

Although the Postmaster-General does not have much say in the programme content of either the ITA or the BBC. he does insist that the hours between 6.15 p.m. and 7.25 p.m. on Sundays should be confined to a limited category of broadcasts (religious, charitable, Welsh language, those for the deaf) and which, in practice, has meant a quarantined zone largely occupied by religious TV. In addition to this hour and 10 minutes of privileged time, the ITV usually provides about 35 minutes a week of religious chat in what used to be the Epilogue slot and the BBC has a half-hour repeat of one of its Sunday religious programmes late the same night.

Definition

In other words, over three hours every week are granted, almost as a right, to Christian churches to put over their message and philosophy on TV. No other serious institution — Parliament, the Monarchy, the City, the Press, the Universities, the Law, the medical profession — is granted a fraction of this time to say what they would like to say to the public.

The definition of what is a religious broadcast is almost exclusively decided by the Central Religious Advisory Committee which advises the ITA and the BBC on these matters

On this Advisory Committee, which was established by Lord Reith – the BBC’s first Director-General — there are no minority religious groups or non-Christians. It represents exclusively the “mainstream of Christian tradition.”

The Chief Rabbi, in a recent letter to the Times, pointed out that the Jewish community receives but a fraction of its proportional share in religious broadcasting time based on the ratio of Jewish citizens.

And a number of MPs have also written to Lord Hill at the BBC complaining about the fact that the humanist position does not get its fair share of representation on the box.

Declining

But a more fundamental question than this volume of time each faith or interest gets on TV is whether or not there is any evidence that the constant exposure of Christianity on TV in its present context brings about a heightened awareness of Christianity and a rise in the number of its adherents and followers.

Judging by a Gallup Poll taken last year, there has been a serious increase in the number of people who believe that religion is losing its influence.

Compared to 1957 — which is a date that roughly corresponds to the advent of commercial TV on a popular scale and the consequent change in serious TV standards — there was an increase of some 17 per cent. in the number of people who thought religion was on the decline.

In 1957 52 per cent. of the people thought religion was losing its influence, in 1967, this had jumped to 67 per cent. In 1957, 17 per cent. thought religion was increasing its influence; in 1967 only 9 per cent. felt its significance was greater.

It is interesting, too, that it was members of the Church of England — the faith that gets the biggest slice of the TV religious cake — who provided the largest number of those who felt religion was losing its influence.

On the other hand, if we examine the records of the Jews and Humanists — groups who are concerned about their lack of access to the box — we will find no such precipitate decline in the over-all adherence to the importance of their beliefs.

The number of recognised Jews in Britain has remained relatively static — around the 450,000 mark — in the post-war years. The Humanists, on the other hand, are galloping ahead with membership in the Humanist Association – although tiny — increasing by some 20 per cent. per year.

No one would try to deduct from these figures a generalisation that TV is chiefly responsible for a fall in churchgoing or a decline in Christianity. Other factors — materialism, science, permissiveness, scepticism have made their impact. But why, for example, have these factors left the Jews relatively untouched?

TV, being the mysterious, unknown quantity that it still is, could be having its effect.

Commercial?

Isn’t there an element of the concealed commercial about many religious unobtrusive priest trying to make some sort of subliminal impact in a discussion on pop music or sex — which puts viewers in mind of TV advertising films and therefore stimulates their most intense defensive and cynical responses?

Judging by the surreptitious disguises now being used to flavour religious programmes with a secular masquerade, it appears that there is a growing doubt about the value of straight forward Christian programmes attempting to reason or proselytise or argue directly from the small screen.

Series such as Malcolm Muggeridge’s The Question Why and the current series on London Weekend, Round House, which is a sort of Speaker’s Corner on current affairs, are only peripherally religious and almost make nonsense of the Postmaster-General’s edict that these Sunday night slots should be devoted to religious programmes.

The post Is TV doing God any good? appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

Panic is clearly in the air. After only three months of operation the new look in commercial TV is being relentlessly driven back to the old look.

Harassed by newspaper reports, falling ratings, impatient advertising agencies, bewildered manufacturers, the independent companies have the frightened glazed look of a fox being surrounded by ravenous hounds.

Having assumed for so many years that they had the magic formula for popular appeal, that they alone could unerringly supply what the public wanted, they are now faced with the fact that Auntie BBC has acquired a mini-skirt and a come-on leer, and can dish out friviality, [sic] vulgarity and triviality as expertly as their show biz rivals.

Catastrophic situation

The statistics for October viewing make very depressing reading for executives on Channel 9. According to JICTAR, which has replaced TAM as the source of TV ratings, the BBC acquired 53% of the total audience last month against the ITV’s 47%.

The BBC’s own statistics, which have always marginally differed from those of TAM and JICTAR, claim that in October the BBC had 60% of the viewers against ITV’s 40%.

Accompanying this decline has been the words of woe tumbling out of the mouth of advertising agency executive – “A catastrophic situation,” said one. “The present state of things cannot continue beyond two or three months,” said another.

If these signs of discontent are designed to get the programme companies to change their schedules, put out different programmes, revise the quality of their product, then one must ask in which direction they want the companies to go and ought they to have the power to force the companies to comply.

Already it is quite clear that no one has interpreted the dissatisfaction of the advertisers as a call for better quality programmes, more serious drama, more committed or involved or responsible programmes

Such news as has been forthcoming about the company reactions to their falling ratings indicates that a return to worse, less demanding, more familiar and more orthodox entertainment programmes is now being planned for the New Year.

Classic examples

We are promised a return of variety along the lines of the Palladium Show. Back in the London area Thames TV will bring back Crossroads and Peyton Place – both classic examples of what TV can do worst.

Crossroads, the epitome of serial drivel and a perfect example of chewing-gum for the eyes, is coming back, we are told, partly because of heavy viewer demand.

The actual number of letters received by Thames TV when Crossroads went off the air inquiring or requesting its return were 480 in August, 75 in September and only 34 in October.

Whatever these figures show, they hardly indicate that some millions of viewers should be condemned to this kind of TV junk for months, and perhaps years, because of the demands of a few hundred viewers.

Judging by the decline in letters received, it seems even these viewers have now settled down to the loss of one of their favourite shows without any undue repercussions on their emotional well-being.

More comedy

Even London Weekend, which was one of the few companies making slight genuflections towards the goal of more mature viewing, has assured us that more new comedy shows are on the way to cheer up their audiences and, presumably, their advertisers.

But when we speak of Channel 9 returning to more popular shows, we have to ask ourselves what are they really returning from? Why only popular shows!

The truth is that hardly anything much has changed, in terms of peak-time viewing, over the whole ITV network since the new companies have taken over.

The basic reliance on serials like Coronation Street, variety shows like Opportunity Knocks, comedy shows like George and the Dragon and hours of old films has barely been questioned.

Can anyone have watched London Weekend’s fare on Saturday and Sunday and truly say they were in anyway affronted by anything remotely highbrow or unpopular or adult during its peak-time hours?

Yet, in spite of all that is being done to provide more and more popular programmes, the BBC still seems to be clobbering ITV mercilessly in every region but Lancashire.

In the London area the BBC shows that have reached the top spots — seven out of 10 — have nearly all done so against opposition that was once considered impregnably popular.

Marked change

What, then could possibly have happened? If the ITV is producing much the same diet before against the BBC’s very similar menu, why has the taste of the public shown such a marked change in a matter of a few weeks?

Could it possibly have something to do with the manner in which the taste of viewers is measured? Is there any likelihood that some of the mystery may reside in the way in which ratings are now acquired compared to what had taken place previously?

The fact is that when the new companies came on the air so did a fresh audience measurement system. TAM, the previous company gave way to AGB and JICTAR.

Although the methods of gathering the ratings are much the same – electronic meters attached to a sample of sets which record the programmes switched on – the actual people having the sets have been changed. In other words, there are now in the London area 350 different homes equipped with these special sets: 350 other homes had them when TAM was in business.

Although the method of selection of these homes, designed to represent a cross-section of the London audience is the same, could it be that with such a small sample changes of three or four per cent in the sample taste could account for the statistical switch of hundreds of thousands of viewers?

Accurate reflection

Could it be that the fresh group of viewers now being asked for their preferences is a more accurate reflection of the nation’s taste than the old sample that had been used by TAM?

Is it possible that commercial TV never had the long lead over BBC that they had claimed over the past number of years, and that nothing has really changed with the advent of the new companies but a different standard of measurement?

And on such uncertain statistical evidence is it right that the standard of TV programmes should be pushed even lower than they now are?

The post The case of the vanishing viewer appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

TALK IS CHEAP. No one is more conscious of the truth of that maxim than TV executives.

Talkers get less money than actors. They need no elaborate sets to back them up. Studios can be small and rehearsal time almost minimal.

There is no need to supplement them with original film material which entails the expense of large film crews. There is little to be paid in the way of hotel or travelling expenses.

A half-hour talk programme ran be laid on for about one-tenth the cost of a half-hour drama or documentary. Transmitting 30 minutes of conversation that costs £400 [£5,945 in today’s money allowing for inflation – Ed] instead of a play that costs £4,000 [£59,450] can save a TV company, on one programme alone, something like £175,000 [£2.6m] in a single year.

Another advantage of talk from a TV executive’s point of view is that he can use it to substantiate his claim that he is fulfilling his serious and cultural responsibilities to the medium. And it doesn’t cost him much.

Thus in their annual reports, the commercial companies can include long lists of dons, philosophers, authors, artists, composers, editors, scientists, who have appeared on their programmes which helps provide a smokescreen of social responsibility.

For minimal costs the maximum amount of goodwill is achieved.

Little

With such obvious benefits to be gained, it is surprising how little thought, imagination and effort goes into the average talks programme. This is one area of TV where it costs no more to make a good programme than it does to make a bad one.

TV is, of course, largely the art of the cheap budget. Since the BBC is being starved of its additional fee and since the commercial companies are being faced with the increased expense of introducing colour, it is perhaps natural that talk programmes should begin to proliferate on all channels.

If late on Sunday you switch from BBC-2 to BBC-1 to IIV, you will get no surcease from talk, talk, talk. The BBC has just introduced a regular Monday evening show of talk conducted by Michael Aspel. The new London TV companies promise us Eamonn Andrews talking three nights a week and David Frost talking another three nights a week.

Watching these programmes I am constantly impressed by the affinity their producers have with the Bourbons who learned nothing and forgot nothing.

We critics are constantly bing abused for having nothing constructive to offer the toilers in the electronic vineyards of TV.

But it is clear from these latest specimens of cauliflower TV — aimed to assault the ear rather than the eye – that elementary errors pointed out time and time again by critics are repeated by new waves of talks producers as if they were either too stubborn to take good advice, too arrogant to learn from experience or loo lazy to read.

Slavish

The Sunday night chat on BBC-2’s Late Night Line-Up, for example, is modelled with almost slavish fidelity on the format of the old Brains Trust but without any apparent understanding of what made that programme a success and this one a failure.

The formula for good conversation on TV is little different from that faced by every successful hostess organising a dinner party. There must not be too many guests; they must have areas of common interest; the bore must be immediately recognised and neutralised.

Any ideal dinner party, too, must not be composed of complete strangers uncomfortably trying to get on each other’s wavelengths and rarely succeeding before the brandy stage has been reached.

There must be some guests who know each other so well that they can exchange gossip, banter and abuse without feeling self-conscious or inhibited.

Unease

Instead of a team of anchormen like Commander Campbell, Huxley and Joad in the original Brains Trust or Michael Foot, A. J. P. Taylor and Lord Boothby in Free Speech — and these two were undoubtedly the best talk programmes yet conceived for either radio or TV – Late Night Line-Up’s Sunday conversation recruits four new faces every week and rarely has a group so regularly communicated such unease.

Not only does this motley assembly seem to have little in common, but it is only with a great deal of effort that they give any impression of being remotely interested in most of the questions they are asked to talk about.

Thus Yehudi Menuhin discussing the nation’s dedication to sport prefaced his remarks by omitting he knew very little about sport.

Irene Worth, asked to talk about the problem of amateurism in the Civil candour said: “I don’t know. I have no views about this”.

Now what is the basis of assembling Yehudi Menuhin, Sir Edward Boyle, Irene Worth and Roger McGough [respectively, a violinist, the Tory MP for Birmingham Handsworth, an actress and a poet] for a conversation on TV? I can think of only one subject they have in common — music – and possibly drama. Then why are they asked to chat about sport or the Civil Service or heredity?

On the other hand, the following week Willi Frischauer, whose field is politics and journalism, had to artificially convert himself into an authority on pop music and the Beatles.

Drab

Again there seemed nothing to link Willi Frischauer, an exuberant and likeable talker on his own subject, with the drab threesome he was trying to stimulate into something resembling a concerned reaction.

On this programme no one gets angry, no one seriously contradicts anyone, no one seems involved and no one really cares. One has the impression they are all there for their chat fees and little else. It is gentility run riot!

Michael Dean and Joan Bakewell, as the chairmen, seem obsessed with the esoteric and cultural aspects of life to the exclusion of almost everything else. When the panel are asked a question like: “Does the future of culture lie in the development of vernacular art?” not only do the guests seem to sigh a mental groan but the sound of sets switching off throughout the land must be deafening.

Another producer who seems to have learned nothing from the experience of other talk programmes is Christopher Martin, who is responsible for Malcolm Muggeridge’s new Sunday evening programme, The Question Why?

Anxious

Claiming for itself a reflective aim in which such profound questions as the basis for our need for wealth, a longer life, more happiness, would be asked and probed, this programme made the elementary mistake of filling the studio with about 30 people all anxious to get at each other’s throats.

Not only is it insulting to invite so many people to take part in a programme in which their average speaking time can only be about a minute and a half each, but when the topic is to be something as complicated and combustible us the right to strike it is courting verbal chaos to jam so many participants into the same studio.

The Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner format has been tried time and time again on TV — Man Alive only recently had to abandon it — and always the result has been disastrous.

Malcolm Muggeridge trying to discipline the storm of shouts, interjections, insults looked like some benign King Canute stemming the incoming tide with the pat of his hands.

If the questions Mr. Muggeridge wants to ask cannot be answered by civilised talkers in a civilised atmosphere, given a civilised amount of time for reflection and argument, then I’m afraid he has no business asking them at all.

The post Talkers get less money than actors and the results suggest the reason appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

THE COVERAGE of traumatic social events like the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy now takes an almost predictable course on TV.

Satellite communications enable us to be on the spot within a matter of hours no matter where in the world.

If the TV cameras are actually covering the occasion, and we are within their range, instant involvement with the shock, the panic, the hysteria can be communicated to millions.

Thus, when Martin Luther King was murdered, it wasn’t long before we were all immersed in the whodunit aspects ofl the affair.

The layout of the motel, the angle of trajectory, the lodging house across the way, the white Mustang car.

Similarly, the immediate details of Robert Kennedy’s assassination concerned the kitchen corridor, the swarthy assailant, the girl in the polka-dot dress.

Coupled with this were the close-up accounts of what happened immediately after the shooting – it’s odd how rarely the camera ever catches the actual moment itself.

The blurred, chaotic melee of frantic bodies; the shrieks, moans, cries of bystanders (will one ever forget tile sound of “No! No! No! Oh Christ, no!” as Kennedy lay crumped on the hotel floor); the harassed eye-witnesses trying to recollect their wits as they answer questions, have together become the archetypal visual pattern of assassination in the Telly Age.

Then the longer-range boys take over: the obituaries, the interviews about the causes, the significance, the consequences of the act occupy the energies of 24 Hours, This Week, Panorama, News At Ten for a couple of days.

The details of the funeral – beamed by satellite live at almost any hour — eventually conclude the drama so that the TV screen can get back to its more normal function of picturing life as wallowing in trivia rather than being pre-occupied with concern.

On the whole, British TV handles this sort of event efficiently and responsibly. There is a tendency to over dramatise, to rely too much on professional communicators for philosophical assessments, to hang attitudes on inappropriate visual material just because it happens to be available — but the need for instant comment makes these technical devices almost inevitable.

In the particular case of Senator Kennedy’s assassination, I found a readiness to talk in vague terms about America’s violent society without anyone attempting to assess what port, it any, TV itself contributed to that very violence.

There was a great deal of information about the passion of Americans for carrying guns and the ease with which they can obtain them; about the frontier philosophy that still permeates American thinking; about the pressure groups that demand the widespread sale of firearms — and one might have been forgiven for assuming that all one needed to cure America’s present sickness was stricter gun laws.

Spurred by this latest act of insane horror, President Johnson has set up a Commission to investigate violence in America and to suggest solutions.

If it does its job properly it must seriously and as scientifically as possible gather what facts are available as to what TV in the area of violence, is doing to Western society.

Anyone who watches the routine westerns and police or spy series that make up the vast bulk of American TV knows that such moral issues as they occasionally raise are always settled by some form of violence.

From the moment he can first perceive anything the American child is subjected to this scale of moral values. You don’t have to argue, to be persuasive, to be logical, to be compassionate, to be ethical to achieve your objects in this world. You have to be fitter, faster, stronger.

Having then, been conditioned to believe that it is right to attack evil with force, that it is, indeed, the most effective way of resisting evil, isn’t it, then a natural consequence that someone will shoot a black man, or his employer, or his rival — or a Kennedy — because in his distorted mind his victim is evil? And feel no guilt or remorse about it?

Astonishingly enough there is on the part of most people in authority a tendency to belittle or pooh-pooh this argument. Why is there this reluctance to believe that TV might be having this impact on our young?

I think the first reason is that most people who run society to-day were not as children subjected to the all-pervasive influence of TV. Having been brought up to believe that the written word was the most powerful formative influence on minds, they cannot accept the fact that this may have changed and that TV has insidiously replaced books and newspapers as our society’s most potent conditioner.

In America, too, TV is so innocuous, so silly, so uninvolved with real issues that legislators and teachers tend to dismiss it as having any conceivable social significance.

The same is true in this country where MPs and churchmen and editors and teachers refuse to take TV seriously except where it touches upon minimal aspects of our activities, such as political balance and shock over sex.

The TV channels themselves, as witness the analysis of the Kennedy killing, rarely involve themselves in any critical examination of their own power. Programmes like Talkback, useful as they are, tend to become defence mechanisms for BBC producers to reply to their more cranky critics.

There is also the belief that TV is not much different in character to books, the cinema and the theatre — which also depict violence.

Thus James Reston, the influential American journalist, analysing American violence writes: “The fantasy violence of American literature, television, and the movies, provides a contemporary gallery of dark and ghastly crime, which undoubtedly adds to the atmosphere in which weak and deranged minds flourish.”

But the impact of TV on “weak and deranged minds” is much more personal, more continuous, more unrelenting, more persuasive than anything ever accomplished by books or the cinema.

Books by their nature demand a concentration and a receptivity that only a minority of the population ever subjects itself to for long periods. The films, experienced in a strange environment, attended only periodically and subjected to home environmental influences between film-going, cannot be compared to continuous immersion in TV.

Any budding Capone would have his fantasies dampened after a walk home from the cinema and a cup of hot cocoa served him by his mother. But the TV experience offers no break, no change, no gap to millions of American viewers.

A recent survey of independent radio-TV stations in America showed that 25 pc of those asked — more than 1,500 stations — said that they had never broadcast any programme dealing with controversial issues of public importance. In other words, the western, the domestic comedy, the spy and police thriller made up almost their entire fare.

And a third reason for the reluctance of authorities to blame TV for violence is that they would not know what to do about it if it turned out to be true and accurate.

The fear of censorship runs deeper in politicians and editors in democratic societies than the consequences of violence.

But is censorship the necessary answer? Isn’t responsibility on the part of those who run TV — and a more intelligent method of choosing who should run it — also a way of handling the disease?

The post Is the real assassin television itself? appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

MANY OF our politicians are so dedicated to the Parliamentary institutions in which they function and are so involved in their workings that they are oblivious to the waves of change and thought that are already eroding and undermining these institutions.

Anyone who watched Mr. Quintin Hogg on Panorama last week would have seen how fiercely and how pugnaciously a responsible politician reacts to any threats to conventional political attitudes.

Mr. Hogg lost his temper with Mr. Perry Anderson, a research fellow at Reading University and editor of the New Left Review.

★

Mr. Anderson, speaking in the low-keyed, rational tones of this kind of TV discussion (which was on the problems of Parliamentary democracy), was saying that talk of referenda or administrative devolution “is so much irrelevancy, it means nothing to the major part of the population in this country.”

A harmless enough comment. you might think. Not one to set pulses racing or fists pounding. But it sent Mr. Hogg into a lather of agitation which, by comparison, made most Frenchmen I had seen on telly seem like models of calm imperturbability.

“What right have you to speak for the major part of the population?” shouted Mr. Hogg. “You represent nobody. Nobody would v ote for you if you stood for Parliament. You ignorant man, why do you claim to speak for the major part of the population of this country?”

★

Now you will notice that what roused Mr. Hogg’s abuse was that Mr. Anderson, who is not an MP, should claim to speak for “the major part” of this country.

Presumably if he had been an MP, Mr. Hogg would have granted him this privilege. Or if he had been head of the TUC, like Mr. George Woodcock, he would have had the right to speak for a major or minor part of this country. Mr. Hogg clearly has no doubts that he has the right to speak for “the major part” of this country.

Now it seemed not to have occurred to Mr. Hogg that the reason he was in the Panorama studio discussing the possibility of bloodshed in Britain was because a young student named Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who “represented nobody,” took a handful of students to the barricades to protest against educational and social conditions.

It is this conflict between those who believe that an ordered society can only function through elected representatives of the people and those who feel that the Parliamentary machine is too remote, too inflexible, too cumbersome, too self-infatuated, too indifferent to minority protests that is at the heart of the present malaise in all democratic societies.

The word that has dominated the speeches and the conversation of those involved in the current turmoil in France has been “participation.”

★

It was this frustration at not being allowed to actively participate in the direction of their own affairs, at being well-looked-after pawns in a benevolent autocracy, that united French students, workers and intellectuals. Economics, it should be noted, was only a secondary aspect of the revolt.

Now what guarantees are there that this feeling of non-participation, which can fortuitously be ignited into violent resentment, does not exist among the British people?

The truth is that our Parliamentary system has evolved to a point where we elect, for all practical purposes, an administrative dictatorship for a maximum of five years.

★

The Labour Party showed how it was possible to remain in power with a tiny majority of three. We have seen how little influence the protests of backbenchers, the Opposition or the House of Lords can have on a Government determined to push through any sort of legislation it desires.

The most effective pressures on Government action do not come from within the Parliamentary system, but from outside it. From the Press, television and public demonstrations.

Now it is interesting that in de Gaulle’s France the most obvious repression was exercised over TV. “They (the opposition) have the Press,” said de Gaulle. “I have the RTF and I intend to keep it.”

★

But the mere act of using TV as an instrument of Government policy, of denying it the right to act as a channel for protest and opposition, is, in my opinion, one of the major causes of France’s present turmoil.

In highly industrialised societies like France and Britain, viewers are sensitive enough to realise when the total picture of their life, as shown on TV, is a lying or evasive one.

When Mr. Edward Short, as Postmaster-General, a few months back, said: “We do not want TV to degenerate into the state in which the British Press finds itself to-day,” was he not saying something similar to de Gaulle’s dictum: “They have the Press. I have the RTF, and I intend to keep it.”

★

No one suggests that Mr. Wilson’s Government is exercising a de Gaullist censorship over TV. Bid there are subtler and less obvious ways of making sure that TV does not function as vigorously or effectively as it should as a channel of protest and public participation.

The appointment of two politicians as heads of the BBC and ITV makes sure that Parliamentary sensitivities and sensibilities will always be recognised and appreciated in the highest quarters.

If minorities cannot acquire a reasonable access to the TV medium; if governments cannot encourage the use of TV as a safety-valve for dissipating and cooling the heated discontents of our time; then do not be surprised if frustrated Britons also take to the streets and the barricades.

The post A look at this business of a man’s right to speak on the box appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

SINCE this year began I have written 20 weekly pieces on television. Looking through them the other day to answer a reader’s letter I was surprised to find how much they concentrated on BBC programmes and how little on those seen on commercial TV.

In 1968 I have only written three columns which concerned themselves primarily with ITV programmes. Two of them dealt with the ethics of certain discussion techniques on The Frost Programme and The Eamonn Andrews Show.

Contracts

The other was an attack on the Government and the ITA for the arbitrary method by which they made certain people rich through their handouts of commercial TV contracts.

The BBC, on the other hand, has been pushed through the critical sieve with a vengeance. I have vigorously questioned its obsession with sports; its current policy of attracting viewers by plumping for peak-time mediocrity; its curious view that no more jokes about Mr. Harold Wilson should be permitted on light entertainment programmes.

The individual BBC programmes I have discussed have included At The Eleventh Hour, Dr. Barnard Faces His Critics, Talkback, Man Alive, Till Death Us Do Part, the Val Doonican and Rolf Harris shows, the Smothers Brothers, Don’t Count The Candles, Dee Time and a Spoonful of Sugar.

Now the only thing that these programmes have in common is that none of them has been consistently on TV for over three years. Even Man Alive, which is the oldest, has recently undergone a face-lift which changed much of its style and approach.

By comparison programmes on Channel 9 tend to cling to schedules like desperate limpets. It now requires on my part a fierce effort of will to switch over from the BBC to the independent network.

Circus

The general impression of the commercial channel is that of a grey, unenterprising circus where the ringmaster announces the same old acts – year after year — because there are always enough customers to fill up the tent.

Searching for a fresh idea, for a programme that hasn’t been grinding on for six years or longer, for something that isn’t an almost exact replica of a hackneyed formula, is a task that has long ago exhausted my patience.

Although the ITA has never divulged its reasons for demoting Rediffusion as a programme contractor, one of the factors that they must have considered was the tenacious manner in which they stuck to programmes like Double Your Money, Take Your Pick and No Hiding Place for something like 12 to 13 years.

