The year TV showed it is not just a toy
Grumpy critic Milton Shulman looks back at the wider themes of 1968 on screen
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.
