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.

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.