Now that Thames TV has decided that it will not be taking Double Your Money after July of this year, Mr. Hughie Green has said that he is shocked that a minority of people should be able to take off a programme which is so popular with the majority.

One would think that after having had the longest run in TV — a run that has seen him mature from youth to middle-age with his grinning bon-homie as glacially intact as ever— Mr. Green would have bowed out gracefully with a few grateful words about the powers of tolerance and resignation of the British public.

Instead, Mr. Green is now arguing that, since some 6,000,000 homes still tune into his programme, that it is almost anti-social for a “minority” to take him off.

Who this “minority” might be and how they managed to get their views to Thames TV, is not explained by Mr. Green. Since decisions of this kind are usually taken by minorities of one, two or three men who control programmes in the various companies, does Mr. Green think there ought to be a “majority” of 6,000,001 executives before anyone dare drop Double Your Money?

Justified?

Ot course. Mr. Green will claim that the mere size of his audience justifies its continued existence. That is evidence of “what the public wants” — and who dare defy the will of statistics?

But if the public is offered no choice, how do we really know what it wants? If Double Your Money continues to occupy a prime slot for 13 years, how do we know that there is not a better panel or quit game in somebody’s imagination that would not be more popular than Double Your Money?

If the BBC had not taken off some very popular comedy shows, how would we ever have known that Steptoe and Son or Till Death Us Do Part would be more popular?

And has Mr. Green ever considered that stultifying effect that programmes like his, with their unchanged routines year after year, has on the creative talent that has to put them out?

And has he ever thought of what these long-running programmes do to audiences? It cocoons them in a world of routine where their ability to make an individual choice is eventually atrophied.

Conditioning minds to be unselective, undemanding and unadventurous is hardly the purpose of TV. Yet that is what its end result would be if programmes were never changed, never altered just because they were preferred by millions too lazy or mentally unequipped to do anything but enjoy what they enjoyed before.

Eamonn

Now every commercial company has had its share of programmes that have on too long for anybody’s eventual good. ATV had Emergency Ward 10. ABC looks like turning the Eamonn Andrews Show into another runner in the eternity stakes.

But the company that has displayed the most resistance to change on the commercial network is, surprisingly enough, Granada.

I say “surprisingly” because Granada has always had a reputation as an aggressive, social-conscious, vigorous programme company. It is a reputation that needs some drastic re-justifying.

Granada’s main contributions to the network include Coronation Street (over seven years old). What the Papers Say (12 years old). All Our Yesterdays (seven-and-a-half years old). University Challenge (six years old). Cinema (tour years old) and World In Action (five years old).

Individually, there is nothing much wrong with any of these programmes. They all tackle their particular subjects with reasonable professionalism and skill.

But to have any company content with a schedule in which over 80 pc of its main programmes are between four and 12 years old indicates a smugness or apathy which is somewhat disturbing.

The dynamic Sidney Bernstein who will, unbelievable as it may seem, be 70 next January, may be preparing the end of some of these hoary programmes when the new contracts are taken up in August [Actually the end of July – Ed].

Whether Mr. Bernstein will be leading his company into the new TV era remains to be seen since, according to the new 1TA regulations, all company directors must retire at the age of 70, unless there are exceptional circumstances to justify their staying.

A positive demonstration of his continuing youth and vigour would be the drastic pruning of some of the ageing programme vines that are now choking his TV schedules.

The post The dreariness of the long-distance runners appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

NO ONE expects logic or consistency from TV executives. The medium has always been a jungle of anomalies, paradoxes, non sequiturs and ad hoc decisions.

But television’s approach to advertising would, by comparison, make the adventures of Alice in Wonderland sound like an exercise in pure reason.

The precise answer to a question like how long is a piece of string is no more elusive than trying to determine when an advertisement is not an advertisement.

Thus the commercial channel was prevented by the ITA from televising the International Trophy motor rave from Silverstone because the cars carried advertisements. Since the natural scenery for this type of event has always been hoardings and banners carrying every conceivable type of advertisement, who would be offended or corrupted by small advertisements on bonnets of cars travelling at 100 mph – would they emerge as more than a blur? — certainly escapes me.

Making this decision even more incomprehensible is the fact that the day following the ban, I watched on the commercial channel highlights of a football match between West Bromwich Albion and Birmingham City where hoardings, proclaiming the delights of White Horse Whisky, Esso, BOAC, Haig Whisky, Coca-Cola and others, competed directly for my attention with the cavorting players.

Surely, then, the ITA should, if only to save itself from the charge of being ridiculous, reveal to us the subtle, perhaps Jeusitical reasoning that has enabled it to distinguish between these two forms of unpaid TV advertising.

The dilemma, of course, arising from the wording of the Television Act, which clearly states that “advertisements must be clearly distinguishable as such and recognisably separate from the rest of the programme.”

This simple cannot be done with sports programmes, and the ITA should obviously stop trying to split semantic hairs in their efforts to prove one form of outdoor display advertising acceptable and another beyond the pale.

If the ITV truly wants to discourage this type of advertising, they might consider adjusting their fees in relationship to the number of hoarding and banners likely to be caught by their cameras. The more advertisements of this nature the promoter has accepted, the smaller should be the fee the TV companies pay him. This sort of rough justice could be effective.

But even a more flagrant form of free advertising that occurs on all three channels is the plug for films, plays or books dropped casually, and not so casually, into light entertainment and discussion programmes.

On the Eamonn Andrews Show recently I saw Mrs Gretchen Wyler, whose main interest, judged from its appearance, was a passion for animals — she didn’t say much about animals — but we heard a good deal about the fact that she was taking over from Juliet Browse as the lead in Sweet Charity.

Similarly, Clint Eastwood, although he had appeared in many violent films, displayed only a repertoire of cliches on the subject of violence which he was presumably there to discuss. Why then was he chosen? I can only assume because he happened to be making a film called Where Eagles Dare, in England.

But BBC-1, in its present slide towards mediocrity, has recently been providing two of the most blatant plug-infested programmes on the small screen:

DEE TIME, presided over by Simon Dee, has become a rich hunting ground for public relations men every where.

On this programme, conversation takes almost second place to free advertising for whatever the guests are involved in.

A few weeks ago three peers of the land were shamelessly boasting about the delights of their stately homes during a discussion that was presumably meant to be about the new image of the aristocracy.

They giggled about the attractions they were offering to the public; they boasted about their takings; they vied with each other about the relative merits of their stately products.

A few moments later Donald Sinden and Bernard Cribbins turned up to tell us they were in a new play in Birmingham.

Except for telling us that girls take their clothes off in the play, that a Miss World was in it and that Simon Dee should say something more about the play, I cannot recall a single contribution either Mr. Sinden or Mr. Cribbins made to the show.

Faced with this avalanche of free advertising, all Simon Dee could say was: “Gosh, there’s so many people I gotta give plugs to!”

The newest recruit to this who’s-for-plugs type of programme is the BBC’s A Spoonful of Sugar. Because it proclaims to be a programme to brighten up the lives of people confined in hospitals, it naturally makes it a somewhat ticklish programme to criticise.

Stephen Potter, in his book Lifemanship, noted that the way to avoid bad notices for a book was to dedicate it “To Phyllis, in the hope that one day God’s glorious gift of sight may be restored to her.” To attack a book with such a dedication would always hold up the critics to a charge of bad taste.

But the fact that A Spoonful of Sugar is concerned with the blind, paraplegics, bedridden nonagenarians cannot deter me from describing it as one of the most embarrassing, ill-prepared, squirm-making programmes I have seen for many years.

There is something basically cheap about using handicapped people – eager to be friendly and cooperative to those who are presumably trying to be charitable to them —to plug actors, BBC’ shows, comedians and even hairdressers as this show does.

To watch Keith Macklin or Sheila Tracy trying to get the poor victim to admit some interest in the personality that waits, beaming and smiling, behind some hospital door is a teeth-grinding experience.

I don’t really believe that these occasions, with the inevitable paraphernalia of cameras, sound equipment, crews and wires that must by crammed into a hospital room, can be anything but a depressing, somewhat nerve-wracking experience for those poor patients, chosen for this spot of limelight.

The let-down, the anticlimax, when all the reporters and performers and technicians have gone must be in some cases most depressing.

I am all for entertainers devoting all the time they can to cheering up those less fortunate and restricted in life.

But they should do it quietly, personally and away from the glare and mechanics of the techniques of plugging. Otherwise their motives are bound to be misunderstood or suspect.

The post Seen any good plugs lately? appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

Syndicated to newspapers on 27 April 1968

MR. PAUL FOX was made Controller of Programmes of BBC-1 on June 18, 1967.

In his new post Mr. Fox has something like £15m. [£223m in today’s money allowing for inflation – Ed] to spend. He is responsible for putting out more TV programmes than any other organisation in the world, and he supervises the production of more hours of entertainment than Lew Grade, Sidney Bernstein, the Boulting Brothers, Darryl Zanurk, J. Arthur Rank and Sir Philip Warter all put together.

What qualifications has he for such a formidable task? He was editor of BBC’s Sportsview for six years, until 1961. He edited Panorama and was head of BBC Current Affairs. Thus, his background has largely been concentrated on sports and news.

When he was appointed, Mr. Fox modestly claimed that his personal influence on BBC-1’s programme schedules would not be much in evidence before sometime in 1968.

Philosophy

He has now had 10 months to assert himself, and I think it is fair to appraise the trends in programming he appears to have set in motion.

Such comments of Mr. Fox’s that I have seen reported would seem to show that the acquisition of viewers plays an exceedingly prominent part in his philosophy of broadcasting.

Soon after he took over he indicated that be would give the ITV a much tougher battle for viewers, and last December, be was concerned about the audience ratio of 60-40 which the commercial channel had in their favour on Sunday nights.

To correct this dire state of affairs, he offered the British public a peak-time fare which began with the Smothers Brothers followed by Dr. Finlay’s Casebook, and ended with a long, feature film.

Since the Smothers Brothers were a disastrous flop, it must be assumed that Mr. Fox’s much-hoped for switch of viewers did not take place.

There has been some more schedule juggling, and BBC-1 now offers us on Sunday night — to woo us away from Channel 9’s delectable treat of The Saint (a repeat), The Big Show (variety) and a feature film – The Andy Williams Show, The First Lady (a series about a female councillor) and a feature film.

The end result of this fierce competitiveness is that there are only a marginal difference in quality of programme between the two major channels and that any discriminating viewer will be driven to the nearest pub or book.

Not content with turning the week-end into a battlefield for ignorant insensitive and complacent scalps, Mr Fox has apparently turned his diligent drive tor viewers to the week-days as well.

It you eliminate the daily 24 Hours programme from BBC-1 (which has a rough equivalent on the commercial channel with the News at Ten), there is practically nothing to choose between BBC-1 and ITV as far as the aim, tone quality and spirit of their programmes is concerned.

Monday’s schedule offered us Z-Cars, The Dick Emery Show, Panorama, Professional Boxing, Dance Date. To-night you have The Virginian, Mum’s Boys, The Wednesday Play (a repeat) and the European Cup. On Friday it’s A Spoonful of Sugar, The Newcomers, Man from UNCLE, Comedy Playhouse, Miss England and Tennis.

Bland

There are 28 hours of peak-time viewing on BBC-1 every weeks (ie, 6-30 pm to 10-30 pm) and, excluding the news and 24 Hours, the proportion of time devoted to what I might loosely call “non-entertainment” programmes (ie, drama, ballet, opera, documentaries, discussions, music, art, social and political comment) is about four hours per week.

In other words, for its mass viewing audiences BBC-1 now feels that 80 pc of its prime time should be devoted to bland, innocuous, unconcerned, uninvolved, soporific, uninformative, desensitising programmes.

Its tendency to move serious programmes to off-peak hours — which has always been the policy of the commercial channel — shows that there will soon be no difference at all between BBC-1 and ITV.

Since Mr. Fox has taken over we have seen the disappearance of the satire snows, the end of controversial comedies like Till Death Us Do Part, more a conventional plays into The Wednesday Play slot and an annual schedule which boasts of 1,000 hours of sport, or almost 25 per cent of its total output.

What seems to be happening is that BBC-1, like commercial TV, is opting out of a responsible position in shaping the taste, values and aspirations of the British public and is contenting itself with playing the role of a national yo-yo.

Deterioration

Its hierarchy can probably rationalise this position by claiming that BBC-2 can offer the more discriminating and more sensitive viewer all the serious, cultural, non-entertainment programmes programmes they want.

One can even envisage that when BBC-2 becomes more popular — when it shares a larger proportion of the audience — it, too, will deem it necessary to cater for bigger and bigger audiences, like its rivals, and eventually succumb to the temptation to become just floss and froth on the fabric of our national life.

This deterioration in the impact and power of TV is just what those with vested interests in the status quo would like.

Politicians, establishment figures, groups opposed to change and reform, have watched with a baleful eye the increasing intrusion of TV in their domains of influence and power.

Nothing would please them better than the cutting back of this involvement of TV in the central issues of our time. And the best way to do it is, of course, to turn the medium into visual chewing gum; innocuous waffle; soporific pap unworthy of the attention of those seriously concerned with our affairs. This has almost been achieved in America.

But TV is, for good or ill, a medium more powerful than any that exists in society to-day. It becomes the duty of those who run it to refuse to have it converted into a national bubble-bath. They must claw, fight, scream and shout for the right to be responsible and involved.

Serious

The BBC — because it is a national institution financed by the people’s money — must always be at least as serious as a popular newspaper. There is not a popular newspaper in the land that does not devote at least 40 per cent its non-commercial space to a discussion of the serious, demanding and involved aspects of the day. And in prominent places like its front page!

If TV is used by governments and those in authority as a new opium for the masses; if it portrays a bland, reassuring, comforting picture of life; if it is not used properly as an outlet for all the doubts, arguments, controversies and fears that rage through our lives, then watch for the explosion when disillusion sets in.

Some of the violence and anger of Negro rioters in America has been attributed to the contrast between the miserable reality of their existence and the chummy, benevolent, affluent, fictitious picture of American life seen on the small screed.

Similarly, the German students have been rioting because they claim that not only the Springer Press, but TV as well has provided the people with a false illusion of what is going on about them.

Mr. Paul Fox and Lord Hill, who joined the BBC as its chairman, have responsibilities towards the British public which, at the moment, they show few signs of either understanding or grasping.

The post A sad, sad look at the sad, sad decline of BBC-1 appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

WHEN Labour came to power in October, 1964, British TV faced a number of outstanding problems. Ever an optimist, I envisaged a TV millennium.

“The appointment of young and vigorous Anthony Wedgwood-Benn as the new Postmaster-General should presage some bold and exciting developments in British TV,” I wrote at the time.

Having outlined some of the issues I confidently expected Mr. Benn to tackle, I ended my article, addressed to him, with the following euphoric peroration: “The time has come for a positive lead from the Postmaster-General for more diversified, more significant and more adventurous TV. Will you give it?”

At the time, the future development and expansion of TV was harassed and beclouded by a host of unanswered questions. They hung over the medium like life in one of those TV commercials a minute before taking an aspirin.

Problem

The most pressing problems included the raising of the TV licence fee, the introduction of colour, the possibility of a fourth channel, the structure of commercial TV, the University of the Air, Pay TV.

Supplementary issues which might have been influenced by a dynamic and concerned Postmaster-General were the extension of broadcasting hours, a determination to prevent excessive profits being made out of a monopoly situation, an insistence that money made out of TV should be ploughed back into the medium, and the encouragement of the production of TV programmes for export.

Well, three and a half years have come and gone.

Wedgwood Benn has come and gone. Mr. Edward Short, his success as Postmaster-General, has come and gone. Mr. Roy Mason, the third Labour custodian of our TV destiny is now in charge.

What has been accomplished? After almost four years of Labour Government only two significant changes have taken place. We have colour and three new programme companies will soon be performing on Channel 9.

On the other hand, the litany of “no changes” sounds like a particularly depressing long moan. The BBC has not received an increased licence fee. There is no possibility of a fourth channel during the life of this Government.

There will be no University of the Air. Nothing has been done about pay TV except to allow an experiment to go ahead that had already been decided upon by the Tories.

There has been no increase in broadcasting hours. Nothing has been done to prevent exorbitant profits being made by those lucky enough to get commercial TV contracts. Nothing has been done to stimulate the production of TV programmes tor export. No steps have been taken to see that money made in TV stays in it.

With this desert of negative achievements to inspire him, it is perhaps not surprising that Mr. Roy Mason, our latest Postmaster-General, should early on indicate that he, too, intends to adopt the administrative philosophy that in broadcasting the less done the better.

Although he has only had the job tor a fortnight or so, his performance last week in answering questions in the Commons about broadcasting shows that the obscurantist mantle of his predecessors sits very naturally on his shoulders.

Abrupt

He was asked nine questions and to each one of them he managed to say no; he couldn’t promise; he couldn’t comment; or he didn’t intend to do anything.

Now if these questions had been asked for purely party provocative or petty purposes, one might have understood and forgiven Mr. Mason’s stonewalling demonstration.

But some of them seemed to me to raise important issues that deserved more than a dismissive reply.

He was asked by Mr. Hugh Jenkins if he would introduce legislation that could enable him to require the ITA to withdraw the licence of any programme company whose control was materially changed by acquisition or merger.

When Mr. Jenkins received an abrupt “no” to his question, he pressed on with a supplementary suggestion that since these contracts were in many cases licences to print money wasn’t it desirable that the nature of the company to which it was given should remain the same?

In other words, if Thames TV or London Weekend or Yorkshire TV received their contracts because of the nature of the men who were going to run it and back it, shouldn’t Parliament be concerned if another group of individuals bought themselves into controlling positions after the contracts had been allotted?

A perfectly reasonable question, you would think, demanding a considered reply. There is, for example, the case of EMI, which, when it was part of a consortium trying to get the Yorkshire contract was rejected, turning up again as a possible large shareholder in Thames TV because it has bought itself into ABC Pictures, which has a major stake in Thames TV.

If it was right for EMI to be turned down by Lord Hill in Yorkshire, is it right for EMI to be accepted by Lord Bowden in London? Surely a subject that should concern the Postmaster General?

But no. Mr. Mason shrugged off the question with the cryptic remark that Mr. Jenkins was concerned about “this developing into a monopoly situation” and thought it should be referred to the President of the Board of Trade.

The post Latest in the long line of No-men! appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

[sic on typo in headline – Ed]

THE documentary is an art form that is nearly always perched precariously, and uncomfortably, on the horns of a dilemma.

If it has a point of view, it is unlikely to be denounced as unfair, partisan, perverse or provocative. If it hasn’t a point of view it is just as likely to be attacked as innocuous, bland, timid or uninspiring.

Don’t Count the Candles, Lord Snowdon’s documentary – which was made for CBS in America and shown on BBC 1 last week — had a point of view. It said that old age was a state none of us wanted, most of us resented and a few of us did every thing in our power to deny and resit.

As a generalisation it is hardly very original or very profound. Indeed, on this theme it is, perhaps, an almost classic statement of the obvious.

Yet it drew protests. People (not many, I am assured) phoned the BBC to complain that the programme was harrowing. Others were indignant because it did not show more happy and jolly old people.

Neglected

On “Late Night Line-up” a sociologist, Peter Townsend, thought the film was a complete failure because it had neglected, among other things, to show what the Welfare State was doing for old people.

None of these people was prepared, it would seem, to allow Lord Snowdon

who photographed and directed the documentary and Derek Hart, who wrote it, to project their own personal vision of the nature of old age.

Because the film did not correspond to what they thought old age was all about, these viewers denounced it. In other words, they wanted Lord Snowdon and Derek Hart to end up with a film they had never started to make.

Now these are dozens of aspects of old age that might be the subject of a programme of this kind: the opportunities of old age; its wisdom; its power; its physical and mental adjustments; its effect on the family; its sexual attitudes; its economic needs; its place in a modern, industrial state; its reflections on euthanasia. A documentary that attempted to discuss all these thoroughly would probably be about two weeks long. And even then someone would be bound to protest that something had been left out.

One of the persistent cliches that has bedevilled documentary makers is that their films ought to present “a slice of life”. By its very nature – limitations of resources; the tolerance of viewers; the inability of a camera to depict the fine nuances of logic – the best documentaries never attempt anything as large as “a slice of life.”

They concentrate on a wisp, a sliver, a chink, a scrap, a crumb, a morsel, a fragment or a shadow of life. They are more concerned with leaving out than putting in.

Lord Snowdon and Derek Hart had about 55 minutes in which to cram their tiny statement about old age. That meant a limited goal and a fierce problem of selection.

Essence

They decided to do a mood piece about the fear and frustrations of getting old. It was the essence of this state, not its reality, that they were trying to capture.

To complain that a great deal had been left out is to object to Modigliani painting only thin seamen when the world has many fat women in it — or to attack Graham Greene’s novels for concentrating on Catholic issues when Jews and Hindus also have religious problems.

But, judged by what it had set out to do, Don’t Count the Candles was a most successful documentary. Considering that it was Lord Snowdon’s first venture into TV filming, it was a most commendable achievement.

The close-ups were particularly telling: the wrinkled flesh; the knotted veins, the eyes being dabbed by an old man left in an old people’s home by his daughters; the desperate gaiety of the elderly trouper; the silent, resigned faces in a seaside hotel.

And if these images were necessarily bleak, they were counter balanced by Leopold Stokowski, at 80, conducting with all the fervour and intensity of a man in his prime — and Compton Mackenzie, even older still, planning to write another 25 novels.

I felt that there was probably too much emphasis on the attempts of the old beauty through health clinics, glandular extracts and dubious rejuvenators.

Promises

The middle-aged, too, are suckers for promises of eternal youth. And every current affairs or documentary programme — Panorama, Twenty-four hours, Whicker’s World, Man Alive – has a go at this very visual subject whenever ideas are scarce.

Because it was done by Lord Snowden, Don’t Count the Candles has had more critical analysis than such an exercise would normally have warranted. There have been much better documentaries that have received only a fraction of this attention.

But because he happens to be married to the Queen’s sister this should not prevent us from recognising the fact that if he was still Tony Armstrong-Jones he would probably now have earned a reputation as an exciting and imaginative film-maker.

The post Were the protests over Lord Snowden’s look at old age justified? appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

THE SADDEST SPECTACLE on the contemporary TV scene is the depressing deterioration of American TV. Conditioned by the fear and caution of advertisers, popular programmes are sinking ever deeper into a morass of blancmange entertainment.

With the exception of an occasional current affairs programme, the American networks operate on the principle that it is their function to provide the least offence to the greatest number.

It does not overly concern them that in so doing they are also being extremely offensive to most of the intelligent people in their country.

Nor does it bother them that by being aggressively innocuous they are actively helping to cement into their society all its iniquities and inequalities.

The result of this policy of banalities for the masses is that most discerning, sensitive and intelligent Americans view the medium with contempt. They appear on it sceptically work for it reluctantly and deride it both privately and publicly.

Pressures

One of the most heartening aspects of British TV is that, as yet, the rot that comes from catering to advertising pressures has not bitten very deep into our own programming philosophy.

And, because of a self-imposed limitation on the amount of American material transmitted — usually amounting to about 15 per cent of its total output — British TV has been forced to produce most of its own programmes which, naturally reflect our own customs, habits, values and ideals. The result has been that most people in this country infinitely prefer British programmes to almost anything that comes from America.

American series or variety shows rarely reach the top ten status — not only nationally, but even in the regions. Many weeks go by when not a single American show appears in the top twenty national favourites.

The fact that BBC and the ITV companies still go on buying American material is not because they think the public will prefer them to British shows, but because they usually cost less than producing an original programme over here.

The gap between American popular taste and our own native preferences has been sharply illustrated by the fate of the Smothers Brothers. After only nine programmes they have been dropped by the BBC from their schedules. Two more programmes remain to be shown.

‘Daring’

In America, difficult as it is for anyone over here to understand, the Smothers Brothers are not only the most popular variety show but also have a reputation for producing daring, satirical and controversial TV.

1 have assiduously watched most of their transmitted programmes and I must confess that the mystery of their appeal has consistently escaped me.

In a clean-cut way, I suppose they represent to Middle West moms an ideal of the all-American brothers. Dick, the sharper, more astute one, is amiably patient with the gangling inarticulateness of his brother Tommy, whose lovableness is demonstrated by his awkwardness with both his grammar and his guitar.

The show’s shape is traditional in the mustiest sense of that word. There are guests who are fulsomely introduced and who take part in the inevitable set sketches in which the feeblest of jokes are greeted by almost maniacal laughter from a studio audience.

The level of the jokes and audience appreciation can be gauged by the fact that in a recent skit about the French Revolution the heartiest laugh came when Marie Antoinette, on being told that the people were crying for bread, replied, “Let them eat cake!”

Although eight writers were credited with the script, I did not notice Marie Antoinette’s name among them. Perhaps de Gaulle will take it up. Since we produce a host of variety shows far funnier and wittier than this lame display of simple gush — Morecambe and Wise, Bruce Forsyth, Millicent Martin, Benny Hill, Ken Dodd — it is not surprising that British viewers have been less that enchanted with the Smothers Brothers.

But what amazes me is that in America the Smothers Brothers are hailed as prophets of adventurous and satirical TV. And it is not an idle reputation, since this year alone three advertisers have stopped sponsoring the show because they consider its jokes too blue and its political satire too controversial.

Yet nothing I have seen could, by our standards, be considered remotely objectionable. Compared to our own satire shows or to something like Till Death Us Do Part, the Smothers Brothers are milk-sodden gruel for the toothless.

Sketches

Occasionally there are mild sketches about things like safety in automobiles or treatment of the sick, but nothing more pointed than a gag ever emerges and the atmosphere is always too cosily friendly that an insult could only be interpreted as a compliment.

