There are times when it embarrasses viewers to look
When TV turns from asking questions to shouting the odds, Milton Shulman gets concerned
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.
