Stop me if you’ve seen this before
Enough with the old films on television, says grumpy critic Milton Shulman
Artistically and technically TV has made very few advances over the past few years. Since the arrival of the hand-held camera over a decade ago, there have been only minor innovations in the way in which most programmes are produced on the air.
It is true that instant replay techniques have brought a quality of reflective excitement to sports. Drama, too. received a momentary fresh look with the injection of documentary realism in plays like Cathy Come Home.
But, considering its voluminous output and the manifold opportunities for experiment, it is surprising how staid and conventional most of TV’s output has become.
Variety, for example, is still frozen in the moribund moulds of yesteryear with Vai Doonican trying to look like Perry Como; with Top of the Pops not much removed from Ready, Steady, Go!; with Music, Music, Music giving a detergent imitation of the Black and White Minstrel Show whose technical origins are lost somewhere in the musty memories of light entertainment history.
Take-over
If I had to blame a single factor for the paralytic pace of visual innovation in British TV over the past six or seven years, I suspect it would be the creeping take-over of the small screen by the cinema industry.
Old films are no longer a joke; they are a menace. Gradually they are edging into so many crevices of the TV schedules that there is becoming a serious shrinkage of opportunities for TV technicians and artists to originate very much of their own.
On the major channels last week I counted the number of hours that were devoted to programmes that were made, financed and originally designed for the cinema and not for TV at all.
On the commercial channel, they occupied 10 hours 20 minutes of the week’s schedule. On BBC-1, if my arithmetic is correct, they filled up no less than 11 hours of the Corporation’s output.
These statistics symbolise, I suggest, the Tweedledum-Tweedledee likeness in programme thinking that now characterises both popular TV services.
Considering that each channel is only allowed to transmit 50 hours a week — aside from certain outside, religious and educational broadcasts — this means that more than one fifth of the time available to British TV is now occupied pumping out second hand material originally made for an altogether different medium.
It is not merely that the stuff is ancient, but even more demeaning is that TV viewers are expected to enjoy it even tnough the conditions for the maximum appreciation of these films is nowhere in evidence.
Colour films are shown in black and white. Cinemascope productions are squeezed into an unnatural square that truncates, dwarfs or distorts the image.
Stereophonic sound is pushed down to a whimper of its former self. Films are callously cut to fit rigid time slots. Their plots and climaxes are ruthlessly interrupted to bring us urgent messages from dog food manufacturers and perspiration deodorants.
Some of this might be tolerable if the films being shown had some merit of quality in their original, pristine state.
I sat through To Each His Own on BBC-1 watching Olivia de Havilland, wearing padded shoulders that would have been the envy of any American football player, flashbacking about her torments trying to gel control of her illegitimate son without letting anyone know that the boy was hers.
Dated
Since it was produced over 22 years ago. it is not altogether strange that the emotions and attitudes are rather dated. By the time her son at last confronted her with the words “Can I have this dance, mother,” I realised what a social boon the pill is if it will only save us from more films like this.
As if bad films weren’t enough, British TV now has a growing number of programmes which are outright plugs for films – either those on general release or those about to be seen on the box — or programmes that are composed of tiny snippets from feature films made up to fill a slot.
Michael Aspel’s The Movies — now mercifully coming off — is little more than free advertising for films being commercially shown together with puffs for old films masquerading under such omnibus BBC titles as The Great Stars, The Cagney Cavalcade or Laugh With Hope.
More imaginatively done — and of older origin — is Granada’s Cinema which, in essence, is also a grand public relations job for the movie business
Cheap
Then, too, there are concoctions like Disney Time, benevolent portraits of film stars like David Niven, and Personal Cinema which deals with a film makers work, which add to the disproportionate amount of time devoted by TV to glamorising, glorifying, idolising and publicising the activities of this single art form.
The reason for this obsession and preoccupation with the cinema is not hard to find. You can buy old films cheap. That is their greatest attraction. You can fill an hour of TV time at about a tenth or twentieth of the cost needed to mount some equivalent light entertainment programme at peak time.
They also need no effort, no work, no imagination, no worry on the part of the top echelons of the media. There is no fretting about studio space, artistes’ money, costumes, sets, technical facilities and the attendant uncertainty of possible failure.
For these advantages — economy and non-involvement – too many of TV’s executives are only too ready to abandon the dynamic, imaginative, exciting potentialities of the medium. It is a depressing state of affairs.