The sharpest comment I ever heard about anything remotely resembling a social problem was when someone was asked how people could be discouraged from staying in hospitals. “Bad food, ugly nurses and as a last resort we keep the bed pans in the Frigidaire,” was the answer

If this type of innocuous banter can drive advertisers away from sponsoring programmes — and ultimately extinguish them from the air — then American TV will have imposed upon itself a censorship which in its ultimate effects, will be as damaging to freedom in the United States as controlled TV has already damaged freedom in France, Rhodesia and the Soviet Union.

The post A look at the musty humour of the Smothers Brothers appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

Syndicated to newspapers on 9 March 1968

The most immutable, unchangeable, orthodox, settled, transfixed and stubborn form of TV is in the field of light entertainment.

Symbolic of the rooted thinking in the world of variety TV was that revolving stage in the Palladium Show which want on turning with its load of waving chorus girls until even Lew Grade must have grown dizzy at the sight of it.

Such modest deviations in technique that have emerged over the decodes inevitably result in a rash of imitations that never know when to stop.

Perry Como achieved fame in America because of a relaxed throw-away style of delivery and presentation. Since then entertainers in roll-neck sweaters have been relaxing so much their backbones are in danger of becoming vestigial remnants.

The stool

Another modest innovation in the Perry Como Show was the high stool. The result is that the stool has now become the inevitable prop for signalling a friendly informal atmosphere.

When entertainers or singers want to chat cosily to each other or to the audience, they draw up a stool. No one ever sits in a chair and even standing up has become slightly suspect.

It is by such mini advances — hardly the width of the merest G-string — that TV musical shows inch themselves into the future. Compared to the changes that take place in TV drama, comedy shows, current affairs programmes and documentaries, the variety programme is the reluctant dinosaur of the small screen.

Even the annual report of the Independent Television Authority — a document notoriously reticent about casting the slightest shadow of disapproval on anything seen on Channel 9 — has used the words “stale” and “disappointing” about the commercial companies’ output of light entertainment and called for “positive corrective measures.”

But the rot seems to have seeped into the BBC as well. There it may have started with the Val Doonican Show.

Mr. Doonican, a friendly Irishman with a soothing, singing voice, managed to sweep this brand of relaxed amiability into the top ratings.

The show was remarkable only for the intensity of its cosiness. Surrounded by a group of perpetually grinning singers, the highlights of the programme were the choral singing of very old, very familiar, very childish folk songs.

The rest were the usual guests, the usual badinage, the usual toothy greetings. No effort was made to provide anything imaginative in the way of choreography, decor, script or style. Indeed an ideal programme to sleep by.

Since this was apparently what the public wanted, the BBC has repeated the formula in The Rolf Harris Show. Here, if possible, wholesomeness is an even more aggressive quality than it was in the Val Doonican show.

Mr. Harris, bearded and twinkling, has all the by-gosh, gee-whiz charm of a cousin from Australia. He is always overwhelmed by the magnificence of his guests (“They are really international stars … Come on, a tremendous burst of applause for our next guest.”)

His patter is artificially folksy. “I was thinking recently about giraffes,” he tells us, as an excuse for an infantile song about his wish to be able to talk to the animals.

His jokes are simply cringe-making. “Where’s your iambic pentameter?” “I thought you were going to bring it,” is a more-brilliant-than-usual exchange.

Or something like the closing lines of his last show: “My little girl — she’s only four — came back from school with a scruffy little rag doll worth £12 10s … (pause) … Well, it was worth £12 10s. because she swapped her bicycle for it.”

The centre-piece of the programme is Mr. Harris demonstrating his ability to paint with a huge brush on a broad, grey canvas.

Picasso

As he pom-poms, boo-hoops to himself in a humming undertone, the audience settles back as if they were watching nothing less than Picasso at work. What emerges are rather mediocre greeting card scenes whose only distinction is the audacity it takes to demonstrate so tiny a gift so brazenly.

The other staple ingredient of The Rolf Harris Show is a leaping, cavorting group of young men and girts whose idea of a dance routine is to chase each other around the studio or bend forward in a row grinning archly at the camera.

Indeed, the whole show smacks of well-intentioned amateurism. Since Mr. Harris cannot sing, dance, draw or tell jokes very well, it is only natural that he should be surrounded by an atmosphere revelling in its own mediocrity. It is all bland and harmless in much the same way as having a bath in semolina pudding.

A step-up in imagination — but not much — is Once More With Felix on BBC-2. Miss Julie Felix, her aquiline face framed in a cascade of black hair, has presumably been given this show because she is sincere with a guitar.

More often than not her repertoire consists of protest songs that for me seem to have exactly the same melody.

Her pretty face takes on an aura of social significance as she rhythmically tries to break our hearts about the Mexican deportees who are chased “like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves” and die in the following sequence: in the hills, in the mountains and in the plains.

Stamina

It’s never easy to whip oneself up into a proper mood of indignation about such folksy injustice when the guests on the programme tend to be lighthearted puppeteers or raconteurs seemingly indifferent to “trying for the sun” or “not having a name when you reach the aeroplane.”

There is a spasmodic attempt to use bits of film to illustrate some of the songs — almost always showing Miss Felix either running or walking along beeches or hot southern streets — but aside from establishing Miss Felix’s stamina, they add little to the general quality of the entertainment.

Piccadilly Palace, on Channel 9, starred Millicent Martin and Bruce Forsyth and if it offered up nothing new, it at least looked as if more effort and money had gone into it than the Rolf Harris and Julie Felix shows put together.

Gloss

The script had some good situation sketches and some of Millicent Martin’s dancing numbers were very effective. It was basically the same tired stuff, but a gloss of professionalism made it more palatable.

On the Continent, this type of light entertainment has acquired a brightness and vivacity and flair that no one over here seems capable of matching.

Film is imaginatively used to extend the barriers of the studio. Dance numbers are organised to please the eye and take advantage of all the electronic aids that are now available to directors.

Although British TV leads the world in most fields, it has consistently trudged along in the rear as far as musical variety is concerned. It may well be that the British public is content with nothing better than soporific comforters to while away the hours until the grave, but that is no reason why TV executives should be content to give them nothing better.

The post Take a high stool, then add a roll neck – and you’ve got a show! appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

MAN ALIVE on BBC-2 insists that it is “a programme which focuses on people and the situations that shape their lives.”

As a catch-phrase blurb in the Radio Times it is snappy, and generalised enough to be practically meaningless. Among other current programmes that could also claim “to focus on people, etc., etc…..” are Panorama, This Week, 24-Hours, World In Action, Late Night Line-Up, Whicker’s World, Meeting Point and Blue Peter.

Where Man Alive, however, was different from these other programmes was in its pre-occupation with the intimate situations that shaped people’s lives.

Not for it such life-shapers as the Labour Government, Vietnam, the Common Market, the Vatican, television, comprehensive schools, trade unions, the hydrogen bomb, the impact of culture.

Hurt

Its editors, Desmond Wilcox and Bill Morton, burrowed into the more personal layers of human motivation. With camera and microphone, they tramped through the wreckage of hurt, broken and anxious lives.

Unmarried mothers, the homeless, priests who sinned, divorced wives, mistresses, children of broken homes, homosexuals, people with phobias, teenagers who left home — these were some of the unhappy fauna that Man Alive trapped on the small screen.

Watching it was at times like eavesdropping on a confessional or hiding under a psychiatrist’s couch. The techniques used to encourage such intimate revelations were those one might associate with the family doctor or a newspaper sob sister.

The interviewer’s voice always throbbed with sympathy and understanding. After each unhurried question, there would be a long pause before the next, which had the effect of encouraging the subject to say a little more — afraid perhaps that he had let the interviewer down by saying too little — and often thereby bringing out the statement he probably would have preferred to have kept hidden.

Usually the interviewer was unseen — his words echoing eerily on the sound track — and the subject was scrutinised by the camera as vividly as a stethoscopic searching for some hidden disease.

To be fair, not all Man Alive programmes indulged in this metaphorical wringing of hands over man’s plight. There were editions on grouse shooting, market research and the Mafia, but there were enough of these TV confessionals to associate the programme in many minds with a keyhole vision of the human condition.

No doubt these revelations often made absorbing television. But there was always a suspicion, too, that on some programmes there was a preoccupation with sensation for sensation’s sake and that sentimentality was being used as a substitute for concern.

But there is a bottom even to the well of human misery and Man Alive, in its new series, has turned away from agonising over individual private sorrows and is now concentrating on a broader spectrum of social problems.

This takes the form of setting up an issue like hanging, the exploitation of the welfare state, or the excesses of satire, filming some background material and interviews, and then throwing it open for discussion to a studio assembly of involved guests.

Again the programme seems to be more concerned with so-called “good” TV than with any sincere desire to inform viewers rationally or effectively about the subject being aired.

“Good” TV in this context means TV that excites, irritates and embarrasses rather than TV that informs or stimulates any logical thought.

It manages to include in one format almost every device guaranteed to kill reasonable talk, serious communication and constructive reflection.

There are usually 15 to 20 speakers spaced through a large studio as if they were all afraid of catching something from each other.

The speakers are of unequal intellectual weight: some are experts on the subject, while others have little but an isolated experience to justify their inclusion in the debate.

The sheer distance that separates the protagonists guarantees a shouting match in which the loudest and most persistent larynxes will eventually prevail. The large number of debaters means a few scrappy minutes for most speakers, no chance of rebuttal and a discussion dominated by the most unabashed extroverts.

In the programme on capital punishment Duncan Sandys and Edgar Lustgarten, arguing for the restoration of capital punishment never remotely got round to the many reasonable arguments that should have been put on their side.

In much the same way, the question of whether satire had gone too far descended to an exchange of irrelevant insults between the editors of Private Eye and Mr. Robert Maxwell, MP, and one switched off feeling only acute embarrassment for all concerned.

Because it sensationalises serious subjects, reduces discussions to brawls, humiliates important people, there are some, no doubt, who will claim that it is good TV.

Socially, however. its most dubious effect is that it not only brings no enlightenment to the urgent problems it raises, but it polarises opinion, confirms prejudices and leaves viewers even more convinced about the wisdom of their own views and the stupidity of their opponents’ than they were before seeing the programme. As such, it is positively harmful.

The post There are times when it embarrasses viewers to look appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

Syndicated to newspapers on 24 February 1968

THE fascination at Alf Garnett, the monstrous hero of the BBC’s Till Death Us Do Part, lay in his ability to act as a distorting mirror in which we could watch our meanest attributes reflected large and ugly.

Like some boil on the back at the neck that one cannot resist stroking or touching, this social aberration demanded the nation’s attention.

Some 18 million viewers — half of Britain’s adult population — watched him weekly wallowing in the hates and fears and prejudices most of us have tucked away in some genteel niche of our psyche.

Alf’s views on coons, kikes and wags; his reflections on Labour Party politicians; his suspicion of anything new like transplant operations, his ignorant superstitions, his insensitivity to beauty, his blatant hypocrisy can be seen and heard most days in most pubs, factories and boardrooms in the land.

Aggressive

Even his conventional virtue — his faith, his patriotism, his loyalties — have all been acquired tor the wrong reasons. His religion is motivated by fear at a vengeful God; his admiration of the Queen, by snobbery; his passion for West Ham, by a need for aggressive self-fulfilment.

Fortunately, there are few of us who possess all of Alf’s bulging portmanteau of hates and prejudices. But it is only the saint among us who does not share at least one.

The difference between Alf and most of us is that he brandishes his decadent and violent ideas in the fout-mouthed linguistic setting that suited them best. He was too uncultivated and ignorant to realise that if he disguised them under a veneer of propriety, they would have been acceptable in some of our best drawing-rooms.

Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of Alf’s existence is that he should be a member of the working-classes. Ever since Rousseau’s “noble savage,” liberal humanitarians have believed that given the right social conditions, the best in humanity would emerge from the lowest orders.

They had long ago given up the middle-classes and the aristocracy as too corrupted by self-interest to ever strive unduly for a broadening of the human spirit.

It would be expected that a Prussian Junker like Ludendorff could be described as “a man blind in spirit. He had never seen a flower bloom, never heard a bird sing, never watched the sun set.”

And it was natural that the epitome of a nation’s xenophobia, narrow-mindedness, obtuse attitudes should have been that red-fared, bloated representative of the upper middle-class, Colonel Blimp.

But the proletariat was better than that. So the Russian Revolution and the Welfare State set out to prove. Well, we know what happened in Russia.

Could it be possible that decades of literacy, universal suffrage, full employment, trade union protection and governmental paternalism could spawn a monster like Alf Garnett?

Sadly, it is only too true. The millions who laughed at Alf Garnett weekly knew only too well that it was true. And it is in reminding us how far we still have to go before any Utopian ideals about ourselves and our society can be remotely realised that Johnny Speight’s creation has succeeded in providing on TV both a chastening and enlightening experience.

No one can deny that some of the recent episodes of Till Death Us Do Part showed signs of tired flair and exhausted imagination. But even the worst ones were funnier, more stimulating and more nerve-provoking than 95 per cent. of so-called TV comedy.

The nation owes it, creator Johnny Speight, and its cast, Warren Mitchell, Dandy Nichols, Anthony Booth and Una Stubbs, a debt of gratitude.

But when a series as significant as Till Death Us Do Part leaves the air, it is important that a critic investigates the nature of its going.

Smothered

Was Alf Garnett pushed off the BBC or did he die a creative natural death? If Johnny Speight is to be believed, Alf was smothered by an artistic climate in which he could not survive.

“We have been irritated by a number of idiotic and unreasonable cuts,” he said. “The trouble has been since Lord Hill’s arrival at the BBC and I could be the victim of new policies. I would write another series for the BBC but only it this censorship was stopped.”

What evidence, then, is there that Till Death Us Do Part has gone too far in its use of unseemly language, its derision of politicians, the monarchy, foreigners, its shocking of sensibilities over such topics as religion sex and the family?

Judged by viewing figures, only a tiny fraction of the nation has been shocked enough by the Garnett family to stop looking at them.

This has by no means deterred pressure groups, like the one of which Mrs. Mary Whitehouse is secretary, from blazing away at the programme as a disgrace to the nation and a potential source of corruption.

Because in a comic discussion about the beginnings of man, the words “your bloody God” and “that rubbish, the Bible” were used, Mrs. Whitehouse’s association has demanded that the BBC be prosecuted for blasphemy.

In the event of a prosecution, would Mrs. Mary Whitehouse or the BBC be right as to what shocks and disturbs the nation?

The BBC in its Talkback programme, has provided some evidence of where viewers stand on programmes that its critics claim go too far in the way of permissiveness about language and taboo subjects.

An audience of 100, scientifically selected from the London Area by an independent firm, represents a statistical sample of the population by age, class, sex and earning power.

On the right of TV to upset and occasionally offend the nation, 80 per cent. agreed that it had that right. Did Alf Garnett stimulate racial prejudice? Ninety-five per cent said No. Were references to the Queen by Alf Garnett offensive? Ninety-seven per cent, said No. Was there a need for an independent viewers’ council? Ninety-two per cent said No.

These statistics, then, would seem to put paid to Mrs. Whitehouse’s constant claim that her body represents a majority, or even a substantial, number of viewers.

An incidental aspect of this affair is the fact that so many commentators have assumed that Lord Hill’s presence at the BBC has been responsible for this new censorious atmosphere. It may not be true — Lord Hill should let us know — but when Prime Ministers appoint politicians to be overseers of our beliefs and morals, suspicions will always be there.

The post Viewers, the fact is you were looking at yourselves appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

A GLOSSY brochure has landed on my desk proudly announcing the BBC’s plans for sport coverage on TV during 1968. Just, as two years ago, the diadem in their sports programme was the World Cup, this year the Olympic Games in Grenoble and Mexico will be the crowning glory.

Among other compelling events to come perspiring into your living room will be the Test matches between Australia and England; Wimbledon tennis; the Open Championship for golf; Amateur Boxing Championships; motor racing; international athletics; National Swimming Championships; women’s hockey between Britain and Canada; the Royal International Horse Show; Horse of the Year Show.

This you will see in addition to the BBC’s regular programme on sport — Grandstand, Sportsview and Match of the Day — and such national events as the Derby, the Boat Race, the Grand National and the FA Cup Final.

And just in case you have not had your fill of sport’s personalities there is Quiz Ball on Mondays, which pits representatives of soccer teams against each other in what is euphemistically described as a “battle of wits.”

I am not surprised then that when the programme planners totalled up this bonanza of sports coverage they could gleefully reveal that over 1,000 hours of muscular competition would be seen on BBC-1 and BBC-2 during the coming Year.

Temptation

As someone who will watch any games on TV except all-in wrestling (I just cannot believe a moment of this clutch-and-grab drama) the temptation to be glued to the small screen afternoons and evenings during the spring and summer will be tremendous.

But, tempering my enthusiasm is a nudging doubt about my right to indulge myself in such pleasures in 1968. There is no doubt that I cannot watch TV during the day and work at the same time.

Should I be writing an article or a book that will earn the nation valuable dollars or should I be fretting about Mary Rand’s jumping or the chances of Laver winning Wimbledon?

In a year when productivity ranks with patriotism as a national virtue; when stenographers are treated like Stakhanovite heroes because they are working half an hour a day extra; when unions and management have been exhorted by Government and Press to put in extra effort and extra time at the bench and the desk, the BBC blithely proclaims its intention to devote almost 25 pc of its output to sport — a good deal of which will be shown in the afternoon as a counter-attraction to work!

Keen sports fan that I am, it seems a serious mistake in judgment to devote over 1,000 hours to sport in 1968 when the BBC’s total output will be little over 4,000 hours.

The thought seems fleetingly to have occurred to Peter Dimmock, chief of BBC Sport, who, in his brochure, asks the question: Is there too much sport on television?”

The answer, according to Mr. Dimmock, is an emphatic “No. Why? Live TV is the best shop window that any sport can have”, he explains, “and the audience figures demonstrate the demand.

“In these days of a wide choice in leisure, major sports need TV to remain ‘fashionable’ and keep people interested so that to-day’s viewer becomes to-morrow’s spectator or participant”.

In other words, the BBC has a duty to perpetuate sport for sport’s sake. Nothing about competing forms of entertainment that might also like to become “fashionable” such plays, discussions, documents, satire or pop.

Nothing about why sport should be awarded 25 pc of the BBC’s TV hours and the rest of the multitudinous activities of the British people should be crammed into the remaining 75 pc of screen time.

Nor nothing about whether the national interest is served by this concentration of sport aimed at encouraging us to become either players or watchers.

Passion

If I were Chancellor of the Exchequer I might be asking myself whether there was any correlation between our stagnant rate of production and our growing passion for sport and its concomitant activity – gambling.

There can be no doubt that the televising of horse racing has increased the volume of betting on horses. Any day that racing is televised, the gross takings of bookmakers goes up substantially.

The recent ban on racing, due to the foot-and-mouth epidemic, coincided with an unprecedented spending spree in the shops before Christmas.

The orthodox explanation for this spree was the fact that buyers feared increased purchase taxes and were stocking up while goods were cheaper.

Another explanation was that something like £60m. [£890m in today’s money, allowing for inflation – Ed] which would normally have been turned over in racing during these few weeks, suddenly landed in the handbags of housewives whose husbands found themselves with an unaccustomed few pounds in their pockets.

No one suggests that horseracing should be banned. But a more logical approach to the nation’s needs would be to concentrate racing on two days of the week — preferably Saturdays and Sundays (when Sundays become freer) — and to see that TV does not unduly encourage the betting habit by too many televised meetings. This is also a reason for discouraging the Pay TV channel, which would undoubtedly extend its racing services if it were allowed to survive.

Impossible

How many working hours the BBC will cost the nation this summer by its televising of Wimbledon, the Test matches and the Olympic Games is impossible to assess. But it will certainly be considerable.

Is there not a case — this year, at least — for cutting down the BBC’s obsession with sport rather than intensifying it?

The post Sport – Has this now been made the new British vice? appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

ONLY A FEW weeks ago I was worrying about the impact of The Frost Programme on the national scene. Was the glib, wisecracking Mr. David Frost really fit for this role of popular Ombudsman that he was rapidly acquiring?

“It is basically a programme that trivialises some of the most sacred and significant issues of the day,” I wrote. “And because it trivialises, because it defuses social dynamite, it reaches the level of receptivity that most people have towards serious events.”

Its success, I claimed, was its ability to reduce the moot serious issues to the level of entertainment and its recogniton of the fact that TV is at its most viewable when it is devoted to the art of embarrassment.

Any implicit warning in these words was certainly not heeded by the Minister of Defence, Mr. Denis Healey, when he decided to submit himself to the Frost treatment.

The resultant confrontation confirmed to the hilt one’s deepest anxieties and fears. Here was trivialisation and embarrassment oozing out of the TV screen like some clammy overspill of burnt porridge at one of Mr. Frost’s famous breakfast parties.

It was clear that Mr. Healey thought that he was in for a nice, cosy chat along the lines that endeared Mr. Frost to to many other senior politicians who had appeared on the programme.

It would appear that the public relations machines of both major parties have come to look upon The Frost Programme as a kind of political launderette.

Politicians slightly soiled by the dirt splattered up for some vicious political fight can enter this telly detergent machine reasonably confident that when he has emerged grey will have been forced out and white forced in, the blue whitener will have done its work and every housewife will be able to tell at a glance how much cleaner he looks.

Massage

Thus when George Brown was being harassed for one of his frequent social gaffes, when Edward Heath’s popularity was at the bottom of the public opinion polls, when Ray Gunter had finished a rough tussle with the dock workers, they wore given the Frost magic massage and emerged more sparkling, more lovable and more humanised than before.

Mr. Healey had also just been through a bad spell of publicity that could have done him little good. He had been represented as one of the Cabinet Ministers who had supported the view that certain arms should be sold to South Africa.

What better way of refurbishing his image than a sensible chat with Mr. Frost, informal, heart-to-heart, non technical about defence.

What be obviously didn’t expect was the low level of debate to which he would be subjected.

He good-humouredly tried to shrug off these palpably silly questions (“Why can’t we get rid of all our armed forces and carry on with 1,000 men for ceremonial duties?” was one of Mr. Frost’s penetrating suggestions) by insisting that they were naive and that Mr. Frost’s research team had not done its homework.

Now there is one area in which interviewers like Mr. Frost are particularly sensitive. They do not like letting the public in on the secret that all their casually delivered questions are the work of backroom boys burrowing about preparing them for the frontman to deliver as if he had himself thought them up.

Mr. Frost would obviously prefer his audience to believe that he himself is the expert, ready with penetrating questions.

This time his team blundered. They had equipped him with a set of erroneous facts and childish queries and Mr. Healey had no recourse but to insist on the futility of Mr. Frost’s exercise.

Reprisal

But Mr Healeys bantering, mocking tone had quite clearly irritated the usually composed interviewer. Almost as a sort of reprisal he began to harry the Defence Minister.

What position did Mr Healey take up on the arms ban to South Africa? Mr. Frost wanted to know. Any first year student of politics could have told Mr. Frost that if the Minister had answered his question he would have broken his oath of secrecy and would have had to resign from the Cabinet immediately.

When Mr. Healey protested, Mr. Frost insisted on an answer. He was the public, he implied, and had a right to know. And anyway hadn’t the Cabinet Office already leaked this information to the Press?

Now things began to get ugly. Mr. Healey suggested Mr. Frost would have to apologise for that remark. Mr. Frost then called upon his audience to let us know what they thought of Mr. Wilson.

And when someone ya-booed that we must be pretty hard up if Mr. Wilson was the best man we could find as Prime Minister, Mr. Frost leaned back with a relieved gesture to confirm that he felt he had won the argument.

All the potential dangers of The Frost Programme were here starkly revealed. The way in which important politicians have to win their popularity as entertainers rather than thinkers or administrators, the low level of discussion in which complex, subtle, marginal issues have to be converted into blunt over-simplifications for the most ignorant voters; the suggestion that politicians who have secrets are devious and suspect, and undemocratic; the assumption that a audience no matter how unscientifically selected and assembled somehow represents “the people.”

No one wants to see political discussion off the air.

TV has a duty to probe for the truth and display politicians under the earnest glare of public scrutiny. There are serious programmes where this is done. The Frost Programme tends to turn them into clowns, puppets, or scapegoats. In the long run, that can be no good for parliamentary democracy.

The post Turning the politician into a clown not a good idea appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

ONE OF THE CONSISTENT minor mysteries of TV is its inability to use and exploit intelligent women on the screen. The concept of a female brain seems to be anathema to the box.

Fictional characters like Elsie Tanner or Emma Peel can acquire such a grip on TV audiences that they will wear black for their funerals and send them embroidered tea towels on their weddings.

Light entertainment artists like Dusty Springfield or Millicent Martin are embraced by TV with almost embarrassing haste and given the supreme accolade of named shows like Dusty or Mainly Millicent.

But it is difficult to envisage a programme called Just Dee or The Brophy Report with Dee Wells or Brigid Brophy as the centrifugal force holding together the other elements of a TV show.

It is true that in panel fames a bright woman like Lady Barnet or Olive Stephens will be accepted as long as she is doing something harmless like pitting her wits against men.

Desultory

But if she has a point-of-view, a personal philosophy, an attitude of mind which she would like to express as pungently and as forcefully as, say, Alan Whicker or David Frost or Robin Day, her days on the small screen are destined to be ruthlessly short.

Since it is an accepted fact that most TV audiences are women and that the woman’s finger dominates the TV switch, it is, indeed, odd that not a single intelligent woman has had anything but a desultory and brief flutter of prominence on TV since it began.

Baffled by this curious phenomenon, I sought some guidance from two of the most attractive and bright women that have appeared on British TV for years, Joan Bakewell and Eleanor Brown.

Joan Bakewell can be seen almost nightly on BBC-2’s Late Night Line-Up tactfully and pertly interviewing an astonishing range of people over an astonishing range of subjects. She never seems at a loss for a question, never seems baffled for a reply.

