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.

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.