Haughty

Eleanor Bron, who has a serene, almost haughty, beauty, was one of the consistent delights of the BBC satire shows, TW3 and Not So Much A Programme, with her devastating impressions of Tory wives, American culture seekers and Hampstead intellectuals. Films now occupy most of her time.

Their faces, pretty as they are, have not yet acquired that sort of familiarity which make them instantly recognisable in a crowd.

“I’m not pestered much for autographs,” said Joan Bakewell. “Nor do I get many dirty letters or rude phone calls. Strangers tend to think they know me when they see me on the street or a bus, but that’s all.”

Nor is Eleanor Bron’s experience much different. “I get the odd pornographic letter but only a few. I’m ex-directory so there are no rude telephone calls. There is an arrested expression on people’s faces when they see me on the street that I find amusing. A lot of people tell me that I look like Eleanor Bron.

“If people do recognise me, they tend to laugh. I hope with me and not at me. Socially, it’s an advantage in starting up a conversation. They don’t ask you what you do. When they do talk to me it’s usually to ask what David Frost is really like.”

Searching for a reason for the lack of interest in women on TV, both agreed that it had little to do with the view that women are more difficult to handle in this kind of job.

“It’s certainly not true that women are more temperamental and cannot stand up to the nervous strain of television,” said Miss Bakewell. “I believe women are much tougher and can survive the pressures better than men. Most women run two lives and cope with it. Men don’t.”

Miss Bron agreed that women with families do present more problems on a job than men, but this was not an exclusive TV concern.

“Men tend to think women are more fragile and likely to crash in a crisis. But a woman in tears is no different than a man who gets drunk in a crisis. In my experience, men on TV are more often in a worse shape than women.”

Why then this reluctance to allow women a serious place on the TV screen? Eleanor Bron, discussing interviewers, came close to a pertinent answer.

“There is something not neutral about a woman,” she said. “Men in their presence tend to be either chivalrous or flirtatious.

“This tends to elicit a phoney response from men. Viewers accept a man’s interviewing as a more natural condition.

“There is also a kind of forthrightness and aggressiveness needed for good TV which is not particularly feminine. Women to be attractive have to be conciliatory, but this is not the best way to elicit responses on TV. She can’t use the true arts of a woman for getting responses which is to be gentle, sympathetic and understanding.

Gentle

“If the programme is about politics then the interviewer must be tougher. And if a woman gets tough, an audience feels threatened and put upon. It’s not natural for her to be doing it”

Joan Bakewell thought that this argument applied that were controversial in theme.

“I don’t think I would be given an interview job that demanded a muscular, tough, relentless attitude on the part of the interviewer. It’s more difficult for a woman to be rude on TV. But I don’t think interviews have to be aggressive to be successful.

“I don’t want to be a cipher on the box. I hope people will think I have attitudes. But women are emotive objects and if she feels something she tends to express it very intensely. This might annoy men who hate losing an argument to a woman on TV.

“It looks like an act of sexual aggression if a woman tries to win an argument and that’s why it would be difficult to have a female Robin Day on the screen.”

Having said this, she paused for reflection. “Of course,” she said, after a moment’s silence, “I must admit that I also mind losing arguments.”

The post The real trouble about women on TV is that they make men nervous appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

YOUTH IS THE GREAT OBSESSION OF OUR TIME. We try to cling to it. We try to emulate it. We try to understand it. Whose fault?

I suspect the credit or blame can be equally divided between advertising and TV. Those petrol ad. virility symbols (fast cars and phallic pumps), slim-line girdles, bread, soft drinks (has love never been made by a fat, old man?), exotic chocolates (sucked by sexy females undressing upstairs) and hair glosseners, teeth brighteners, smell eliminators that seem to be the exclusive prerogative of the young.

Since the young have money that they spend more indiscriminately and more rashly than the middle-aged marrieds, it is natural that the copy writers should aim their tempting illusions at the soft centre of this vulnerable market

There always have been programmes like Ready, Steady, Go and Top of the Pops with Keep Out signs for adults. And the new TV drama has been preoccupied with the sexual travails of North Country lasses in Liverpool or Cockney lads in Battersea.

Hippies

But there has of late been an increasing tendency on the part of current affairs and documentary producers to isolate youth and examine it as if it were some special social group like homosexuals or child molesters.

The activities of the hippies, the flower people, the psychedelic ravers, are analysed and probed on programmes like 24 Hours and World In Action with the same sort of anxious concern that they give to comprehensive schools or race riots.

Unable to treat young people as naturally as the weather — which is what they are — producers tend to treat their behaviour patterns either with a shrug or a wagging finger.

The Mind Alchemists, in which Michael Tuchner for the BBC examined the cult and the gospel of LSD in America, would have been a much more satisfactory programme had it toned down the accusatory touch.

“Hippies seem to be playing at life; they are apathetic, non-productive and irresponsible,” wrote Mr. Tuchner in the Radio Times, “they stand for anarchy, nihilism and self-indulgence … their version of Utopia is naive and foolish and impossible.”

The programme itself was more objective than this synopsis of Mr. Tuchner’s views, with a particularly good interview with Timothy Leary, the Messianic leader of the LSD cult.

Handsome

Not only was he handsome and articulate, but he made some telling points about the futility of many of the values American youth has been encouraged to adopt.

There was, too, a fascinating cameo of an LSD session with tour disciples being “switched-on” in an atmosphere of Oriental reverence and protocol. The looks of serene ecstasy that suffused their faces belied most of the warnings that the earnest experts on the programme gave us about the terror and panic that can be experienced under LSD.

Attractive

And I was also impressed by the ex-hippie who, after 10 years, decided he no longer needed the drug, that it had shown him his potential and that he could now adjust his life more easily to his capabilities.

After such a convincing demonstration of the drug’s benign and beneficial longterm effects, the stern denunciations of doctors and psychiatrists about the deadly dangers of LSD would probably not have discouraged any young person from an experiment if he was that way inclined.

Indeed, I suspect that the mere fact that so many figures of authority were cautioning him about the perils of the drug would nave made it all the more attractive.

The one thing that the young learn early is that warnings add spice to an adventure and that prohibitions are an invitation to action. Preaching is something they react instinctively against.

Jill Craigie’s Keep Your Hair On, also on the BBC, did not make that mistake. This was an amusing assault on perhaps the silliest prejudice that the older generation has against our present young.

Miss Craigie showed us four young men with a variety of jobs and accents who were hard-working, responsible, masculine and efficient. And who wore long hair. And why not?

The inevitable psychiatrists again offered us explanations about both the desire for long hair and the antipathy it arouses in its middle-aged opponents.

It might be that a surplus of a million men over girls has created an instinctive peacock reaction in young boys. It might be that the older generation is jealous of the sexual freedom of the young and therefore resents the symbols of that freedom.

But these are doubtful premises and Miss Craigie’s nicely edited, sharply photo graphed documentary might have been just a bit faster and neater if the psychiatrists and sociologists had been eliminated. But this was a programme that eschewed preaching, made a small telling point and, because it was less pompous, was more effective than the Mind Alchemists.

The post Long hair or LSD – the planners keep tackling young ideas appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

THE MOST INTRACTABLE problem confronting a TV critic is to convince anyone of importance or significance in this land that the little box should be taken seriously.

Yet there it is, seeping into the marrow of our society, insidiously and subtly changing habits, tastes and attitudes at a speed unprecedented in the history of mankind.

Yet how can one respect a medium, or get anyone else to respect it, when it can lavish time, money, energy and thought on programmes like The Golden Shot or To-night With Dave Allen?

Even more distressing is the fact that both of these fatuous exercises have been put on by ATV, one of the programme companies that has just had its licence renewed for another six years.

Many forms of imbecility are tolerated in the name of entertainment. A critic who lost his temper with all of them would eventually have to be put in a straight jacket [sic – Ed] before undertaking is evening’s viewing.

Appeal

But, I think, some protest must be registered when standards are being debased — even if the genre of programmes is already so low that it is rarely off its knees.

The Golden Shot is a TV game demanding less intellectual knowledge than Double Your Money and far less physical dexterity than Beat the Clock.

As such, it should make an immediate appeal to all those with neither minds nor muscles.

The sole trick demanded of a competitor is to sight a target, press a trigger and hit a bulls-eye. The only difference between this game and those shooting galleries one sees at every local fair is that the equipment is expensive, gimmicky and electronically controlled and that practically no skill is required.

The one tiny idea is repeated over and over again with only an occasional singing group to break the monotony. Sometimes the contestants direct a blindfolded cameraman to hit the target, other times they handle the instrument themselves and the big bonanza prize (100 guineas) goes to the person who can snap a thread with the steel bolt that acts as the projectile.

The repartee used by the compere, Jackie Rae, to jolly up the studio audience and the contestants has the authentic note of grim desperation.

Learning that one of the participants was named Mrs. Sadler, he brightly asked, “Not your ballet company, is it?” Most of the others he treated as if they were on a psychiatrist’s couch with reassuring phrases about how happy, content, calm, and relaxed they looked.

Not surprisingly this idea is imported from Europe, where a god deal of moronic TV comes from. I suspect most European governments are terrified of the implications of TV and are only prepared to tolerate it if it is reduced to the proportions of a national yo-yo.

Ultimate

Like most TV programmes of this sort, the ultimate appeal depends upon the cupidity of the viewer. For doing practically nothing — merely being lucky enough to be chosen — he can win a spin-dryer, a tape-recorder, or cash.

He is not embarrassed by being asked such demanding questions as who wrote Hamlet or to conclude the expression “Home sweet …” (‘Do you need some help … you know … a place people live in … h … h … ho … ho … that’s it. Home! … the jackpot prize is yours!’). As such, it should please everyone except those concerned with the dignity and the potential of the medium.

To-night With Dave Allen is a late-night conversation programme that makes the Eamonn Andrews Show sound like the Brains Trust.

Presided over by an amiable Irish comic who made his reputation imitating drunks, Dave Allen’s more intelligible contribution to the conversation are the repeated assurances that he is Irish and that he doesn’t know very much. (“All I know about tennis is the word love.” Hysterical applause!)

His guests are an embarrassing mixture of cranks, eccentrics, publicity seekers, and serious people. Even the most trivial issues are reduced to almost dwarfish proportions under Dave Allen’s prodding.

Amazed

Having Roberto de Vicenzo, the British Open golf champion, on the programme, he asked him to drive a golf ball. The studio audience, by their rapturous applause, seemed amazed that he could do it.

An expert on etiquette was asked the provocative question: “What about general etiquette — sitting down, standing, walking?” On this vital issue a girl in a mini-skirt showed she could keep her knees together.

A night club singer, trying to raise support for a musical, sang a song with lines like: “Whatever happened to the guy named Joe. Who asked me to marry him and I said no.” which should not make her task much easier.

And Nicholas Monsarrat, the novelist, was being asked questions about The Cruel Sea, which he wrote almost 20 years ago, and had to stand round shuffling while listening to an idiosyncratic justification of the flat earth theory which was cut off just as the speaker was going to tell us about some flying saucers that landed in Dover last week.

The post This is television without any of its dignity appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

THE BBC’s decision to pay no attention to a petition asking that the Black and White Minstrel Show be dropped because “it causes much distress to most coloured people” has made some well-meaning people snarl with indignant anger.

What conceivable harm would it do the show, asked a fierce lady on Three After Six [Rediffusion’s post-news magazine programme – Ed], if the men merely washed the black off their faces? Wouldn’t that protect the sensitive souls of a minority group?

The answer, of course, is that it would destroy the Black and White Minstrel Show entirely and substitute something else.

Indeed, the BBC did try to do just that thing with all-white cowboys and cowgirls, directed in much the same manner as the Minstrel Show, and the experiment never caught on.

Take the cork oil their faces and you would have to change the costumes, the choreography, the choice of songs. In other words, you would have a different show.

Ah, and what harm would that do, I can hear the fierce lady asking. No special harm except that something now enjoyed by 13 million viewers would no longer be there to be enjoyed.

But, assuming Sir Hugh Greene bowed to this tiny clamour, what then? Sensitive Pakistanis and Indians would demand that Michael Bentine drop his sing-song jokes about them.

Africans would insist that John Bird never again be allowed to say, “Hello, fans,” when he gives his impression of an African head of state. There would be no Irish, Welsh, Jewish, Scots, American jokes for fear someone might be offended.

But in addition to the undemanding pleasure it gives me, I have always thought that The Black and White Minstrel Show was one of the few programmes on the air that effectively preached and practised racial tolerance.

It is the only programme that regularly shows coloured men — even if only in black make-up – cuddling, cooing, loving and courting white girls.

Not only do they talk of sharing love nests together, making whoopee, having rooms for two and maybe three, and whispering of love so soft and low, but the girls — white girls — quite definitely indicate by their smiles and wiggles and nods that they are actually enjoying it.

I have always thought that this was a programme that white racists might complain about. But never Negroes.

The post Please leave the Minstrels their cork appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

THE inexplicable ups and downs of BBC comedy give a critic an acute feeling of vertigo. They run the gamut from hilarious genius to abysmal piffle with apparently bland indifference.

It hardly seems credible that the same administrative minds that wars ready to sponsor such comedy breakthrough as “Steptoe and Son” and “Till Death Us Do Part” should also be responsible for such trite concepts as “The Illustrated Weekly Hudd” and their latest effort, “The Reluctant Romeo.”

Centred around Leslie Crowther, a pleasant, knock-about comedian with some gift for mimicry. It concerned his efforts as an advertising man to get a contract to sell spaghetti.

His sales technique was to pretend to be the senior member of the firm and to promise a passionate Italian lady, who owned the spaghetti business, to marry her.

Suction

When the signorina turned up at the office determined to kiss Mr. Crowther like a frantic suction pump and with a quaint line of accepted dialogue like “I love you from the heart of my bottom,” the entire office joined in the conspiracy to hide Mr. Crowther’s real identity.

Stated baldly in this way there is a thin thread of discernible logic running through the plot But the scriptwriters, George Evans and Derek Collyer, were not concerned with situation comedy but situation anarchy.

Whatever relevance the story had to an advertising agency quickly vanished since the running about from office to office, the donning of beards and wigs, the mugging and the falling down, might just as readily have been set in a plutonium plant or a gherkin factory.

Such jokes as there were depended not upon wit but often upon sly sexual innuendoes given to innocuous lines by a tilt of an eyebrow or a leer in the voice.

Samples: “I just have to explain to this lady how I made her a mother … I can’t get enough of it … You should see the look that comes in my eyes when I’m stirring my dumplings.”

Dismal

The cheap and facile way of getting an easy laugh more and more betokens the inventive poverty of writers. Eric Fawcett, the producer, should force them to work harder by blue-pencilling most of these dismal excuses for gags.

“It’s my first real chance as a character actor,” Leslie Crowther is quoted as saying in the Radio Times. If be believes that he will believe anything.

What character? What chance? This is Mr. Crowther almost exactly as I remember him on the children’s programme, “Crackerjack,”‘ and not nearly so funny.

And if one were looking for an explanation to the erratic quality of BBC comedy snows, I think we have a clue here.

“The Reluctant Romeo” was probably conceived in some office in the Light Entertainment hierarchy at the BBC when someone brightly said: “Let’s find a vehicle for Leslie Crowther.”

Thereupon the story line, the dialogue, the environment was tailored for Mr. Crowther’s personality. Which meant finding something for a quick gagster, a painful mugger, an amiable face and a well-meaning blank.

The sensible thing, of course, would have been to allow two writers to develop a series with nothing but their imaginations to guide them and, then, get the right man to fit the script. Leslie Crowther if be could do it. Someone else, if he couldn’t.

“Steptoe and Son” were the creations of Galton and Simpson. Harry Corbett and Wilfred Brambell became successful TV comics because they adapted themselves to the characters of two junk merchants.

Johnny Speight conceived of the grotesque, hilarious family in “Till Death Us Do Part” and Warren Mitchell achieved instant fame as the unspeakable Alf Garnett.

Contours

In these two comic series, the most successful ever done on British TV, the funniest men on the small screen were merely versatile actors with no special reputation as comic geniuses before they fitted themselves into their roles.

Compare this record with those shows where the scripts were hand-tailored to fit the contours of comics like Roy Hudd, Lance Percival, Charlie Drake, Roy Kinnear and, now, Leslie Crowther. Desperate, all of them. Vehicles that became hearses. Laughter only good for canning.

Sometimes, of course, the technique works. Benny Hill and Frankie Howerd are honourable exceptions. But only great comics, like these two. can get away with it. There is a lesson here somewhere, I think. I hope.

The post The (too) easy laugh that kills so many TV comedy shows appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

“THERE HAS always been a disparity between the critical attention paid to plays and feature programmes on the one hand, and series and serials on the other. Yet it is the series and the serials that are, for most people, the staple diet of television viewing.”

The quote comes from this year’s report of the Independent Television Authority. I presume this means that in the Authority’s view critics get more fussed about This Week or Armchair Theatre than about such long-running, immovable dinosaurs of the TV scene as Emergency – Ward 10 or Coronation Street.

Since inertia is the most prevalent occupational disease in TV, it could be that critics are also in danger of catching it.

Disgust

I suppose there is a limit to the amount of times you can go on expressing disgust, resentment, annoyance or irritation with programmes like Double Your Money or the Eamonn Andrews Show without being accused of conducting a personal vendetta against their producers, their stars or the company’s board of directors.

In other fields of art or entertainment, there are other sanctions backing up or rejecting critical opinion. The most powerful, of course, is financial.

But the BBC with its monopoly licence position and ITV with its monopoly advertising position are immune to almost any sort of pressure – with the possible exception of a discreet nod from someone on Cabinet level.

As long as they play safe, do not shock, subdue life to the lowest level of receptivity, they can thumb their noses at both critical and public opinion in the sure knowledge that their annual income will not be affected.

Worst

A programme like Crossroads, for instance, if it were made into a film would empty the most undiscriminating flea pits in the land. If it were put on the stage, it would be about as popular as Epilogues at the Atheists’ Convention.

Yet there it is, spread across the nation, not once a week like The Power Game, or twice a week like Coronation Street, but no less than five times a week.

When I first wrote about Crossroads over a year ago, it was an afternoon programme. “In this environment,” I said, “life is shrunk to the dimensions of a dried pea being pushed into a small hole by a lazy snail. Nothing is generated; nothing is achieved; nothing is finished. The nation is reduced to the status of watchers at a construction site where the workers are on strike.”

The result of strictures like this – most of my colleagues have been even more abusive and derisive than this relatively kind assessment – has been that Crossroads has been promoted to an evening spot just on the edge of peaktime.

Thus, one of the worst programmes on the air now gets over two hours per week of screen time – more than twice as much as any other adult programme on British TV.

Masquerade

As a series, its most unique feature is the total forgetability of most of its characters. With the possible exception of Marilyn, the Cockney barmaid, they are ciphers masquerading as people and they fade out of one’s conscious and one’s memory with the credit titles.

The plots have the sameness of pub conversation and not since the age of four when I was confronted with a crisis about sugar on my semolina have I been asked to occupy my thoughts with such trivial and mundane issues.

The Flying Swan, a better series on the same theme, was quickly smothered by the BBC when presumably they realised what it was doing to their reputation.

The post The time has come to smother Crossroads appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

WHEN I WAS in television a few years back, a favourite pastime of executives was trying to dream up backgrounds upon which a new series could be pinned.

The difficulty was that almost everything had been exhausted. Lawyers, hospitals, schools, factories, board-rooms, airports, civil service, luxury flats, working-class streets, hotels, shops and, needless to say, spies.

Since then clear evidence of desperation can be detected nightly with activities swirling around football clubs, motels, new towns, blackmailers, police spies and country cousins.

The trouble with most of these subjects is that they are basically undramatic. In truth little ever happens to these people and their days are usually as uneventful as that of real estate agents in the Sahara.

Thus the producer of Intrigue, Robert Banks Stewart, is evidently having a trying time finding plots that bear some relevance to his brief.

The inspiration for this series is obvious enough. If the public enjoys the boardroom intrigue of The Power Game and the mystery of a spy series like Danger Man, why not something that marries business and espionage?

I can just imagine the congratulatory back-slapping that went on at ABC’s weekly Creative Meeting when some bright spark put this one on the agenda.

There has been a good deal of industrial espionage, but what shennanigans really go on by which the secret of a raised hem-line or a new coloured toothpaste is stolen from a business rival?

Inevitably a private eye figure, burly Edward Judd, is the central character, equipped with sofa-strewn office and a hot-and-cold running secretary in the shape of the delectable Caroline Mortimer.

The episode, That’s What’s Pushing the Price Up, by Paul Finney, seen a fortnight ago, was about the efforts of some unscrupulous car manufacturers to buy a photograph of a new car model being secretly tested by a rival firm.

Their aim was to publicise the fact that a radical new model was about to be put on the market by their competitor and this news would mean that no one would buy their present model because it would soon be out of date.

Unable to market their current crop of cars, the firm, already financially shaky, would be an easy victim for a take-over bid.

All this seems to me to be a reasonable enough Machiavellian situation and plausibility was never too seriously outraged.

Even the price offered for the photograph had a nice austerity ring in these days when car manufacturers are unlikely to have two share bonuses to rub together and when taking over another car manufacturer may not be as digestible a process as it used to be.

There were some clever character vignettes – Michael Harrington as a rapacious tycoon was particularly good – and the denouement in which the photographs were seen to contain no information at all had a genuine ring of truth.

The merit of this episode was that the plot had some relevance to credibility. Although some of the characters were over-drawn and some of the plotting was superficial, it was basically a likely situation that kept you watching because of its authenticity.

But last week’s episode, Cut Price, Cut Throat, by Paul Lee, was inglorious gibberish that shows up this type of series at its worst.

The contest this time was over the sale of a clothing contract to some European customer who was inevitably fat, bald and slightly sinister because he liked good music.

To gain their ends the villainous clothing manufacturers would stop at nothing-seduction of beautiful Latin women, hiring of sinister Italian thugs, bribery of police, kidnapping, beatings, blackmail, threatened murder.

Russian agents trying to wrest anti-anti-missile blueprints from Cape Kennedy would not have been more violently sinister than these rag-trade gentlemen eager to make a wholesale deal on the Continent.

While commending their zeal to break into the export market, I hardly think the Board of Trade is yet ready to condone guerilla warfare to establish our right to sell mini-skirts in Milan.

Mr. Robert Banks Stewart, the producer, should now take a look at the rest of the scripts he has lined up for this series.

Before deciding to put them into production he should ask himself if the plots are really concerned with industrial espionage or if industrial espionage is merely being used as an excuse for some trite thuggery to fill up a mindless Friday evening.

Glossy sets. heavy breathing villains, aimless violence, lavish spending, svelte females have little to do with the routine business in this country which tends to be involved with timid executives, dreary offices. dowdy wives and every penny watched by eagle-eyed accountants.

But a series like Intrigue would be far more effective if it concentrated on authenticity at the expense of glamour.

The post Clear evidence of desperation among the boys who write those crime series appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

Milton Shulman has
some astringent comments
to make on U.S. imports

WHENEVER British TV seems to have reached its nadir, there is always the consolation that its general output is higher technically, intellectually and dramatically than the average American programme.

No American police series has achieved the veracity, originality and authenticity of Z-Cars. None of their domestic comedy shows have the edge, bite or inventiveness of Steptoe and Son or Till Death Us Do Part.

QUALITY LACKING

They have nothing in the field of satire and wit to compare with Not So Much a Programme or Not Only… But Also. Their serious drama is practically non-existent. And the quality of their programmes about the arts and current affairs is well behind ours.

Observant readers will have noticed that all the British programmes I have named have come from the BBC. With the best will in the world, I have tried to recall a recent ITV series or programme that we could be proud of. With the possible exception of This Week, I can think of none.

The qualities most lacking in American programmes are daring and imagination. They are in the grip of a philosophical bogey known as Americanism.

ANARCHY, CONTEMPT

In this context Americanism used to be identified with red-blooded independence, one-man-against-the-crowd, irreverent anarchy, suspicion of manners, contempt for conformity, resistance to authority.

In the entertainment world it nurtured talents like the Marx Brothers, Chaplin, Will Rogers, Lenny Bruce, Mort Bahl; it spawned biting and angry films like Lost Week-end, Fury, Modern Times, The Snake Pit, Dr. Strangelove, Nothing Sacred; it stimulated directors like Fritz Lang, Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, Lewis Milestone, Stanley Kubrick.

But in TV, Americanism means none of these things. The American way of life, judging from the small screen, means fear of the boss, reconciliation to violence, awe of authority, eagerness to be accepted, terror of loneliness, obsessive obsequiousness to religion, the omnipotence of law and order, fawning adulation of the family image, compulsive patriotism, reverence for good taste, and an imnibus [sic] creed that welfare and conscience of the individual must be subservient to the welfare and conscience of the community or State.

GUIDING VALUES

By and large these are the values and motives that guide the scriptwriters and producers of programmes like Perry Mason, Peyton Place, Bonanza, The Fugitive, Bewitched, Dr. Kildare, Dick Van Dyke Show, The Lucy Show, The FBI and, oddly enough, even The Munsters.

They rock no boats, rattle no skeletons, question no accepted truths, mock no authoritative postures. They are the mental chewing gum of a society that wants its TV to produce only the fleeting flavour but never the continuing substance of real life.

For many months now there has hardly been a single American show that has reached the top twenty rated programmes.

And if I am told that this is just an accident of networking, it is clear from a study of the individual regional ratings that only Peyton Place has any substantial following in local areas.

Of course, to dismiss all American TV as vapid and toothless would be an unfair and stupid generalisation. The Defenders, in the framework of a crusading commentary on the inequalities of American justice, has often produced some gripping and telling episodes.

INCREDIBLY HUMOURLESS

But most of the American shows we see here have nothing but their slickness to recommend them.

The dialogue is banal and the issues spurious in the series which aim at something dramatic. The comic programmes, with the exception of the Dick Van Dyke Show, are incredibly humourless and rely upon the crutch of maniacal laughter tracks to reinforce the illusion that they are actually funny.

EVERYONE OFFENDABLE

This standard of taste and entertainment may be all that is possible in a medium that relies exclusively on advertising for its finance and therefore has to be guided by the precept “Thou shalt not offend” in a land where everyone is offendable.

But why should these programmes be foisted on us when it is quite clear that we can make better programmes of our own that our own people will much prefer?

The ration of 14 per cent foreign programmes that is allowed to ITV means in practice that the quota is used up almost exclusively for the purchase of popular American series. It means that on Channel Nine we see very little of serious American documentaries (which are often very good) and almost nothing of programmes that come from the Continent.

THOUGHT NEEDED

It is time, I think, that some thought be given to a more realistic quota formula. Instead of lumping the 14 per cent into a “foreign” category why shouldn’t it be divided, let us say, into three per cent foreign other than American, two per cent nonfiction American and nine per cent fiction American?

Some such device would guarantee that we saw something from America other than its muck would limit the American series shown here to only the best available (and a nine per cent would amply assure that) and would encourage an interchange of programmes to the Continent.

Alternatively, we could say to the Americans that we would show on British TV exactly the same percentage of American programmes as they show British programmes on American TV. And they would hardly like that.

The post These are among the TV shows I call toothless and vapid appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

One of the nastiest is Alex. Lambert of The Informer, who has temporarily replaced Sergeant Lockhart of “No Hiding Place” as Rediffusion’s man with the TAM appeal.

It has been consistently high in the ratings since it first appeared some six weeks ago.

Without wanting to be over-priggish, I find the glamorisation of a stool pigeon, the romanticisation of a cheapjack Lazarus, a rather clammy device for hooking popular audiences.

If Lord Hill is seriously concerned about the corrupting influence of programmes that appear on the air before nine p.m. – the wasteland reserved for programmes not unsuitable for children – then I suggest he consider some of the moral implications of “The Informer.”

“I didn’t realise what a fascinating subject informing was until we started researching for the programme,” cooed Stella Richmond, its executive producer, in a recent interview.

If you read that sentence quickly you might have thought Miss Richmond’s bubbling enthusiasm was related to some harmless activity like shrimping, or stamp collecting, or skin diving.

It was not. She was talking about the fascination of “informing.” Selling people to the police, not because of any sense of duty or conscience or moral responsibility, but purely for money.

Handsome

And Alex. Lambert, the disbarred barrister turned copper’s nark, does very well, thank you very much, out of betrayal. He’s handsome, has a sardonic grin, lives in sumptuous surroundings, wears Saville Row suits, eats in the best restaurants, drives fast cars, has a pretty, devoted wife, is adored by a ravishing girl friend, keeps no regular hours, moves freely in artistic circles and, apparently, has no overdraft problems.

Such a life and such a hero might well warrant emulation in the young. Why not Alex. Lambert fan clubs? Membership open to all those who have reported that Mom hasn’t renewed the TV licence and that Dad has cheated on his income tax.

It is, perhaps, arguable that an originality in approach, brilliant, adult dialogue, imaginative stories with a sardonic thrust and drive, characters whose motivations are intelligently probed and portrayed, might have justified the part the informer plays in a society groping for acceptable values.

But nothing like this is remotely attempted in “The Informer.” Its routine thug-ear plots are well below the least ingenious efforts of Edgar Wallace or Peter Cheyney.

Irritating

Hardly any effort is made at plausibility and it is extremely irritating to find the script-writers blithely contemptuous of such obvious plot mechanics as the fundamental one about how Alex. Lambert gets his information in the first place.

We sometimes see him conveniently watching a rehearsal for a smash-and-grab. Or picking up a casual piece of notepaper on his girl-friend’s desk (who, incidentally, is a lady with more mysterious contacts than a supernatural octupus) which just leads him to some nefarious skulduggery.

Having saddled themselves with characters and a story-line they have no credible viability, the writers constantly slow up the action paying lip-service to the demands of continuity.

The wife, played with crunching, repetitive sincerity by Heather Sears, is ignorant of her husband’s profession and, therefore, has to put on the same look of pained surprise when he gets into bed with her regularly at four in the morning.

Her dialogue consists largely of endless permutations on the line “I don’t like sitting/standing/lying here at home/in bed twiddling my fingers” and her moods vary between flouncing anger at his curt explanations and wifely forgiveness when he takes her out to a meal.

The girl friend, who must be the most frustrated glamour girl in modern TV, can ooze sex and suggestion all over Lambert, but the minute she touches his hand or invite him along to her flat for a longer evening he scurries off too his wife. Any virile man who can do that week after week to a girl looking like Jean Marsh surely needs some serious medical advice.

Together with the enigmatic, purposeless Lambert himself – whose perpetual frown must be due to the fact that he can’t think of any fresh place in which to meet his police contact now that they have exchanged secrets in museums, steam baths, morgues, airports and gent’s lavs – they make a rum, hollow trio.

The farrago of stolen paintings, neurotic wives and Edwardian super-crooks owed much to “Danger Man” and “The Avengers” without at any time touching the authentic suspense element or the wry mocking tone of either of these series.

Although Ian Hendry plays Lambert with a nice detached coolness, and although the directorial pace sometimes glibly disguises the flaws in story and conception (I should also say that the sound quality in some of these episodes has been atrocious), its technical facility is not good enough to justify the cheap, nasty values that are glorified in the person of Alex. Lambart the informer.

The post He’s nasty and he’s a stoolpigeon yet a great many viewers like to see him appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

THE RESTAURANT we had arranged to eat in was closed.

I was waiting for her outside. She came swinging along the cluttered street as if she’d just foiled another botanist ready to take over the West with a blood-sucking vegetable or another dentist poised to mesmerise mankind with a high-speed dental drill.

She shrugged at the food news. “What about a Wimpy Bar” she said, trying to be helpfuL

I had a better suggestion in Greek Street where interview facilities are cosier.

In the taxi she said that she’d been whistled at as she walked through Covent Garden. Since it was taking my own lips some effort to remain unpuckered, I was not unduly surprised.

With her tight, black velvet dress provocatively arrested at mini length, her long auburn hair shimmering on her shoulders, her high cheek-boned face with its swamp-like eyes and teasing freckles, she was eminently whistleable at.

Memories

“They didn’t know who I was. And it’s only five months since the last Avenger was on the box. That shows you how long the public remembers you these days.”

She seemed genuinely pleased at this prospect of instant anonymity.

“Being a telly star hasn’t made all that difference, you know.” Disarming candour it one of Diana Rigg’s most pleasing virtues. “Men used to look at me before because I’m attractive. When the Avengers is actually on the screen, women clutch each other and whisper when they see me in a supermarket But in less than six months the image fades. Now the face is only vaguely familiar.”

I hadn’t intended to start the interview in the taxi but it seemed to be fining nicely.

One word

“If you could think of one word to describe yourself, what would it be? ”

You could hear the meter ticking in the long pause.

“Tall.”

I paid off the taxi.

Over the meal we discussed the life and times of Emma Peel and what it felt like to be a television star in a popular aeries. She starts shooting another Avenger series this week. Twenty-four of them with American distribution.

“While Emma Peel as a character is emancipated in most areas, she’s not emancipated sexually. No man reacts to me as if I was a woman. They all call me Mrs. Peel.

Pats

“Patrick MacNee, as Steed, pats me like a shire horse from time to time. My relations with Steed are, to put it mildly, ambiguous. Let’s say they’re not active whenever we’re on the screen. They may have been in the past. Or might be in the future.”

She indicated annoyance with this script insistence on passion Anglaise.

“It may have begun with the original idea for my widowhood. My husband was a test pilot killed in an accident. Inevitably that made me very sympathetic, clean and orthodox. I’d have been much happier if they had told me I’d eaten my husband or something else outrageous.”

She hasn’t taken lessons in judo or jiu-jitsu.

“I know how to do the necessary gestures and movements. I can now fight with a man.” She paused. “But not in earnest.”

Had she thought about the appeal of a fighting woman?

Uneasy

“At first men sat back and roared with laughter. Then they became slightly uneasy about it. It could be true! And they began to like that insecurity. Men like to be threatened. And a predatory woman? I think most of them adore the prospect of being seduced.”

What about money?

What about money?

“I now have more money than I’ve ever had in my life and through money I’ve discovered more freedom in my life. That’s all.

“I have the freedom to stop work next year. Or do Shakespeare. And I have the pleasure of being able to buy things for myself and other people. The only thing that worries me is the tax I have to pay on it.” She gave me the impression that taxes were something new in her life.

Since the natural corollary of money in a woman’s mind is men, we moved on to them.

“I’ve always been chary of marriage. At 17 I dreamt of an early marriage and motherhood. But by the time I was 22 I didn’t identify with it anymore. I play everything by instinct, and I know, even though I’m in my late twenties, that marriage at this moment would be a disaster for me.”

She readily admitted that she was in love.

Marriage

“But I don’t think we’re likely to get married.” She shrugged off any more questions on the point. “Anyway I wouldn’t many now because marriage might make me turn down work. It’s not the disease of ambition. I have only one specific ambition and that’s to work.”

As a girl brought up in the serious theatre, does she think her fame as Emma Peel makes her a success?

“On the basis of TAM ratings and fan letters, I’m probably a success. Incidentally I don’t know what to do with fan letters. I have most of them bundled up — unanswered — in the back of my Mini.

Success

“But if success means doing what I set out to do and doing it properly, then I’m not so sure. That’s why I went back to Stratford-on-Avon to do Viola in Twelfth Night. It’s really a one-dimensional career doing the same role over and over again. I doubt if I’ll do it for much longer.”

Over the coffee, she became more reflective.

“I’ve had no serious offer for work in the cinema. I was always considered a serious actress and not suitable. But Vanessa Redgrave in Morgan has changed all that. But now that I’m a TV actress, the cinema doesn’t like mixing one image with another. Anyway I’d turn down a film part if it was just asking me to do another Emma Peel.

Lessons

“From an acting standpoint, TV’s taught me an economy of style that I didn’t have before. But Emma’s easy for me to do because I’m playing a part that’s 75 pc my own personality. Not the fighting, swinging lady, but the way I come into a room, the way I hitch my trousers, the way I flirt.”

She had to go. She was looking at a new mews house. She was finally giving up the small mews flat she’d lived in for many years.

“I’m much less lonely now, but otherwise things are much the same as they used to be. And when I finish this next series of the Avengers, I’m out of work as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know what I want to do next. And that’s how I like it”

The post Please don’t call me Emma pleads the eminently whistleable at Diana Rigg appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

THE BBC were perfectly right in showing “Matador”, their astonishingly frank and brutal account of bullfighting in Spain.

As a piece of technical film-making, I was not particularly impressed with it. I thought much more might have been done to capture the actual balletic and poetic quality of a matador in action.

It is quite true that El Cordobes, a beatnik toreador with a face blending the arrogance of Nureyev and the contempt Brando, seems to prefer a brawl in the sand rather than an elegant pas de deux.

But if to the initiated his cape-work is ungraceful and his killing is clumsy, it was even more necessary to balance the brutality of the occasion with some evidence of its aesthetic appeal. If El Cordobes himself could not provide it then there were other matadors who obviously could.

The aura surrounding El Cordobes himself was, also, I thought, much too sycophantic and uncritical. Alan Whicker’s commentary too often quivered with the kind of images beloved by aficionados who tend to identify bullfights with passion plays.

His domestic life was handled in a perfunctory manner and no attempt was made to probe the inner motives of this young man who started life as a layabout and could now earn £6,000 [£93,000 in today’s money, allowing for inflation – Ed] in an afternoon.

A shock

It came as a shock to me that he was almost illiterate. If he could barely read, who, then, was handling his millions? Who were his advisers and what sort of entourage did he have? How much of his success was due to shrewd publicity exploitation and how much to his skill as a torero?

But if the programme failed in telling us much about El Cordobes, it certainly revealed to the uninitiated why so many condemn the sport as “an obscene spectacle.”

The camera never turned away at the moment of truth. There were the bulls, blades vibrating in their flanks, kneeling in almost pathetic supplication for their end.

And as they collapsed beneath the final, imperious blow, the crowd roared its appreciation of this ultimate identification with death.

We saw, too, bulls dripping blood from their mouths, horses being gored, and the final humiliation of the noble animal as its carcase was dragged off in the dust to the limbo of the abattoir.

For me producer Kevin Billington’s shrewdest stroke was in not stopping there. We followed the bull to its destined end. The body was dismembered gutted and disembowelled by butchers ankle deep in blood before an audience composed chiefly of grinning, laughing children. And it was this sight that, for me at least, put the whole thing in its proper perspective. That was the fate man had decreed for all bulls and cows. In Cheltenham as well as Madrid.

Could I really complain about the fate of this particular bull when I looked forward to a good entrecote or fillet when I sat down to a meal? And should I be more sickened for contemplating the sight of potential steaks in the abattoir of a bull-ring than in the more respectable environs of my local butcher shop?

Ah, it will be argued, but British steaks do not come from the torturing of bulls! Not having the bull’s own word for it, I would think it would need some really metaphysical arguing to prove that an animal’s death in the heat, excitement and passion of a fight against an adversary was worse in terms of pain and experience than being cold-bloodedly shuffled in a mooing queue to the indignity of a pole-axe or some other form of convenient extermination.

Degrading?

Does it then degrade the spectator or the participant? Will any fisherman, playing with a difficult trout or salmon for minutes on end tell me that he is ever conscious of the pain suffered by the fish as it struggles to free itself from the implacable hook ripping at its jaw?

What about the grouse or the partridge that has been brought back by the retriever with its eyes still blinking to prove that it is still pathetically alive?

Or the housewife, with a respect for good food, who knows that lobsters taste better if they are flung into boiling water still alive? Or the delicious pate de foie gras that comes from the unthinkable torture inflicted on geese?

It may be argued that while these things are true, there is no need for revealing the details of our cruelty in television. We should not, for example, produce a documentary showing in vivid close-ups the agony of a doomed fish or a bird or a fox or a stag, all of which give as much pleasure to Englishmen as the death of a bull gives to Spaniards.

Moral

Either we feel it is perfectly moral and right for us to shoot game and eat meat. If so, why should we not face up to the consequences our pleasures and appetites inflict on other creatures?

Or, alternatively, it is immoral for us to satisfy ourselves at the expense of other creatures. If this is so, we should not make documentary programmes about bullfighting or salmon salmon fishing. But at the same time, we should all become vegetarians, ban blood sports, stop carrying crocodile handbags, and give up fur coats.

I am sure if we did all that, there would immediately spring up a society for the prevention of cruelty to carrots and cauliflowers.

Although there is no doubt about the shocking and sickening elements of some bits of “Matador,” I have been assured by the BBC that the volume of response from outraged and disgusted viewers has been far less than they had anticipated.

Technique

Indeed, it may be that the BBC have hit upon an ideal method of deflecting criticism from their more controversial programmes.

The technique would seem to be to announce in advance that the hierarchy in Broadcasting House has been going through some profound heart-searching about the desirability of showing some particular programme.

At the very mention of the topic concerned – bullfighting, nuclear war, dope addiction, abortion, birth control – the pressure groups will be put baying down telephones with their protests or thrashing the air with furious threats of unspeakable retaliations.

But since no one will have seen the programme, the fury and anger will be lashing itself against an invisible and futile target.

When this emotional cascade has finally spent itself, the BBC then releases its programme in the trough of the resultant calm. Everyone is by now too fed up with the arguments they have already heard, or exhausted by their previous efforts to start the whole thing all over again so soon after its earlier outburst.

Since, in any case, the social consequences of a single programme on the BBC about anything at all will never remotely live up to the dire predictions of virulent partisans, the affair will pass off relatively quietly with the pressure groups pleased they aired their views, the BBC satisfied that it performed its public service duty, and the vast majority of viewers satisfied that they have caught a glimpse of life and experience that might otherwise have been denied them.

War game

I am sure that by this logic, the BBC could now safely show The War Game with hardly a tremor of reaction from those who had opposed its showing before.

It has already been widely seen in cinemas. It has just won a major award at an important TV festival. It would need far less courage on the BBC’s part to transmit The War Game now than it did to decide to devote three solid weeks to World Cup football. And they might be just as pleasantly surprised and gratified by its reception.

That Adamant business

THE PRODUCERS of Adamant on BBC television thought this was an opportunity for some satirical send-ups of modern life.

Not only was Adamant to be shocked by such devilish aspects of contemporary living as advertising executives, the escalators in the Underground and miniskirts, but his old-fashioned skill with his fists, his walking stick sword and his baleful eye would triumph over guns and hypnotic carnations.

The strain of trying to fit an Edwardian Dr. Who into the with-in world of Soho and Piccadilly has rapidly exhausted the imagination of its scriptwriters.

The dialogue has had to reach the subterranean levels of this exchange. “I suppose you wanted to see Mickey Mouse,” asks someone ironically of Adamant. “Oh, is he your managing director?” replies our hero.

A recent episode concerned Adamant’s adventures in the brain washing world of advertising, and it was like watching an episode of The Avengers with Diana Rigg’s hands tied behind her back.

His victories are not only improbable but incredible. The Sherlock Holmes fighting stance and the unsmiling self-righteousness of Gerald Harper has already begun to bore. And the mixture of kiddeywink frolics and camp (in the self-derisory sense) TV is indigestible.

Slipshod

Adamant often reveals slipshod production values.

Particularly irritating are the street sequences where the chases are often accompanied by the sight of gawking bystanders obviously watching the filming and not excluded from the scenes because the director presumably couldn’t get them out of the way.

It is far too long – it would have its problems sustaining a half-hour show let alone an hour. It is slotted at an hour which indicates a pious hope that it might attract adult viewers rather than little ones. And, with the exception of Gerald Harper, the cast displays an uncertainty of purpose only matched by the dialogue.

Adam Adamant will no doubt soon be returning to the block of ice from which he came.

The post Was it right for the BBC to show all this brutality in the bullring? appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

I AM a sports addict. Any game involving kicking, hurling, throwing, catching, bouncing, punching or hitting a ball is bound to rivet my attention.

The sight of horses leaping, running, trotting, bucking or hurdling will attract both my time and my money. Two men attempting to knock each other’s brains out in a ring fascinates me, the jockeying for position in a six- mile marathon absorbs me, the daring of ski-jumpers risking their limbs in wondrous leaps thrills me. Indeed. I cannot resist any
competitive contest involving the use of muscular, physical or mental skill. Only wrestling on TV bores me because I have long since ceased to believe in its authenticity.

But like all addicts I am beginning to worry about my passion. What started as a hobby has now be come compulsive; what should have been reserved for my leisure hours now occupies a good part of my working day.

Duels

Three weeks ago I settled down to write a long article about the theatre which would not only have earned me a respectable but sum would have brought in much needed foreign currency to this country.

But Wimbledon was being transmitted by the BBC all afternoon and a good deal of the evening and I found myself absorbed by such strategic duels as the Santana-Davidson match and the Bueno-Jones struggle.

Then came the five-day Test match. Again I had to switch on. This time my mornings were disrupted because those white-clad figures started out-manoeuvring each other at 11.30 in the morning and went on matching skill and wits until 6.30 in the evening. There was barely time to get a meal in, let alone write an article.

Wasted

And now we are in the throes of three solid weeks of World Cup which means that the odd evening I used to devote to writing has now been washed out for me.

The hours wasted in this compulsive gawking has naturally meant that my productivity over the past three weeks has been materially reduced, my article is not yet finished and both my personal finances and the country’s balance of payments has suffered.

I think there is formidable evidence that my mania or disease (whichever you prefer to call it) is spreading like a plague throughout the land.

Secretaries are leaving their typewriters to watch tennis. Executives and salesmen stop administering or selling to see how long the Graveney-Cowdrey stand will survive and night workers will not doubt be leaving their lathes and machines to discover what England is doing against France.

Now there is nothing startling about our preoccupation with sport.

But what was once an eccentric indulgence we could afford is in danger of becoming a maniac obsession which we can no longer afford.

The Government is constantly urging us to raise our productivity by about three per cent. What that means in man hours worked, I have no idea.

Crazy

But I would guess that the increase in man-hours wasted through watching sports in the past year or two has seriously affected the total productivity of this country.

And for this encouragement to watch rather than work, I think TV, particularly the BBC, is largely responsible. By making the country sports crazy, the BBC is certainly diminishing our productive potential.

Stimulated

Let us examine something like horse racing. There can be no doubt that the televising of horse races has not only increased interest in the sport but has stimulated a startling growth in gambling and bred a vast army of fresh punters.

There are something like 16,000 betting shops in Britain and during any afternoon each one of them has its quota of taxi drivers, manual workers, clerks, salesmen, etc., lingering on the premises betting and waiting for results.

I am sure that it could be said that something like two million man hours per day are lost because of horses and greyhounds.

As if this were not enough, the BBC commentators and publicists use every exhortation and trick in their vocabulary to get viewers to the goggle box during working hours.

When the BBC decided that they would start transmitting the second day of the last Test an hour earlier in the morning, the good news was announced repetitively with joyous enthusiasm and one commentator urged viewers to tell everyone in ‘factories and offices’ that they could now watch cricket earlier than anticipated.

Priorities

And now the decision by the BBC to fill the screen for three weeks with football.

Not only does it blandly alienate viewers who do not care about football and hand over on a plate to the other channel a once-loyal audience probably numbering millions, but it indicates a sense of priorities which is out of touch with the prevailing sense of urgency and crisis which the country has to face.

The argument that the BBC was morally bound to devote this time to football because an event like the World Cup takes place in this country only once in 40 years is both specious and naive.

There are far more important events that take place in this country – events meaning much more to our tradition, our image, our well-being, our purpose than football – that the BBC would never contemplate honouring in this unprecedented fashion.

The 440th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth – and event that can hardly be said to occur with regular frequency – was not celebrated by a week’s peak time viewing of his plays let alone three weeks.

A duty?

Would the preparations for the launching of a British rocket to the moon or the details of a British discovery of a cure for cancer or even a successful London conference on disarmament be considered worthy of two evenings’ peak-time viewing, let alone three weeks?

By enshrining football in such a unique pride of place in its schedules and thoughts, the BBC undoubtedly expects us to place sport, and the watching of it, among the most worthwhile and magnificent achievements of our people.

With such authoritative encouragement and such responsible sponsorship, who can blame the average man for assuming that watching games on TV has taken on something of the aspect of a pleasant national duty?

– Milton Shulman

The post The sporting life could be the death of us appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

NOW THAT JULY IS HERE the TV critic thinks inevitably of folding his tent and quietly stealing away. The chances are that the next six weeks will offer him only dross and desert.

Traditionally summer is the time of mindless effort on the part of both the BBC and ITV with old films, repeats and seaside pier standards filling the small screen.

It may have been a recognition of this pattern of entertainment that prompted the BBC into turning over an entire three weeks of its peak-time schedule to World Cup football.

On any other ground, it was the most arrogant and indefensible decision ever taken by a public corporation claiming to cater for the wishes and tastes of its viewers.

Having striven valiantly and expensively to attract viewers away from the commercial channel — and finally having achieved some success in this goal — this wanton disregard of audience preferences and this reckless rebuke to their loyalty will, I am sure, be very costly to the BBC in the long run.

But I find I am losing my temper when the object of the column, when I sat down to write, was to spread sweet compliments all round.

Many times

Having said many times in the past that British TV was the best in the world, I realise that I have not provided many illustrations to justify the claim.

But before the summer doldrums take over, I intend to place on record the kind of programmes — routine, unheralded, unpretentious — that could be found on your box over the past fortnight which could not be matched in terms of imagination and style by a fortnight’s output of any TV service anyhere else in the world.

NOT ONLY… BUT ALSO, which brings Dudley Moore and Peter Cook to BBC-1, manages to be as hilarious on second viewing as it when I first saw them on BBC-2.

Such gems as the parody of the Supercar puppet films, the delirious takeoff of that account of Laughton’s I Claudius, their visit to Heaven and Dudley’s grimace at the of ambrosia (“Not that creamed rice!”) blend with rare mastery the elements of wit and irreverence.

Occasionally they miscalculate. The item on the most boring man in the world was a failure because being bored is rarely funny, only dull.

If the BBC want to enter some of those annual festivals with a chance of winning, they should — if the rules permit — assemble the best items in Not Only… But Also, eliminate the interruptions by singing females (these musical moments no longer make any sense when there is no need for interludes in which costumes and sets can be changed), and startle the world with the quality of our best British humour.

The vulgarity of TILL DEATH US DO PART is as refreshing and startling in its comic concept as Steptoe and Son.

Johnny Speight’s scripts have taken over the formula of the crude, noisy, uninhibited working-class farce and injected into them an ironic, social comment that is almost breathtaking in this context.

Taboo words

I cannot recall ever hearing so many taboo words on one programme as I did in the episode dealing with Intolerance with Warren Mitchell and Anthony Booth shrieking ‘Mick! … Coon! … Yid!” at each other with unrepentant gusto.

Yet, in spite of this, the programme was not normally anger and wounding sentiments that would only hilarious, but managed to say something worthwhile about the stupidity and futility of racial prejudice.

For those wanting a unique and satisfying intellectual treat there was Jonathan Miller’s recreation of THE DEATH OF SOCRATES as told by Plato.

The modern setting — a sort of limbo in Edwardian England — came off beautifully although I would have thought that a further liberty might have been taken with the characters’ names. Somehow characters like Simmias and Xanthippe struck a jarring note when dressed to look like something out of Fanny By Gaslight.

Persuasive

But Leo McKern brought a massive dignity and overpowering persuasiveness to the arguments of Socrates while his resignation and the mundane preparations for his execution gave the event a wistful and autumnal climax.

And even that cornucopia in a single fortnight does not exhaust all the other good things I managed to catch. There was Whlcker’s fascinating account of life in Kuwait, Tony Hancock bringing a fresh, destructive quality to the role of a compere in such a commonplace programme as THE BLACKPOOL SHOW, and a first-class episode of SOFTLY, SOFTLY dealing with the possible bribery of a juryman.

If one adds to this list such regular stalwarts as TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, PANORAMA, THIS WEEK, LATE NIGHT LINE-UP and, of course, full coverage of Wimbledon and the Test match, can any intelligent viewer claim that he is being neglected by TV.

In his handling of the incomes policy, Vietnam and Rhodesia, Mr. Harold Wilson has recently shown that he has plenty of courage. Surely he can summon up the extra courage needed to increase the licence fee to £6 so that Britain can continue to lead the world in this one field of endeavour.

Will the new Postmaster-General, Edward Short, have the persuasive power that Mr. Benn so obviously lacked?

– Milton Shulman

The post This is television nowhere else in the world can match appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

THE BUSINESS executive as a popular hero figure is one of the stranger entertainment phenomena of our time.

Although drama from Shakespeare to Shaw is populated with rich and powerful tycoons, the mechanics of moneymaking has never been afforded anything more than cursory interest.

But because we are a power-mad society – and money is more powerful than it ever has been before – a take-over bid is like watching Richard III disposing of his rivals and a company prospectus can acquire the fascination of those mysterious letters often seen in plays by Wilde and Pinero.

The truth

But the truth is that to the outsider business is usually routine and dull. The office hours of most executives are occupied with humdrum details requiring neither daring nor imagination.

The loss of a lavatory key or the disappearance of a bottle of whisky from the board-room are just as likely to create a crisis as the loss of an export order.

Even the oil industry, with its international connections and intense competition, cannot factually produce an acceptable
plot of romance and suspense every week, and the writers of the BBC’s The Troubleshooters are forced to dig up some very weird situations in their efforts to keep the oil flowing and profits growing for Mogul Petroleum.

Recently there was a new Asian state threatening Mogul’s interests. A neat twist to this familiar situation of native resentment of colonial exploitation was that the head of this particular state wanted to keep Europeans running the oilfields and did not want to have it handed over to a local lad who might get too big for his gum-boots.

The plotting and counter-plotting seemed reasonable enough until the last five minutes, when the into story exploded into a farrago of improbable of nonsense. Thus we saw the desperate revolutionaries, having already murdered a Mogul technician, confronted by the two unarmed Britons in an isolated jungle clearing.

Superiority

Did the gunmen take the action any respectable group of murderers would have taken in similar circumstances and simply mow down the two helpless men facing them?

They did not. Why? Because the white men innate their displayed sense of superiority and authority by curtly insisting that the murderers drop their guns and yield themselves up to British justice.

Faced with unflinching eyes and a pale skin what else could these dusky fellows do? It is reassuring to feel that the BBC, at least, still remains this Kiplingesque vision of the omnipotence of an Englishman’s command and presence.

Routes

Until this point, the plot could reasonably have taken at least six different routes. all more plausible than the one it eventually took. It was up to the producer, Peter Graham Scott, to recognise absurdity when he saw it.

The same writer, John Lucarotti was also responsible for the episode, Birdstrike, in which Mogul executives were concerned about the fact that an airliner, using their latest type of aviation fuel, had inexplicably crashed.

Was the petrol to blame or was it an error of judgment on the part of the pilot? Again the underlying assumption in the plot was that the pilot, an unidentified foreigner with bad English, was the more likely cause of the accident.

There was some good work by Peter Copley, as a dedicated, dour civil servant hunting out inefficiency, but at no time did we really feel there was any chance of a big British firm like Mogul marketing faulty fuel that would crash aeroplanes.

But a foreigner from some unspecified foreign country? Well, what can you expect? As it turned out the accident was nobody’s fault – a flock of birds caused it all – but until the very last minute the viewer was being hooked on an assumption that foreign pilot’s qualifications were naturally suspect.

The trouble with both of these plots is not that they are anti-foreigner or condescendingly superior but that they have taken the glib, easy way out of a fictional situation.

Relying upon the viewers’ natural prejudices is a short-cut to story-telling. It’s much harder to make a story acceptable if Mogul oil is faulty or if native rebels don’t quail before British stare. Put them in dark make-up or have them wear a turban and you don’t have to prove they are silly, cowardly or inferior. Conventionally, they just are.

That is why a programme like The Troubleshooters, which in many respects is a more intelligent – and more conscientious TV series than most, should take more trouble over the plots its writers concoct.

Pilots

If there have to be inefficient pilots make them Australians or Canadians, or Englishmen. Not be cause any of these are naturally inefficient, but because the writer will then have to devise some responsible explanation for the character he has invented rather than rely upon a convenient label he knows the public will accept.

And, too, The Troubleshooters should take more pain over the women in its series. They are inordinately predictable creatures classified simply into bitches or non-bitches.

The non-bitches are ever ready with a cosy smile, a warm welcome and a lacquered hair-do. The bitches insult their husbands in public, moan about the places they have to visit and flirt outrageously with foreign gentlemen.

Again the story would benefit if the writer had to reverse these cliche positions and make the sympathetic woman someone who moaned in public and flirted on the side. Nice wives do that, you know, and credibility is increased if scratches on an ivory, impeccable image are revealed from time to time.

– Milton Shulman

The post ‘Mogul’ needs a new look at its womenfolk appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

THE GROWING reliance of all channels on old films to fill up their contractual hours is perhaps the most insidious element depres- sing programme standards and which will eventually lead to the deterioration of all TV.

Over Whitsun BBC-1 showed four old films while ITV in London were exhibiting three. During this week we were able to see five ancient films (all at peak time) on ITV and seven on BBC-1 and BBC-2 (all but one at peak time).

Something like 18 hours will be devoted to this chewed-over fodder of the cinema-most of it in peak time-and unless Lord Hill or Sir Hugh Greene calls a halt to this practice all TV. like Pay TV, will become merely another distribution outlet for the film industry.

As if this not enough, each channel now has a programme devoted to the glorification of old films and the plugging of
new ones.

Granada’s Cinema. with the saturnine Michael Scott in the chair. seems to have lost the wit and intellectual bite it had when Derek Granger was running the programme.

Although it still comes up with some amusing and freakish film clips, there is a lazy. desultory tone about the proceedings that is merely time-wasting rather than time-enhancing.

Typical was last week’s assessment of 50 years of 20th Century Fox. This turned out to be a series film snatches Shirley Temple, Carmen Miranda, Ethel Merman, Marilyn Monroe – without any effort to assess, diagnose or evaluate the overall contribution of the company to Hollywood or discuss the pressures or influences that had determined its output. A disappointing affair.

Self-plugging

But the BBC has started a much more blatant exercise in self-plugging and humiliating abasement to the cinema industry.

This is called Film Preview and compered by the fast-talking, vitamin-crammed Philip Jenkinson. Put out at 6.30 p.m. Fridays it is nothing more than a half-hour trailer for the coming films to be seen on BBC with some uninhibited plugs for a few films soon to go on current release.

I cannot think why this programme should consist of this unholy combination of wholesale puffs for films on TV and in the cinemas, unless it is some arrangement to keep the filmmakers happy about so many rival films in the home.

But the result is that Mr. Jenkinson – who can be very knowledgeable about films – has to gush enthusiastically about every film he discusses and fill his script with lines like: “It’s crammed with great songs and wonderful dances… it’s one of the best musical numbers for a long time… who else could put so much into a number?” in the worst huckstering tradition.

Eighth-rate

For its own self-respect, I think this is a programme that the BBC must either axe or change to a more objective formula.

Of course, some of these old films are well worth seeing again. And if it was only the best of the cinema product, no one would have any cause for complaint.

But most of them were eight-rate when they were first made and a patina of dust has not made them any more appetizing.

Most of these films are about 15 years old and when they made up an occasional item on the schedule. they could obviously have no influence on the taste of the viewers.

But I can see nothing but complacency and inertia emerging from this creeping cinematic takeover of the small screen.

The presence of old films discourages TV companies from making their own programmes – they are much cheaper than an original play or series – and shrinks the already limited opportunities for creative TV talent.

It is astonishing that a Government that exhorts everyone to produce more is disinterested and gormless about the stifling of TV and its foreign currency potential.

For there can he no doubt that it is Government policy that has contributed in some measure to the danger of TV becoming a poor second cousin of the cinema trade.

A hint

Starved of funds the BBC has to resort more and more to non-creative measures to keep up their schedule and must buy old films rather than produce programmes of its own.

The commercial companies, uncertain of their future, have no guarantee that large sums spent on original production will be rewarded since they have no idea if they will be in business in a year’s time and on what terms.

And the pummelling of the audience with these old-fashioned techniques and plots is sure to further reduce that area of intelligent receptivity in the viewer and create a public even less capable of enjoying anything fresh, different or mature.

I might, incidentally, add that if Equity is seriously concerned about work for its members they would do well to make representations about this increasing use of old films and stop look making themselves silly by insisting on monopoly over the reading of nursery tales.

– Milton Shulman

The post 18 hours of old films in one week’s viewing is much too much appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

SINCE EAMONN ANDREWS seems to have a hammer-lock contract with ABC TV that guarantees him large sums of money for some time yet, it is doubtful if anything so drastic as annihilation will take place in the near future.

His recent Sunday evening programmes have managed to reduce conversation to an intellectual level that makes tiddly-winks, by comparison, a major art form.

Neither the producer of this programme, Malcolm Morris, nor its editor, Tom Brennand, seem to have the faintest conception of what conversation really is.

Any dictionary will tell them that it is an exchange or inter-change of views and ideas and not a succension of monologues or party turns stimulated by nothing better than a pre-organised cue on one of Mr. Andrews’s mysterious prompt cards.

And as any hostess from Surbiton to Belgravia can tell them, you are not likely to get good conversation unless the assembled people have something remotely in common about which they are prepared to argue, chat or joke.

But judging from recent recruits to the dentist’s waiting-room laughingly described as a set your chances of being invited to this programme are considerably enhanced if you happen to be an American actor making a film in England, if only a minute proportion of the viewing audience has ever beard of you, and if your talent as a talker is largely confined to your ability to answer questions about your early life with something more than a grunt.

Euphemistically Eamonn’s guests are hailed as Sunday Night People, but consider ing the relative obscurity of a large proportion of them I suggest Wednesday Matinee People as a more appropriate description.

Obscurity, of course, is no bar to being a good conversationalist, but rarely have any of these people anything to offer but an innocuous grin, a knowing nudge about what went on when they saw Frank Sinatra (“He’s one of the greats! Just one of the greats!”) wearing a funny hat on a golf course in Milwaukee, and a mention for the film they’re involved in.

The plugging that goes on during this programme is sometimes shamefully blatant. I remember him introducing a girl called Sheila White, who had an undistinguished song to sing in the musical On The Level, as “A little girl I reckon’s going to be a big star.”

She proceeded to stomp around in a noisy, grimacing manner that would hardly have justified her appearance on Hughie Green’s Amateur Nights and displayed as much star potential as Eamonn Andrews in the role of Othello.

Sometimes the programme luckily gets an extrovert like Sir John Barbirolli who is amusing value as long as no one interrupts his stories. But more often vital personalities like Vanessa Redgrave are reduced to the status of embarrassed, limp observers trying to smile bravely at show biz anecdotes told by their more exhibitionist fellow-guests.

And if his guests could be orchestrated into some sort of a central discussion and leave him with little to do but act as a direction finder, there is no good reason why Eamonn Andrews should not continue to compere it. He is a pleasant, likeable professional.

But it could be that The Eamonn Andrews Show has already reached the point of no-return.

When the best brains, the best wits, the best conversationalists often refuse to take part in it because its standards have become embarrassingly low then there is nothing for ABC to do but either wind it up or get down to some drastic reshaping of the show’s entire structure and philosophy.

– Milton Shulman

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THE TELEVISION SERIAL – the nearest thing man has yet devised to talking opium is proliferating like an ugly weed across all channels.

Coronation Street. Crossroads. Weavers Green. The Newcomers. United. Emergency-Ward 10. Mrs. Thursday – together they add up to a massive indictment of the TV hierarchy whose collective intelligence can find nothing more imaginative with which to hook its millions of undiscriminating viewers.

It is bad enough that companies like ATV and Granada should confess to the sterility of their creative machine by clinging so desperately over the years to the formulas of Coronation Street and Emergency-Ward 10.

Tolerated

In no other country in the world is it possible to find audiences that have tolerated popular serials for so long or TV executives who have not felt ashamed that they have not been able to come up with something fresh and different after so years.

Even more worrying is the prospect that the pummelling the public have received by these long-running serials will lower their receptivity to any thing more demanding that plots and characters of an even lower standard will have to be devised in order to keep them happy.

There are signs that the present deplorable state of American TV is due to this fearful escalation in moronic taste. If a nation is brought up on a diet of pap it is not surprising that it never develops either the teeth or the stomach for something better or stronger.

Similarly, it seems, that in the serial field bad begets worse with Crossroads, Weavers Green, Mrs. Thursday and United! all aiming at targets lower than Coronation Street. The Newcomers is the only one with a slightly more ambitious standard.

It is clear that these increasing hours of drivel and gush can only have long-term deleterious effects on the creative abilities of all those writers, directors and actors who have to pump the stuff out.

But what is it doing to the nation? We are spending increasing millions on raising the educational standards of the young. And if education means anything it means, in addition to gaining knowledge, an opportunity to widen experience, to stretch imagination, to cultivate judgment, to sharpen sensitivity, to exercise observation and to stimulate energy.

Advantages

But these programmes are tugging the young in exactly the opposite direction. They shrink experience, limit imagination, blunt judgment, dull sensitivity, discourage observation and stagnate energy.

These serials are naturally favourites of TV executives because, from their standpoint, they have certain built-in advantages. Scripts, sets and actors are relatively cheaper than other forms of TV drama. And because of their innocuousness and puerility these programmes are seldom subject to the complaints of pressure groups.

But none of these factors matter if would really these programmes did not justify themselves by appearing regularly in the top echelons of TAM ratings.

How accurate, then, are the TAM ratings? For it is their guidance and inspiration that undoubtedly decide whether or not we will get more and more of the drip serials.

TAM, of course, merely contends that it is recording the sets switched on to a particular programme and not whether anyone is actually watching it or enjoying it.

Disquieting

But in America recent Senate investigations have produced some disquieting facts about this method of assessing public taste and it has been a great national joke that one adventurous public relations man, merely by finding out the names of a few of the watching panellists was able to manipulate his programmes to the top of the charts.

Some five years ago an independent investigation showed that TAM was as reliable a method of assessing the volume of viewers as had yet been devised. Since then TAM has increased the size of its viewing panels so that it claim it is even more accurate.

Yet any reasonable man must wonder about some of the statistics that TAM has recently been issuing. For example, there is decided clash of opinion between it and the BBC about who was watching which channel on election night.

At midnight the BBC claims there were three times as many viewers watching the BBC as were switched on to ITV. TAM claims that viewers watching both channels – about 3,000,000 homes – were almost equal. This is a staggering discrepancy.

Again we have the remarkable fact that the five-a-week Crossroads, easily the worst produced of the present serials, had four of its programmes in the Top Ten in one week in Border, all five in the Top Ten in Ulster and three in the Top Ten in the South West.

Yet not a single programme of Crossroads in that same week was listed amongst the Top Twenty in the National TAM ratings. Nor did it reach the Top Ten in most of the other large regions with the exception of the Midlands where two programmes made it. Now it may be that people of Ulster, Cumberland and Plymouth have lower taste standards than the rest of Britain and just prefer Crossroads most days of the week to anything else TV has to offer.

It may be, too, just a coincidence that three regions have the lowest number of people a their TAM viewing panel – 100 sets as compared to the large regions with 400 set – but surely it is a coincidence that needs some investigating.

Measurements

In America it is being suggested that TV audience measurements should be administered by a government agency. To avoid any such suggestion in this country, it is imperative that the public have absolute faith in the reliability of these figures.

Since the small screen is being flooded with more and more nonsense because it is claimed that it is what the public wants, but isn’t it about time we hear positively that is the public wants.

Five years is a long time in the changing world of public opinion measuring techniques. Isn’t time we had another independent investigation of both the BBC and TAM methods allegedly telling us what we want?

– Milton Shulman

The post The drivel and gush of the television serial appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

THE DRIFT of Ned Sherrin to the cinema will mean the loss to the BBC of one of the greatest talent-spotters in the business.

As producer of TW3, Not So Much and BBC3, he dumped a cornucopia of fresh faces on to the small screen and, more significantly, invested most of them with an aura of talent.

David Frost, Lance Percival, Roy Hudd, Millicent Martin, Roy Kinnear, Patrick Campbell, Harvey Orkin, John Bird, Eleanor Bron are only some or those who owe their TV reputations to the chances given them by Sherrin.

But it cannot yet be said that many of them on their own have soared into the more rarified atmosphere of personal stardom.

Millicent Martin’s breezy, chirpy personality came across successfully in her song and dance series, Mainly Millicent. But both Roy Kinnear and Roy Hudd have still been unable to find the producers and script-writers capable of exploiting the promise they first showed. Their efforts have ranged from the routine to the dismal.

Toothless

For the past few weeks two more graduates of the satire school have been seen in their own programmes the Frost Report and The Lance Percival Show – and instead of the expected cynical bite all we have so far experienced is an ingratiating, toothless mumble.

Since David Frost has been almost as intensely publicised as Woburn Abbey and since he was TV satire’s first front-man and in that sense the Louis XIII to Sherrin’s Cardinal Richelieu, he has been uniquely identified with the irreverence, scepticism and daring of TW3 and Not So Much.

Technically Frost now displays before the cameras the assurance, authority and command of a brilliant toast-master. Gripping us with a fierce glare that might do justice to a show called The Son of Ancient Mariner, he barks out his aphorisms and comments as if he was trying to hypnotise the autocue machine.

Just when we are about to quail before this baleful stare, he comes to his punch-line which is accompanied by his face snapping into a frozen grin which., in turn, is our signal to laugh.

Old jokes

In the last three editions of The Frost Report, it has been, more often than not, only this facial seismograph that has given us any true indication that a joke has been told.

Each show has tackled such general themes as Authority, Holidays or Sin and instead of giving us any fresh comic insight or amusing observation about our attitudes to these topics, Frost, with the help of about 15 writers, has been content to string together a number of old jokes and quick revue blackouts which intellectually might have been the basis for a film called Carry On Satire.

Some of the contrived excuses used to introduce familiar gags would make a compere on the Palladium Show weep with envy. Thus following up an item on Guernsey, Frost told us that a mermaid has just been caught off the island. Its statistics were 36-22-and 7s 6d a pound.

Nor has David Frost any particular reticence about repeating himself – surely the worst offence any
comedian can commit. He told us, for instance, about a holiday advertisement for “sunny Vietnam.”

“Come to Saigon.” it urged. “You will find no fighting in the city – only in the outskirts.” It sounded funnier when I first heard him tell it on Not So Much.

The programme on Sin – aha, this will be something, we thought – not only concentrated on Sex to the exclusion of almost every other vice, but treated it so hygienically and respectfully that it might have been the week’s Good Cause.

Occasionally, of course, some items do succeed – the law of averages sees to that – but unless future Frost Reports sharpen up their bite and their purpose, the scourging menace that once terrified politicians, vicars and Mrs. Mary Whitehead will end up with an endearing spot on The Black and White Minstrel Show.

– Milton Shulman

The post Frost warning; so the message is pull your socks up appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

THE SINGLE PLAY is television’s problem child. There have been more arguments, more protests, more petitions, more heart-searchings, more letters to editors, more threats and more conferences about this one aspect of TV production than about any other.

It was inevitable that trying to produce something like 200 original plays a year would mean, from the writer’s standpoint, a drastic deterioration of standards.

When one recalls that between Sheridan and Pinero – over 100 years – there was not a single important play or single significant playwright produced in this country, the chances of getting two or three “good” plays on TV every year would be very remote. But 300 comparison, a miracle would be child’s play.

Routine

Recognising the impossible, the series and serials with their stereotyped set of fixed characters permuting a routine number of situations has been adopted by TV as its peculiar gift to drama. The single play has largely been restricted to providing opportunities for new writers and experimentation.

It has, therefore, been argued that in order to prevent plays becoming confined exclusively to coterie viewing and to tempt the multitude away from their Coronation Street tripe and Emergency Ward pap, the play from time to time must be presented as a Big Occasion.

And certainly ATV did all it could to drum up interest in its Monday night’s play, Nelson, and garland it with all the excitement of something special.

The writer was Terence Rattigan. It had star names like Rachel Roberts, Celia Johnson, Michael Hordern, Felix Alymer and Michael Bryant. And it was introduced by Prince Philip. About the only thing missing was Lew Grade on an elephant.

Superior

And, judged solely by TV standards, this sensitively-written glimpse of Nelson’s uncontrollable fascination for the vulgar Emma Hamilton was superior to most original drama offered up by the parlour’s grey eye.

But compared to what the cinema or the theatre might have done with the same theme, this Big Occasion was a midget, indeed.

Although Michael Bryant admirably conveyed the cynicism and self-doubt that churned restlessly beneath the resolute exterior of a national hero, there was something superficial and contrived about the reasons Mr. Rattigan put in his mouth for his treatment of his neglected wife.

He hated her, it seems, because she insisted on forgiving him for his mean treatment of her and be cause she made him choose between her and Emma. Nelson could never have been so facile or self-deceptive.

And, too, the introduction of a 16-year-old boy, nicely played by Fergus McClelland, to act as a go-between and a catalyst in a tempestuous, seething affair between complex, sophisticated adults resulted in some dubious and jarring conversation and situations.

Spurious

Too intellectually spurious for the theatre, the theme might have been the basis of a cinema epic had we been allowed to witness a million-pound reconstruction of the Battle of Trafalgar so that the film’s stupendous climax would have allowed us to be patient with much of the rest.

But on TV we had to be content with a battle represented by knives, forks and silver salt cellars. That’s what the art of the small budget does to these opportunities.

Still the play did have its compensations and some moments of telling effect. The dinner party in which Lady Hamilton, perhaps little too raucously played by Rachel Roberts, provokes an embarrassing, strident quarrel with Nelson and the confession Nelson makes to Lord Minto, interpreted with fine subtlety by Michael Morder about his feelings for Emma were directed with a fine flair by Stuart Burdge.

– Milton Shulman

The post I liked the garlanded Nelson play, but… appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

NOW I have always thought Frank Muir a very witty, amiable and intelligent man. The scripts he wrote with Dennis Norden were among the funniest ever seen on TV in this country.

What, then, has happened to his sense of humour now that he has become Assistant Head of BBC-TV Light Entertainment? I might add you need a sense of humour to go round lumbered with that title.

I ask this question because he is the author of a rave piece of publicity in last week’s Radio Times about a programme called The Maladjusted Busker, starring Roy Hudd.

No doubt the idea of this half-hour sounded tempting enough. Why not a silent film, in the tradition of Chaplin and Keaton, in which the BBC film department could show just how hilariously inventive it could be without the use of words?

John Law’s script had the merit of simplicity, if little else. A piccolo-playing busker would become separated from a band of street musicians and he would spend the rest of the film trying to find them.

Each snatch of music he hears would send him tearing off in that direction, only to discover that the sounds came from a band of the Irish Guards or a record shop.

Now Roy Hudd, who has not been well-served by television since he left Not So Much a Programme, has discovered that he can get easy laughs by flashing an idiotic, toothy grin and leaping about like a gormless llama.

Faced with a script of almost poverty-stricken aridity, Hudd clung to these safe techniques with the desperation of a non-swimmer relying on a leaking life-belt.

Sample visual jokes included water squirting in his face from park fountain, leading some children in a Pied Piper dance (does the presence of a piccolo make such a sequence almost inevitable?), taking off his trousers in a launderette, smirking at black panties in a shop window, and finding someone had dropped a coin in his cap when he had taken it off to scratch his head.

I may be making an extravagant claim, but I doubt if any British postwar film has ever concocted anything as flat and ponderous as The Maladjusted Busker.

Yet there is Mr. Muir, in the Radio Times, claiming that Mr. Hudd “gives a beautifully consistent performance, full of sudden delights.” And since Mr. Muir employs Hudd and I don’t, I am sure that this young comedian will be sustained by his boss’s opinion and not depressed by mine.

Jamborees

THE annual Eurovision Song Contest has for me some sort of gruesome fascination.
The atmosphere of showbiz opulence, the impeccably dressed Continental audience displaying the enthusiasm of a shoal of sleepy goldfish, the ritualistic appearance of the singer and the national conductor (the conductor always being much fatter, older and self-conscious than the performer), the pretty girl singers and often prettier male singers crushing their features into paroxysms of passion as they moan about last loves or exult about found loves in unintelligible tongues from Dutch to Yugoslavian.

What, then, possessed our English juries to send along Kenneth McKellar, dressed to look like an advertisement for a holiday in the Highlands, and to have him sing a song that had for me overtones of something written for a Victor Herbert operetta?

– Milton Shulman

The post Oh, that maladjusted sense of humour! appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

IT IS PERHAPS typical of the British approach to the arts that television’s two most important arts programmes are shown on Sundays.

The scheduling, of course, is not accidental. ABC’s “Tempo” turns up early on Sunday afternoons because Channel 9 has never paid more than lip service to culture.

There must be an arts programme to grace every company’s annual report and ITV’s Year Book has to have a few titles to fill out its Arts Section, which is easily the thinnest in its glossy recapitulation commercial TV activities.

Indeed, the ITV Report’s discussion of the arts goes out of its way to defend its neglect of the arts by asserting that programmes about painting, opera, ballet and music are really not suitable to the medium.

Its excuses include the lack of colour, the small screen, the distracting influences of seeing an orchestra. The most superficial scrutiny immediately annihilates these objections.

The truth behind this tortuous apologia is that Channel 9 produces as few arts programmes as it can because the arts traditionally have only a minority appeal. And to many ITV executives “minority” is an eight-letter word just twice as dirty as any four-letter word.

But respectably large audiences can be built up for such minority activities as show-jumping, ten-pin bowling, snooker and iceskating: a little bit of persistence and courage could do the same for music, books, ballet, painting and the theatre.

Since, however, courage has never been a particularly discernible attribute of the ITV, we have instead “Tempo” – trailing behind it a reputation for failure – plopped from one unpopular slot to another as the sole, consistent, cultural symbol on Channel 9. The latest attempt at a kiss-of-life to this chronically ill programme is the introduction of a series called “Entertainers.”

Last Sunday the juxtaposition of the pop singer Tom Jones and the ballet dancer Lynn Seymour was an almost classic example of derivative banality.

They were asked whether success had changed them, did they like being photographed, did they do much rehearsing, did Mr. Jones’s voice suffer because of his aggressive singing style – and the answers were almost as trite as the questions.

The narrator, in a portentous voice, made such profound observations as “success inevitably changes people … promotion and publicity are all part of the star system…” Will somebody please soon put “Tempo” out of its misery?

The BBC treats culture quite differently. While ITV shuns it as if it were suffering from galloping BO, the BBC treats it with the careful reverence of an elderly waiter carrying a bottle of rare claret to a wine connoisseur.

Its range of arts programmes grow evermore esoteric, specialised and narrow. Except for a few panel games, the policy seems to be to please the cognoscenti and to keep the masses out.

Replacing Monitor – which occasionally made an obeisance to the uninformed – comes Sunday Night. And was there ever a title more carefully designed to discourage the hot polloi from tasting delights beyond their cultural station?

The Platonic Dialogues, an interpretation of Yeats, the madness of Robert Schumann as reflected in his music and the dabbling of the Brownings into Victorian spiritualism, are a few of the offerings of Sunday Night that I have seen.

The Platonic Dialogue was brilliant. Yeats was fascinating. Schumann was absorbing. The Brownings were interesting. But only to those with an initial curiosity, understanding or sympathy about these subjects.

The recent account by Jonathan Miller of the impression made by American spiritualist Daniel Dunglas Home, on Robert and Elizabeth Browning, is typical of the direct which this programme is heading.

A fragmentary anecdote, it was blown up to represent some sort of comment on the Victorian attitude to death. In reality it was merely a husband and wife differing about the credentials of a medium. The same argument goes on in many a middle-class home to-day.

With no technical resources to give it any TV life – the sight of Dunglas Home floating at ceiling height ought to have been within BBC capacities – we were offered merely a series of close-ups of Eleanor Bron languishing, Kenneth Haig persuading and Robert Gillespie protesting. A self indulgent little thing for the few; the rest would have fled elsewhere.

Programmes like those on Sunday Night are, of course, an essential element of the coverage of the arts. But need they be the exclusive approach to the arts?

I have never understood why the arts cannot be treated as an ordinary, everyday, commonplace adjunct to life. No more exclusive than politics; no more elite than sport: no more difficult than foreign affairs.

Why have we not had Panorama or a This Week on the arts? A programme that deals with art as news subject to the same critical, controversial, informative approach.

In the past fortnight there was Graham Greene’s novel, The Comedians, Arthur Miller’s play, Incident at Vichy, with the author in England to discuss it, a row over the staging of the Covent Garden opera, The Flying Dutchman, the virtual end of circulating libraries, fresh developments at the Tate Gallery. All of these matters are exciting issues to far more people than ever go ice skating or watch snooker.

With an interest in art breaking out all over the land, with the increasing problem of more leisure, with the growing capacity of our artistic talents to help our balance of payments problem, it is about time that art on TV stopped being treated either as a pariah or a pope.

– Milton Shulman

The post A matter of a three letter word appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

CAULIFLOWER TV KEEPS GROWING like a parasitic ivy on all channels. These ear-bashing, studio-bound programmes, which owe everything to radio and nothing to vision, have an unhealthy way of proliferating themselves.

The interview and the discussion are the two main off-shoots of cauliflower TV and at their best levels these can offer some of the most stimulating and rewarding moments on the small screen.

John Freeman’s Face To Face revealed what excitement could be generated by the confrontation of a serious mind with a serious and sympathetic interrogator.

In recent weeks one could have seen no fewer than four variations on this confrontation theme – The Reputation Makers, with Angus Wilson, Intimations, with Malcolm Muggeridge, The Levin Interview, with Bernard Levin, and People to Watch, with Robert McKenzie and Erskine Childers.

From the various samplings I have taken of these programmes, they are all more or less successful. Indeed, they have a builtin, cast-iron formula for success if the producer is sensible enough to get two essential elements right.

Failures

Most important of all, he must have – as all these programmes have – an interviewer who is not only articulate, quick and logical, but who is catholic in his curiosity and sceptical about values and judgments.

Pit such a man against another intelligent man with an established reputation or deep convictions or imaginative horizons and the resultant talk, if it is given time to develop, will usually be absorbing.

Naturally. there are failures. Sometimes the personalities involved develop such mutual antipathy or disinterest that a barbed or bored exchange of platitudes is the only result. But, on the whole, this is the best kind of cauliflower TV.

The discussion programme, on the other hand, seems to be going downhill at the speed of the devil on a bobsleigh.

Although there is a good deal of discussion on BBC-3, Late Night Line-Up and 24 Hours (a much improved programme, incidentally), the two programmes – aside from religion and schools – that devote their time almost exclusively to a group exchange of views are Late Show London and The Eamonn Andrews Show.

When one compares the calibre of speakers and talk of both these shows with former discussion programmes like Free Speech and The Brains Trust, one becomes apprehensively aware of what TV can do to crush into disrepute the once-civilised art of conversation.

Offender

Late Show London is the worst offender because it pretends to engage in serious talk and splatters all concerned with humiliation by the glib, cynical and fatuous way in which it goes about it.

Although it began as a magazine show aimed at reflecting the gaiety, variety and sparkle of London life, in less than a month it has been purged of everything but the talkers.

The Eamonn Andrews Show, too, seems to be in a desperate plight to find “the famous, frank and funny people” it blurbs.

On Sunday we had three actors – Michael Crawford, Martine Carol and James Booth – and a publisher, Gareth Powell, who might most charitably be described as non-famous, once-famous and non-funny people. With nothing important to be frank about, it’s not surprising they weren’t frank either.

Anyone in the theatre knows that actors can be as witty as Wilde, as wise as Shaw, and as profound as Montherlant only when they have memorised the appropriate lines.

The emergence of the actor as the wit, the sage, the commentator, the thinker of our time reveals into what a disastrous, intellectual abyss we are being plunged in order to please the moronic tastes of the telegawkers.

– Milton Shulman

The post Oh! those awful earbashing programmes appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

THERE IS NO SADDER sight on television than watching the speed at which the teenage shows develop visual hardening of the arteries.

In my day youth used to be identified with an erratic and unpredictable change of mood, interest, fad, foible, passion.

If one can judge by the most popular TV proprammes, the teenagers of the 1960’s have been stuck in a one-taste groove like a baby dinosaur growing up in the ooze.

Pop music, if we are to believe the programme planners, is the all-consuming cultural interest of modern youth – and practically nothing else!

For almost four years the only evening programmes aimed at adolescents have been little more than public relations adjuncts of the record business.

Rhythm

Juke Box Jury, Top of the Pops, Ready, Steady, Go! Thank Your Lucky Stars, Gadzooks, It’s All Happening and Stramash! have not only reflected the need of teenagers stimulated by rhythm but they have exaggerated the relevance of that need into a gigantic lie.

Sociological historians studying this decade from the pages of the Radio Times and TV Times would have to conclude that in their formative years the young of the ‘sixties had only a minimal or negligible interest in films, the theatre, sports, polities, books, conversation, science, debate, serious music, travel, poetry, art or even love. Their sole relaxation appeared to be to shake in a large hall – usually on their own, mute and devoid of contact with the opposite sex – displaying neither enjoyment, passion nor involvement

Even more depressing is the bovine manner in which they have accepted the same formula, the same setting, the same atmosphere, the same jargon, even the same personalities, of these pop shows.

For the past few weeks I have been watching Ready Steady, Go! and Thank Your Lucky Stars and find that they are practically indistinguishable in mood and manner from what they were a year ago.

Stale

Ready, Steady, Go! has suffered worst from imaginative paralysis with artists introduced in the same way to the same platform to the same accompaniment of massed bodies gawking or jiggling.

What was once fresh, immediate and zestful has been allowed to stale into tired familiarity and predictable routine. The fact that it has gone “live” has coincided with the fact that it is really dead.

Thank Your Lucky Stars, too, has gelled into formula stuff, with the designers being the only ones called upon to be inventive. And there is more than a sign of desperation about some to be of their efforts. I thought last week the motif was traffic signs for drunken drivers.

Adulatory

The over-all tone is adulatory and non-critical with the comperes of both programmes vying with each other in their use of copy-writers’ adjectives.

Cathy McGowan of Ready, Steady, Go! now has a serious rival in Jim Dale of Thank Your Lucky Stars in the use of the word “fantastic.”

Last week’s show, according to Mr. Dale, had items which were great, fabulous, the best, tremendous, in addition to being merely fantastic. He asked the audience to give each of them “a great big hand.” Must the vocabulary of these shows really be so poverty-stricken?

Welcome

Against such an uninspiring background it is a relief to welcome the B.B.C.’s A Whole Scene Going. Although it, too, over emphasises pop music, it at least makes an intelligible effort to examine the phenomena and provide more than a fan club’s view of the performers.

When Pete Townshend, of The Who, admitted that his group had no musical quality and that he was baffled by the tastes and personalities of the fellow-members of his group, I felt a rush of honest fresh air into this pop formula for the very first time.

“In pop business, you know, we’re lucky there are no standards,” he said, and when someone in the studio pressed him about their sexual appeal, he bluntly replied: “Look, our group’s one of the most unglamorous on the stage.” One may resent the grammar, but not the sentiment.

Relevant

The inclusion of a letters’ column with various teen-age and older experts answering questions such as when a provincial girl should leave home and come to London, should a new pop singer get himself a manager, and what do you do about a boy friend who is constantly being mistaken for a pop star provided lively and relevant discussion.

The film montages on fashion are zippy and gay, while the introduction of other interests like sport, cinema and clothes is a welcome rebuttal of the libel that we are rearing an adolescent herd, brainwashed by pop alone.

The post Ready, Steady, Go runs into imaginative paralysis appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

LOOKING back over the achievements of TV during 1965 is like studying a panoramic photograph of the moon. All is a wasteland except for occasional promising shadows which on closer examination turn out to be the Sea of Despond or the Valley of Blighted Talent.

With the exception of Winston Churchill’s funeral I cannot think of a single programme on Channel 9 during 1965 that has advanced or enlarged by an iota the art, the aims, the grasp or the potentialities of television.

In a year which might best be labelled and forgotten, as The Year That Never Was, it is clear that my annual awards will hardly be included in those annual reports which take such pride in listing the prizes won in remote and undistinguished festivals throughout the world.

BREAKTHROUGH OF THE YEAR – This undoubtedly goes to ATV who, under the tireless chivvying of Lew Grade, has finally produced British TV films that have broken into the America TV networks.

From the series The Saint, Danger Man, and the Baron (yet to be seen), it is possible that Britain could earn something in the region of 10 million dollars in the next two years.

This, for the first time, opens up the golden American market to British TV producers and, for the first time, puts TV into the posture of a significant foreign currency earner.

RASPBERRY OF THE YEAR – This award – an Op Art version of the fruit that periodically emits derisory sounds of contempt – has been tidily won by Rediffusion – the London-based TV company.

Not only was it responsible for the three programmes that received the worst critical receptions of 1965 – Groucho, The New Stars and Garters and Riviera Police – but it has confessed to a sterility and rigidity of creative ideas by its apparent inability to think of anything fresh or novel with which to replace its mouldy programme relics – Double Your Money, Take Your Pick and No Hiding Place.

Rediffusion’s board – which has persistently refused to have anyone from the programme side as one of its directors – has finally admitted, by implication, that its thinking on this matter has been wrong.

Within the past few months it has invited five new men to the board – although only three of them have actually produced programmes and it will be interesting to see what difference this will make in Rediffusion’s performance.

I cannot say that the changes announced by their programme chief, Cyril Bennett, have caused any pulses to race in TV circles.

Best Programme of the Year – The coverage of Winston Churchill’s funeral by both the BBC and ITV. This showed what could be done by outside broadcasts when talent was united for one goal, and when when money was no object. This solemn and momentous occasion was enhanced by this great record of it.

Most Noble Gesture of the Year – ITV’s decision broadcast, entirety, the BBC’s obituary of Richard Dimbleby. This was a most fitting tribute to one of broadcasting’s great personalities. The fact that ITV recognised in this way the achievement of the man who symbolised, more than anyone else, their greatest rival, displayed an adult and becoming sense sense of judgment.

The post In a TV year That Never Was these were my worst programmes appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

IN A TWO-PAGE ADVERTISEMENT in the American show-biz magazine “Variety,” Rediffusion trumpeted its 10 years of achievement in Independent TV.

“There must be something special about the work we do,” the advertisement read. “Like Around the Beatles, This Week, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Crime and Punishment, Freedom Road, Riviera Police.”

Since Rediffusion has lined it with Shakespeare and Dostojevski as amongst its finest hours, it is clear that the London TV company is very proud of its series, Riviera Police.

Now it is clear that the vast majority of sensitive and intelligent critical opinion in Britain does not share Rediffusion’s enthusiasm for Riviera Police.

It has had an even worse critical reception than Groucho – Rediffusion’s other recent major light entertainment show – and when one has said that one has about plumbed the depths of pejorative language.

One critic called it “decadent, trashy entertainment,” and added that “everyone in it is courting contempt.”

“The Spectator” said: “This dear and nasty programme is apparently inspired by Continental Films, a publication rich in pin-ups which are a solace to tired TV executives.”

Now the name of the “Spectator” critic who penned those lines is Stuart Hood. Mr. Hood was Programme Controller at Rediffusion when the decision to make Riviera Police must have been taken.

‘Nasty’

If he thought the idea was “nasty,” theoretically it was in Mr. Hood’s power to prevent the series being made. Unless, of course, he was overruled. And there was only one man who could have overruled him – Mr. John McMillan, the general manager and present Programme Controller. Could this offer some clue to Mr. Hood’s short tenure of high office at Rediffusion?

In any case, it is clear from the “Variety” advertisement that Mr. McMillan does not share Mr. Hood’s distaste for this farrago of sun-tanned shenanigans on the beaches of the Mediterranean.

And it must be reported that Mr. McMillan certainly has numbers – if nothing else – on his side. Since it first began, Riviera Police has consistently jogged Coronation Street for the heady accolade of being No. 1 in the Tam Ratings. Why curl up with shame when that medal is being pinned to your breast?

Indeed, when I spoke to Lord Hill a fortnight ago, I asked him what he thought of a situation where critical opinion was at such wide variance with mass preference. Did he think the critics were wrong or out of touch? He tactfully dodged the question.

But in spite of Lord Hill’s reticence, it is evident that certain discreet noises emanating from the ITA indicated that the Authority was not happy with the moral tone of certain stories transmitted so early in the morning nor with the cameras creeping pre-occupation with flesh for flesh’s sake.

Blonde

I recall one early episode where a fetishist party – with girls dressed as animals so that they could waggle furry tails at the camera – occupied a good deal of the time.

A blonde sun-bathing on a piano stuffed the base of a champagne glass into her bikini top and cooed, “Fill me another, lover.” Another, removing her swim-suit, innocently gurgled: “Don’t these bikinis cut into you when they’re wet.”

The plot involved the detective being hit on the head and falling between the straddled legs of a bathing beauty. The legs were his only clue to the villains, and the rest of the film was a flurry of navels, thighs, bosoms and calves as every photogenic clue on the Riviera was carefully examined.

What a sad change, then, there is to report on one recent episode of Riviera Police.

Not a navel within whistling distance. The one bikini in view was dangled in middle-shot as if it were something ready to go to the laundry. The heroine was dressed in a one-piece black swim-suit and bosoms were so scarce that Riviera tourists authorities might well contemplate an action for defamation and loss of trade. Indeed, the most exciting garb was worn by some monks who were dragged into the plot.

Without sun-tan lotion to act as an aphrodisiac or rounded contours as a diversion, what is there to hold audiences to Riviera Police other than inertia?

The story was typically feeble and contemptuous of viewer intelligence. A woman archaeologist, madly possessive of her son, jealously murders all girls the son is interested in. She convinces the boy he has done the murders in his sleep.

Forgotten

Such details as to why the hotel authorities conspired to deny the presence of one of the murdered girls in the hotel were conveniently dumped – unexplained and forgotten.

The French accents of the cast came and went with bewildering uncertainty. The shooting was flat, the editing leaden and the dialogue crass.

Determined to cash in on the success of such sophisticated thrillers as Burke’s Law, Riviera Police seems on every count merely a bumbling, pathetic copy from its colourless four detectives – some recruited from the Dominions to make them palatable in Australia or Canada – to the dire selection of cretinous plots chosen by its editor and producer, Jordan Lawrence.

The BBC, I would suggest, deserves some share of the credit – or blame – for sending Riviera police to the top of the ratings. Since it has consistently opposed it with repeats – either Hugh and I or the Likely Lads (and both recently seen before) – it has unwittingly conspired in the creation of the canard that the British public prefers programmes like Riviera Police to anything else on TV.

But what will the ITA think – I wonder – when it is handing out its new contracts of a company that lists Riviera Police as one of the finest achievements of its 10-year-career?

The post Decadent and trashy – Is this YOUR view of Riviera Police appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

THE BBC is undoubtedly the most prolific comedy factory in the world. It churns out with awesome regularity everything from a seaside-pier giggle to a sophisticated, way-out leer.

Compared with it, commercial TV is about as funny as a crematorium. For some reason, Channel Nine has never taken humour very seriously.

ITV has relied for its laughs largely on imported American shows like The Beverly Hillbillies or The Lucy Show. It has cultivated comedians like Morecambe and Wise, Arthur Haynes, Alfred Marks and Bruce Forsyth, but this is a tiny achievement when one realises what the BBC has done for British humour.

On any representative week there is likely to be at least three times as much home-produced comedy on the BBC as on the alternative channel.

Benny Hill, Eric Sykes, Charlie Drake, Sheila Hancock, Thora Hird, Lance Percival, Roy Kinnear, Eleanor Bron, Dudley Moore, Harry Worth, Harry Corbett, Wilfred Brambell, Roy Hudd, Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd, Hugh Griffiths, Millicent Martin, Terry Scott, Hugh Lloyd, Ted Ray – are only a fraction of the names who owe their TV reputations and best opportunities to the BBC.

Art form

And at the BBC, comic script writing has been recognised as the minor art-form that it is and with Frank Muir now in the higher echelons of the Light Entertainment side of the Corporation, this respect and nurturing of comic writers is likely to be even more enthusiastic.

All that having been said, it seems incredible to me that the BBC should have wantonly abandoned their reputation for reasonable judgment in the comedy field by putting on a show like And So To Ted to replace one of the slots left vacant by Not So Much.

It would be charitable to think that this throw-back to the dreariest kind of radio humour of the early thirties had been deliberately slotted as an act of malevolent revenge on all those viewers who had been clamouring for the removal of Not So Much.

Unfortunately, it looks far more like a grovelling surrender to the lowest taste denominator and a sickening reminder of how easy it is for any adult advance in TV programming to be shunted into a limbo of vestigial relics.

Except for an amiable face and an ability to reel off old jokes without the slightest trace of self-consciousness, Ted Rogers is my concept of a non-comedian.

Anxiety

His nervous grin and zig-zagging eyes convey anxiety. His timing is halting. His mastery of mimicry is minimal. And he displays a profound inability to distinguish a funny line from an abysmal one.

The script writers – Dick Vosburgh, Ken Hoare and Mike Sharland – seem to have gone on an exhumation hunt to find gags for their first two shows. If they dig up any more fossilised jokes they might be had up for grave-robbing.

“Here is the news in brief,” smirks an announcer wearing no trousers. For a topical joke there is “Which was the funniest of the Marx Brothers – Harpo, Groucho, Chico or Profumo?”

Since it has now run for two weeks in succession there is the item dealing with the Professor (funny, presumably, because he has a guttural accent) providing questions to answers.

“Now, Professor, what question follows the answer V-Neck”? What do me and my girl friend do when we are out together?” [sic on quotemarks -Ed] (berserk laughter from laugh machine). “Everest”? “What do I do when I feel tired?” (maniacal hysterics from laugh machine).

The second programme was an advance on the first simply because someone had throttled the laugh machine. Now there was a studio audience that seemed to contain one or two hyenas ready with an apoplectic response to the slightest tickle.

The nearest the programme got to sex was when a gardener said: “I got so confused I put Sweet William in the same bed as Iris,” and it took almost four minutes to re-enact that tired chestnut of the man who is awakened by his butler to take a sleeping pill.

Row

Surely in view of the row that followed Not So Much‘s disappearance, one would have thought that both Huw Wheldon and Michael Peacock, as top BBC administrators, would have been acutely sensitive about the type of show they were replacing it with.

It does not say much for their sense of public relations – or, indeed, their feeling about what is or is not proper late-night viewing – that …And So To Ted is now with us.

What a relief, by contrast, to watch a real funny man at work.

The Benny Hill Show had some inspired clowning on its return a fortnight ago. The item about the fastest film director in the world was a hilarious hodgepodge of every technical mistake ever committed on the screen. And a family having breakfast in the rhythms dominated by the radio music was amusing stuff.

I thought the second show last Saturday less inventive and the skit about the weakling who takes body-building lessons to become the toughest man on the beach went on much too long and was decidedly forced.

But in his saga about how Little Bo Peep might have been treated by Z-Cars, Tonight and Bonanza, Benny Hill’s face, with its look of a naughty melon, showed once again its delicious and formidable gift for mimicry. I suspect that a second mind to help him with his script-writing might get rid of some of the more obvious errors in judgment.

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UNDOUBTEDLY the folk hero of our time is the detective. Whether it is the rumpled Maigret or the suave Bond, there is an inexhaustible audience fascinated by the conflict of a lone figure against the combined forces of crime and evil.

We no longer demand of our private eye or special agent or police inspector that he be a paragon himself. Indeed, corruptibility must now be part of his equipment.

He can be a rake, bribe-able, cowardly, effete, seedy, snobbish, vicious, devious, boastful, dull and ugly, and still retain our sympathy in his struggle against amoral opponents who are sometimes not as amoral as he is.

I suspect it is basically his aloneness that makes him so appealing a figure for contemporary audiences. No matter what help he gets from assistants or scientific paraphernalia, he is always a man pitted physically or mentally against the unknown.

Mass identification with his problems and dilemmas comes naturally to societies like our own where loneliness has become a mass disease.

It follows, then, that in any TV series based upon the activities of a single detective, its success will depend more on the development of the central character rather than on the strength of the plot or the ingenuity of the detection processes.

Wasted

Judging from the work of three detectives seen on TV – Sherlock Holmes, Amos Burke, of Burke’s Law, and Frank Marker, of Public Eye – the Americans are beginning to learn this lesson while out producers are still light years away from it.

Sherlock Holmes on the BBC seems to me to be the saddest example of a wasted opportunity. On a completely undemanding level, the aura of sinister Victoriana is acceptable enough.

Douglas Wilmer has the authentic jaw, the hawk-like nose, the cold, detached stare, the clipped decisiveness that one envisages for Holmes. Nigel Stock, as Watson, is a bumbling appendage that rarely adds much to the action.

But a recent episode “The Beryl Coronet” adapted by Nicholas Palmer, summed up what I feel are all the faults of this series to date.

A valuable piece of a coronet had been stolen from the home of a leading London banker. The banker suspects his son but Holmes, after measuring the imprints of a wooden leg and finding some significant boots, proves that the boy was “inn-oh-cent,” as everybody seemed to pronounce it.

Now trying to stretch this story to an hour has obviously been too much for the imagination of either the writer or the director, Max Varnel.

Lingering on long pans up and down staircases, each clue was stretched out to fill Gargantua and flashbacks were used to repeat events we already knew.

An even worse mistake was not introducing either Holmes or Watson into the story until almost 20 minutes had passed.

With all that padding needed, couldn’t we be told more about Holmes? His cocaine addiction, his Stradivarius, his chemical experiments, his skill at fencing, his university, his brother, Mycroft.

Conan Doyle’s creation, brought up to date with some imaginative scripting and some modern pace to the editing, could still be exciting stuff. But this reverential, orthodox approach merely reduces to the routine a unique treasure of detective fiction material.

Now in Burke’s Law, shown on the Commercial Channel, gimmickery is all. The improbably stories rarely interfere with Burke’s conquest of the sexiest suspects in America. The only clues that really interest him are those found in mattresses.

Who Killed Rosie Sunset? enabled Burke, played with dead-pan aplomb by Gene Barry, to investigate a flamenco dancer, a concertina player, a counterfeiter, and an abstract Russian sculptor. He was mauled by a luscious brunette tax expert, he was cornered by a Slavic beauty whose English vocabulary consisted only of the words “hello” and “yes” and he was stroked by a rich blonde wearing tights that were little more than an epidermal disguise.

Racy

In his Rolls, equipped with telephones and cocktails and driven by an Oriental chauffeur, he raced from bedroom to nightclub to artist’s studio. I cannot tell you who did it or why, but while it lasted it was racy, pacy and alive. With a much better story the Holmes episode was slow, bumbling and dead.

But, by comparison with ABC’s new series, Public Eye, both Holmes and Burke are masterpieces of TV technique. Its private eye, Frank Marker, is supposed to typify the new anti-hero figure.

He has sleazy offices, shady clients, an old sports jacket, stains on his tie, is plagued by income tax demands and when he gets into a fight, he loses.

All of this information came out of the TV Times. None of it was visible in Saturday’s first episode, “The Morning Wasn’t So Hot.”

In technique and subject matter, it brought back memories of “No orchids for Miss Blandish,” which I have always considered on the most tasteless British films ever made.

It concerned the activities of a pimp who picks up unsuspecting girls newly arrived in London and turns them into call-girls and prostitutes.

A little brunette, Jenny, is desired for their brothels by a crime syndicate and the pimp is forced to sell Jenny to them.

When Marker, who through no detection device that was visible to the naked eye, finally finds Jenny – her mother has been worried about her – Jenny decides she wants to stay a prostitute.

“Mr. Marker, last week I earned £300 [£6,500 today, allowing for inflation – Ed]. Did you?” is her decisive answer to his revelation that she has been sold to other brothel keepers. There’s a moral to keep our girls pure and unsullied.

Roger Marshall’s dialogue would best appeal to the paperback literati of Shaftesbury Avenue with sentences like “The nearest he gets to power is in your bed” and “He’s in town getting the lay of the land.”

Alfred Burke, as Marker, had little to do except look hang-dog and disgruntled while this flow of “ugh” poured over the screen.

During the advertisements I switched over to BBC and listened to Quintin Hogg and Malcolm Muggeridge in Not So Much engaging in a fascinating and adult discussion about sexual morality.

It is perhaps typical of our sense of values that Not So Much should be condemned as offensive while puerility like Public Eye will probably survive.

Which, in the end, is more corrupting?

The post Some of the things Burke (of Burke’s Law) can teach Sherlock Holmes appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

POP records are not only big business but a social phenomenon. There is little doubt that they are making a discernible impact in the shaping of the new Britain.

From being the squarest nation in Europe we are fast becoming the coolest. Foreigners familiar with the Britain of Victor Silvester and hunt balls are staggered by the transformation they find in the dancing seen in jazz clubs and discotheques.

The grace, the rhythm, the abandon – not to mention the improvement in the looks of the girls – have that sophisticated natural quality that one used to associate only with the more exclusive haunts in Paris, Manhattan and St. Tropez.

Barriers

More important, that ease and lack of restraint has begun to manifest itself in certain social side-effects among the young.

Class and racial barriers erode much more quicker when peers’ daughters swing unselfconsciously with lorry drivers and Negro musicians.

The innate rivalry of the dance floor has created a heightened awareness of such status ornaments as hair styles, smart clothes and make-up.

The time-consuming demands of the pop craze has so canalised their energies that relatively few of them display much interest in politics, social problems or even hobbies.

The intimacy of their surroundings and the encouragement of physical abandon has also inevitably resulted in a freeing and liberalising of sexual inhibitions.

But is all this any different from the twenties, when teenagers were swaying to the Charleston and the Black Bottom? It is all a question of degree and I think that at the moment we are going through a particular virulent phase of the rhythm epidemic.

And chief among the influences to be credited or blamed for this phenomenon is undoubtedly television.

There are at present no fewer than five weekly peak hour shows devoted exclusively to the playing and plugging of pop music. This compares with two programmes about politics, three about current affairs and two off-peak shows fortnightly devoted to all the arts.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of these pop programmes – presumably devoted to the ever-changing tastes and fads of their fans – is how quickly they congeal into frozen formulas and into mindless repetitiveness of the same technical gimmicks.

Oldest

The three oldest in the business – Ready, Steady, Go!, Thank Your Lucky Stars, and Juke Box Jury – have remained practically unchanged, down to the compere’s cement smiles, for almost three years.

Now with stentorian fanfares two of them ushered in what they shouted was to be a fresh era in pop presentation.

“We’re all terribly excited,” said Cathy McGowan, introducing Ready, Steady Goes Live. “It’s the very first show of its kind where everybody sings live.” If memory serves me right I thought that was what TV used to do before most of Miss McGowan’s audience were actually born.

There was no doubt that something fresh had to be done to Ready, Steady, Go! which had deteriorated disastrously from its early days, when its free-and-easy mingling of artists and audiences had given the show a spontaneity and bounce that appealed triumphantly to the very young.

But of late is anarchic shooting had become an excuse for sloppy directing, its natural studio environment had become a refuge for lazy set designers and cheap budgets, and its gay, lively enthusiasts had diminished into a jumble of spotty faced, frozen gawkers.

Harried into going live by a growing suspicion among audiences that mime merely disguised the incompetence of its performers, Ready, Steady, Go! moved into a larger studio and recruited some prettier girls into the audience.

But apart from discovering two girls who could sing remarkably like Dionne Warwick, it cannot be said that a new millennium in pop programmes was opened up by the renovation.

The problem of singing live proved that only Tom Jones and Miss Warwick could perform as effectively without the help of recording engineers. The actual sound balance of the programme was atrocious, with rhythm beats blotting out melodies and the background noises blurring the singing.

There was chaos in the cueing, with performers caught with their instruments down and egg all over their guitars. “You’ve done it again,” cried Manfred Mann at a bad cue. “Ready, Steady Goes Live. Aspirin sales have doubled!”

A.B.C.’s Thank Your Lucky Stars did much better with its revised show. Getting rid of all the nonsense stunts – audience markings “O’ll give it foive,” extraneous disc jockeys – the acts took place in a well-marked off arena, divorced form the audiences, allowing the lighting effects to play their full part.

Screams

By cutting to the fist-chewing, hysterical screamers in the audience only when it was needed to match the effect of the performers, the viewers at home could get an uncluttered, clean-cut picture of groups like the Beatles, the Animals and the Drifters without interruptions from the stamping fett and waggling behinds of the studio fodder.

I am at a loss, however, to explain the continued tolerance of the B.B.C. for Juke Box Jury. The juxtaposition of close-ups of astigmatic children and square-faced Moms with the sound of the latest records has long since ceased to be of any conceivable visual interest.

The sight of middle-aged people like David Tomlinson, Joan Turner and Catherine Boyle trying to communicate their with-it-ness to a glum-faced, mummified audience is one of the continuing embarrassments on TV.

What conceivable use their judgments are escapes me when last week no fewer than seven out of nine records were solemnly nominated as hits. David Tomlinson, indeed, voted for nine out of nine as hits which, as a standard, would make the turnover in the Top Ten as active as an explosion of jumping beans.

Smashing

This programme, like Ready Steady Go! also tends to correlate pop music with inarticulateness. The vocabulary of Sue Lloyd on Juke Box Jury seemed to be confined chiefly to the words “I love it, I think it’s great.” Cathy McGowan, doing most of the talking in Ready, Steady, Go! announced a “smashing” competition, thanked Manfred Mann for a “smashing” arrangement, said a harmonica player was “smashing” and told us that the four dancing couples we were going to see were – guess what? “smashing.”

And, in addition to doing something about this potential deleterious effect on teenager speech, could the producers of these programmes not be so shamelessly ready to plug any new American star that happens to float into town?

Dionne Warwick, in spite of her undoubted talent, does not deserve a spot on the Eamonn Andrews Show, Ready, Steady, Go!, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Juke Box Judy [sic] in just under ten days.

It would, indeed, be healthier all round if the entire pop world were farm more independent of the public relations men in the record business.

The post Five pop shows on television to every two where they talk about politics appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

SEVEN years ago I appeared on the second programme of a new BBC magazine feature about the arts called Monitor. My main contribution was to interview some so-called “angry young men” and discover what, if anything, they had in common.

Technically, the item consisted of a series of close-up heads answering the same question in turn. By this juxtaposition, it was clearly seen that young men like Kenneth Tynan, John Wain, Colin Wilson and Stuart Holroyd – all fixed with the same “angry” label – had completely disparate, even antipathetic, political and philosophical views.

Those were very early days in the history of Monitor, and its editor and compere, Huw Wheldon, was tentatively groping towards some kind of formula for tackling the arts on TV.

Experimental

His first two programmes contained an experimental film montage about Harringay Circus, Peter Brook explaining musique concrete, Alan Brien reporting audience reactions to Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, and my bit on angry young men.

Whatever one may say about the way these items came off, the thinking was at least determined to give the arts a zestful, intimate and topical relevance to contemporary life.

But this attitude that the arts had something to do with ordinary living was given its first sharp, discouraging blow by an administrative decision that stemmed directly from my interviews with the “angry young men.”

Someone in the BBC hierarchy had decided that the item had been “too political” and that henceforth Monitor was to leave politics strictly alone.

Taken literally, this would have meant that, if they were discussed at all, the real motivations behind the work of Arthur Miller, Orwell, John Osborne, Shaw, O’Casey, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Guttuso, Brecht, Logue, Camus, some of Picasso – to merely scratch the surface – would not have been seriously probed or analysed.

During its seven years of existence I’m sure that Monitor occasionally bypassed or skirted round this odd bureaucratic edict.

But with such a prohibition tied to its tail, it just naturally went the only way left open to it. That was to remove art more and more from the clumsy, sweating, imperfect ambience of living and to set it apart as something to be polished, dusted, coddled, observed and isolated like some precious vase on a mantelpiece.

Monitor produced some remarkably successful programmes. It introduced some brilliant and exciting film reports of artists, painters and writers. And Huw Wheldon was always there to reassure us that it was not very difficult and communicable if we would only give it a chance.

Yet in spite of the kudos that was heaped upon it, there was a growing feeling, particularly amongst the young, that this headmasterish, semi-pedantic exhibit-in-a-museum approach was not the way art should be treated.

In the fields of writing, painting, sculpting and composing, artists were losing patience with the formalistic rules that governed their mediums and were indulging in anarchistic experiments to prove that art could be found in anything seeable, touchable, audible or imaginable.

And it was on this wave of new thinking about the arts that Jonathan Miller, fresh from Beyond The Fringe and some theatre direction in New York, decided to launch the latest series of Monitor programmes.

Determined to strip art of its pious, shellacked, mandarin look, he turned up on his first few programmes leaping about like a benzedrine-happy leprechaun, gaggling, mugging and skipping his way through the compere chores.

Fallible

To prove that Monitor was not some remote image in a Louis Quinze mirror, he let us see the cameras, the mike shadows, the boom, the bad lighting, the erratic editing, the whole fallible paraphernalia of TV production.

Here, he was trying to say, is Art Irreverent, awkward, imperfect, clumsy, easy, natural and funny. Just like you and me. Give it a chance! the same message as Wheldon’s but a different sales pitch.

But Miller’s inexperience, both as a TV producer and as an authority on the arts, lured him into some very costly mistakes.

His now-notorious interview with Miss Susan Sontag, an American novelist, was almost a parody of everything fresh and vital that could be said about the arts.

Being very young, it was natural, too, that Miller should seek for his dynamic, revolutionary vision of the arts in America. They were producing artists who were inspired by the inside of a medicine cupboard, a dirty brassiere in a bathtub, the emptiness of a pad in Harlem.

Unfortunately, the Americans he chose for us to examine were almost universally dull, self-satisfied bores whose talk was neither profound, amusing nor revolutionary.

Orthodoxy

The hoots of derision that greeted these first few programmes obviously caused Jonathan Miller to lose his nerve. Orthodoxy in technique and subject-matter are now creeping back into Monitor.

There’s John Betjeman cosily interviewing conventional poets to the background of shots of lowering skies and clean horizons. There’s Jonathan Miller sitting quite still in the best Wheldon manner. And there’s Samuel Beckett, being spoken by Jack MacGowran, for an entire programme – the only visual excitement being how close the cameras could get up MacGowran’s nsotrils.

With this programme on Beckett – claustrophobic, esoteric in the narrowest sense, Third Programme – without any attempt to engage any viewer who was not already a dedicated, obsessed Beckett fanatic, Monitor had returned to the worst excesses of its most precious, divorced-from-life, minute-minority phase. I didn’t think that was what Jonathan Miller had in mind when he took the job.

The post What a pity Mr. Jonathan Miller should lose his nerve appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

WITHOUT current affairs programmes or documentaries, television would be hard put to it to justify any claim to being a serious medium of communication.

It is programmes like Panorama, This Week, World in Action and Gallery that provide the solid bulwark of respectability behind which television channels can cower while peppering us with Compacts, Coronation Streets, Beat the Clocks and Take Your Picks.

They achieve a remarkable standard of consistent, pungent, informed comment and their continued existence and well-being is as essential to TV as the Kremlin is to Communism.

But there are signs that longevity has brought its inevitable toll of orthodoxy, smugness and hardened thinking. This is particularly true of Panorama, where methods of presentation have remained as static and predictable as a pagan ritual.

There inevitably sits the Buddha-like figure of the Great God Dimbleby aura-ting (if the verb doesn’t exist it ought to) resplendent waves of common sense and reliability.

With the slight frown of a benevolent teacher asking a series of hypothetical questions to which he alone knows the answers, he takes us gently by the minds into the confusing maelstrom of such issues as Vietnam, the trade gap or the Congo.

On Monday, with a condescending smile, he showed us the Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callaghan, defending his latest fiscal statement against the combined scepticism of a BBC reporter, a financial journalist, Edward Heath and ICI’s Paul Chambers.

Then he whisked us off to Rome and a short profile by John Morgan on the new British Cardinal, Dr. John Heenan. And finally Derek Hart summarised for us the argument for and against travelling to Spain during the present crisis over Gibraltar.

Everything was impeccably well-mannered and balanced. Mr. Callaghan answered questions from the reporters without being remotely drawn on anything concerning the Budget or anything he had not said in the House.

Mr. Heath and Mr. Chambers made their statements to which Mr. Callaghan listened with firmly closed lips since it appeared obvious that they had agreed not to talk to each other but at each other. The new Cardinal’s profile was friendly – almost obituary-like in tone with John Morgan failing to take up the one issue which non-Catholics might have been curious. The Cardinal said it was the Church’s view about contraception he was supporting and not his own. own. [sic] He was merely concerned with the truth.

He agreed, however, that he would find no difficulty at all in accepting the changed attitude to contraception if the Church decided a different line was valid.

If, then, to-day’s truth can become to-morrow’s lie, how is Cardinal Heenan so convinced that what he supports to-day is the real truth? John Morgan did not ask the question.

Derek Hart’s contribution on Gibraltar, with its efforts to brighten up to discussion with some long-ish sequences of flamenco dancers was, by journalistic terms, a very dated story that should have been scrapped since it had nothing really new to offer.

A typical Panorama week. A dehydrated discussion, a scrappy profile and a tired news story. The programme has been better but, of late, traditional reporting and respectability seems to be clogging its arteries.

This Week, under Jeremy Issacs, has streamlined its format by eliminating the resident compere and being more flexible in the time it gives to any one subject. Lately, indeed, it has tended to devote a whole half-hour to subjects that hardly warrant it.

With James Cameron in the chair, it managed to inject a note of urgency into an analysis of the recent financial dilemma facing the United Nations.

By stopping the story for pressing transatlantic telephone calls to Desmond Wilcox in New York one was given the feeling that Albania’s intransigence was about to smash the United Nations and that we were in an international crisis not far removed from Vietnam.

The programme’s chief weakness is using the same trite techniques – silhouetted, shadowed, masked figures – for probing into taboo sociological problems like homosexuality.

The sight of the crunched face of Magee or Wilcox displaying concern in film reverses (shots taken after the actual interviews) has now become one of the cliches of TV.

World in Action, once Granada’s challenge to This Week, has deteriorated recently in both the artificiality of its anger and the strident, hysterical note of its commentary.

It programme on bronchitis was marred by a sensational lingering on sputum and coughing sufferers as well as a faked-up procession of coffins that jarred, and to some extent nullified, the reality of the problem.

The programme last week on Vietnam was practically all old newsreel clips with a minimal amount of film shot specifically for the programme.

Its best item, seen before – was an evangelical sequence of President Johnson, before he became President, in an unbelievably home-spun and corny frame of mind.

But no one should be allowed to get away with a script that contains lines of such bathos as “This is a civil war… brother set against brother”, or: “This is a battle for the hearts and minds of Vietnam… (the Americans) failed to win friends and influence people.”

Alex Valentine, the producer, should immediately get himself a new scriptwriter or this series will drown itself in its own muck sweat.

All these programmes, exciting and provocative as they sometimes can be, are suffering from an inability to get out of a format rut.

There is no evidence of experimenting with fresh techniques of presentation nor any signs of new thinking about the way in which an old problem can be given a fresh impact.

They all tend, in addition, to see only the ponderous, significant and urgent side of life. It is a long time since any of them gave me a laugh.

Since they profess to be mirroring life surely they must sometimes be tempted to show us what life looks like in a distorting mirror and with its trousers down.

The post Just for a change why doesn’t Panorama etc get out of the rut? appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

IF ANY FURTHER sign were needed of the fatigue and inertia now paralysing television it is the sudden proliferation of talk programmes.

While the eye is being increasingly neglected, the ear is assaulted and pummelled hour after hour by what one might call cauliflower TV. It leaves the ear battered, bruised and sorry for itself.

Some talk programmes like Not So [Much A Programme, More A Way Of Life] and On the Braden Beat divide equally between the eye and the ear. But The Eamonn Andrews Show, Three After Six, The Explorers, Division, Take It Or Leave It, Dateline, and, naturally, The Epilogue, are basically radio shows that make only peripheral use of the visual medium.

Dinosaurs

These dinosaurs of TV could have made their appearance on radio in the mid-thirties with hardly a change of format or script. In the pioneer days of TV they would have been dismissed by any progressive producer as a retrogressive admission of defeat.

But their appeal to TV board rooms and planning executives is obvious. Cauliflower TV often gets a favourable critical reception because it usually has about it an intellectual or cultural aura. And, above all, it is cheap.

For these programmes there are no heavy costs for the sets, scripts, travel, filming, editing, or performers. University dons, journalists, writers, and politicians – the backbone of these programmes – can be paid a fraction of the cost of actors, well-known comperes, and other professional entertainers in other shows.

I would guess that Rediffusion by putting on Three After Six (three people talking to each other) instead of Here and Now (a film and taped actuality show) the company is saving money at the rate of £30,000 to £40,000 [£650,000 to £900,000 now allowing for inflation -Ed] a year. Since they get as much official acclaim for one as the other, who can blame them?

It would be foolish, of course, to contend that there was no place for some talk programmes on TV. What concerns me, as much as the misuse of the medium, is the general deterioration and lowering of intellectual standards of the conversation we hear on TV as compared with what we used to hear on radio.

Exempted from this stricture is Rediffusion’s The Explorers, in which Jack Hargreaves makes a serious attempt to probe the minds of serious men to give us some insight about their thoughts about the future.

Monday’s discussion with Professor Denis Gabor about the impact of automation on our society and the problem of leisure left me tingling with intellectual excitement and curiosity.

Boring

But what ABC’s The Eamonn Andrews Show is supposed to be doing I have not yet discovered. Entertaining people, I will no doubt be told, proving once more that the word “entertaining” is often synonymous with boring, vulgarising and embarrassing.

When it first began its guests included a sprinkling of relatively serious people like Randolph Churchill, Wolf Mankowitz and Ogden Nash. But the inability of Mr. Andrews, as compere, to sustain any serious talk and the impossibility of mixing slapstick and profundity soon led to the elimination of almost everybody but entertainers and clowns.

On Sunday the show reach its nadir to date. Representing the entertainers were Michael Mac Llammoir and Jeanette Scott, and the clowns were Michael Frayn and the Earl of Arran.

If the conversation has kept its centre of gravity concentrated on such topics as whether or not all blondes were dumb or whether humour is male of female (these subjects were touched upon), one could have dismissed the subsequent inanity as TV fodder on the same level as the ill-fated Celebrity Game.

But Mr. Andrews steered the talk into deeper channels, and this ill-assorted group found themselves talking about automation, computers, racial prejudice, patriotism and conformity.

Foreigners

From the Earl of Arran we heard that “the Irish have never produced anybody worthwhile,” that the Swiss are “mean, snobbish and smelly,” and that “wogs begin at Calais and that all foreigners are “bloody.” [sic on quote marks]

Now there will be protests from viewers about the use of the word “bloody.” I doubt if many will object to the far more xenophobic sentiments of the earl’s mind.

No one on the programme, I should add, intelligently contradicted the noble earl. To their credit, they were probably too startled to do anything but gasp.

If Lord Hill and the ITA is really concerned about television corrupting the public mind, let them stop worrying about the number of times people are kicked in the groin in thrillers and think a bit about the number of times they are concussed on the brain by programmes like the Eamonn Andrews Show.

One rule Lord Hill might seriously think about is preventing so-called funny programmes from tackling subjects too important and too delicate for their capabilities.

The ITA does not list the Eamonn Andrews Show among its “serious” programmes but it does list On the Braden Beat. The distinction is valid and proper. It is, therefore, up to the ITA to make sure that we are protected from stupidity and ignorance about significant matters merely because it is masquerading in the jester’s garb of “light entertainment.”

I had intended this week to discuss, too, the quality and standard of other examples of cauliflower TV but, because of space, it will have to wait for another time.

The post All these talk programmes – they’re getting worse appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

INERTIA is television’s most prevalent disease. Nothing is more likely to bring on a fit of the vapours amongst TV planners than the suggestion that a popular programme has outlived its effectiveness.

Programme paralysis is particularly virulent in commercial TV circles where it would probably need a couple of deaths or retirements in the board rooms before Coronation, Emergency Ward 10, Sunday Night at the Palladium, Double Your Money or No Hiding Place were finally tossed into their well-deserved limbos.

But the BBC, to, suffers from this reluctance to change or abandon a once-successful formula. In their case they tend to cling less to the popular shows than the programmes that give give the Corporation its image of solid, responsible, semi-intellectual respectability.

Speculation

There is much speculation these days about who will fill Stuart Hood’s vacant post as BBC’s Controller of TV Programmes. Proof of the need for some fresh mind in this job is the manner in which To-night [sic], the five-day topical magazine, has been allowed to deteriorate into a middle-class Tit-bits stuffed with incestuous techniques and in-jokes.

Although To-night has been on the air almost eight years, it reach the peak of its creative dynamism about four or five years ago. It then evolved its wry, oblique, irreverent approach to life.

It sought out with a purpose and some effectiveness some of the immoral and ludicrous aspects of British society. And in its imaginative use of film and the ranging quest of its cameras, it recognised the fact that TV is essentially a visual medium.

The quirky

But my recent viewing of To-night shows that irrelevance has been replaced by a falsetto indignation about insignificant and manufactured issues, that its spotlighting of British life is largely concentrated on the quirky and the silly and that its aim to stimulate and titillate the eye has been all but abandoned.

The unexpected was once To-night’s most endearing feature. Predictability is now its most irritating fault.

There seem to be at least three Alan Whickers on the programme and if you exchanged the beard and the Scot’s [sic] burr, who could tell whether it was Fyfe Philpot or Trevor Robertson speaking?

Metaphors

The hallmark of a To-night item is a man in a mackintosh, carrying a hand-mike, walking menacingly down an empty rural lane or across a row of suburban houses towards a camera close-up and in an apocalyptic voice saying something like (my words) “This ground on which I’m standing hides a dream… for some a dream of hope and riches… but for others it has already proved a will-of-the-wisp, a Freudian aberration, a frustrating nightmare.”

In one week such unrestrained, highly coloured metaphors have rolled over a disused lead mine, and abandoned town in Australia, a toy factory, a church in Spitalfield.

Only the picture of an Australian town vacated after the collapse of the uranium boom was worth showing. Fyfe Robertson’s attempt to find a serious social issue in an ecclesiastical decision to spend £70,000 [£1.5m today, allowing for inflation -Ed] on a beetle-infested architecturally-exciting church was contentiously forced. But perhaps it was peripherally acceptable.

There was no excuse at all for including Christopher Brasher’s two contributions from Wales. His playing about with drums was embarrassing and his enthusiasm about some disused lead and zinc mines was inexplicable and even misleading. “A few tax concessions,” he said in conclusion, “and we could be digging our own minerals and cutting our import bill.” And perhaps going bankrupt in the process?

Eccentrics

The programme, too, is plagued with eccentrics and odd inventions. Any foreigner watching it might well conclude that any attempt to drag such an odd-ball nation into the second half of the 20th century is doomed from the start.

There was the working-class home of a printer converted into a baroque, plaster-imitation of a miniature Victorian palace. There was Fyfe Robertson offering to sell us re-painted quarry locomotives for £100 [£2,500] each. There was the man who collected vintage Rolls-Royces, another chimney pots, and the fellow who was using chicken manure as a substitute for petrol.

There is, too, a ponderousness about the so-called funny items that is almost distressing. Magnus Magnusson trying to ridicule Italian politics, pretending to be lulled to sleep by an Oriental device or making up a new calendar were Teutonic and collegiate enough to have been the products of some “vitty shport” at Heidelburg University.

Dullness

It is not only prestige that the BBC is losing with this near-parody of a once-exciting programme. Its dullness and specialist appeal gives the commercial channel and opportunity to pick up its mass audiences for the night.

Double Your Money and Take Your Pick have for years made the Top Ten largely because they were pitted against To-night. Even such relatively serious programmes as All Our Yesterdays and Cinema can reach Top Ten status with To-night as its opposition.

With the BBC trying to justify a higher licence fee, this almost wilful chucking away of audiences seems either short-sighted or stupid.

What To-night desperately needs is a change of time-slot, approach and editor. Moved to 10-30 p.m., it would be more likely to pick up the kind of audiences to which it is appealing and a fresh zest and look would obviously come with its late-night atmosphere.

Obsession

It must stop living on its former glories and get rid of its obsession with the past and the eccentric. It should concentrate on the urgent, the vital and the genuine absurd. If it campaigns, it must make sure that the issue is really worth campaigning about and it must stop its present breathless, contentious, holier-than-thou approach to all God’s works and all God’s peoples.

It is obvious, on this record, that 29-year-old Derrick Amoore is hardly the Editor to take on such a renovation. Judged by To-night, he seems to be the oldest young man in the business.

The BBC might also stop to consider whether or not their current passion for youthful executives has not already gone too far.

The post Is this the root of the trouble with Tonight? appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.