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.

YOUTH IS THE GREAT OBSESSION OF OUR TIME. We try to cling to it. We try to emulate it. We try to understand it. Whose fault?

I suspect the credit or blame can be equally divided between advertising and TV. Those petrol ad. virility symbols (fast cars and phallic pumps), slim-line girdles, bread, soft drinks (has love never been made by a fat, old man?), exotic chocolates (sucked by sexy females undressing upstairs) and hair glosseners, teeth brighteners, smell eliminators that seem to be the exclusive prerogative of the young.

Since the young have money that they spend more indiscriminately and more rashly than the middle-aged marrieds, it is natural that the copy writers should aim their tempting illusions at the soft centre of this vulnerable market

There always have been programmes like Ready, Steady, Go and Top of the Pops with Keep Out signs for adults. And the new TV drama has been preoccupied with the sexual travails of North Country lasses in Liverpool or Cockney lads in Battersea.

Hippies

But there has of late been an increasing tendency on the part of current affairs and documentary producers to isolate youth and examine it as if it were some special social group like homosexuals or child molesters.

The activities of the hippies, the flower people, the psychedelic ravers, are analysed and probed on programmes like 24 Hours and World In Action with the same sort of anxious concern that they give to comprehensive schools or race riots.

Unable to treat young people as naturally as the weather — which is what they are — producers tend to treat their behaviour patterns either with a shrug or a wagging finger.

The Mind Alchemists, in which Michael Tuchner for the BBC examined the cult and the gospel of LSD in America, would have been a much more satisfactory programme had it toned down the accusatory touch.

“Hippies seem to be playing at life; they are apathetic, non-productive and irresponsible,” wrote Mr. Tuchner in the Radio Times, “they stand for anarchy, nihilism and self-indulgence … their version of Utopia is naive and foolish and impossible.”

The programme itself was more objective than this synopsis of Mr. Tuchner’s views, with a particularly good interview with Timothy Leary, the Messianic leader of the LSD cult.

Handsome

Not only was he handsome and articulate, but he made some telling points about the futility of many of the values American youth has been encouraged to adopt.

There was, too, a fascinating cameo of an LSD session with tour disciples being “switched-on” in an atmosphere of Oriental reverence and protocol. The looks of serene ecstasy that suffused their faces belied most of the warnings that the earnest experts on the programme gave us about the terror and panic that can be experienced under LSD.

Attractive

And I was also impressed by the ex-hippie who, after 10 years, decided he no longer needed the drug, that it had shown him his potential and that he could now adjust his life more easily to his capabilities.

After such a convincing demonstration of the drug’s benign and beneficial longterm effects, the stern denunciations of doctors and psychiatrists about the deadly dangers of LSD would probably not have discouraged any young person from an experiment if he was that way inclined.

Indeed, I suspect that the mere fact that so many figures of authority were cautioning him about the perils of the drug would nave made it all the more attractive.

The one thing that the young learn early is that warnings add spice to an adventure and that prohibitions are an invitation to action. Preaching is something they react instinctively against.

Jill Craigie’s Keep Your Hair On, also on the BBC, did not make that mistake. This was an amusing assault on perhaps the silliest prejudice that the older generation has against our present young.

Miss Craigie showed us four young men with a variety of jobs and accents who were hard-working, responsible, masculine and efficient. And who wore long hair. And why not?

The inevitable psychiatrists again offered us explanations about both the desire for long hair and the antipathy it arouses in its middle-aged opponents.

It might be that a surplus of a million men over girls has created an instinctive peacock reaction in young boys. It might be that the older generation is jealous of the sexual freedom of the young and therefore resents the symbols of that freedom.

But these are doubtful premises and Miss Craigie’s nicely edited, sharply photo graphed documentary might have been just a bit faster and neater if the psychiatrists and sociologists had been eliminated. But this was a programme that eschewed preaching, made a small telling point and, because it was less pompous, was more effective than the Mind Alchemists.

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WITHOUT current affairs programmes or documentaries, television would be hard put to it to justify any claim to being a serious medium of communication.

It is programmes like Panorama, This Week, World in Action and Gallery that provide the solid bulwark of respectability behind which television channels can cower while peppering us with Compacts, Coronation Streets, Beat the Clocks and Take Your Picks.

They achieve a remarkable standard of consistent, pungent, informed comment and their continued existence and well-being is as essential to TV as the Kremlin is to Communism.

But there are signs that longevity has brought its inevitable toll of orthodoxy, smugness and hardened thinking. This is particularly true of Panorama, where methods of presentation have remained as static and predictable as a pagan ritual.

There inevitably sits the Buddha-like figure of the Great God Dimbleby aura-ting (if the verb doesn’t exist it ought to) resplendent waves of common sense and reliability.

With the slight frown of a benevolent teacher asking a series of hypothetical questions to which he alone knows the answers, he takes us gently by the minds into the confusing maelstrom of such issues as Vietnam, the trade gap or the Congo.

On Monday, with a condescending smile, he showed us the Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callaghan, defending his latest fiscal statement against the combined scepticism of a BBC reporter, a financial journalist, Edward Heath and ICI’s Paul Chambers.

Then he whisked us off to Rome and a short profile by John Morgan on the new British Cardinal, Dr. John Heenan. And finally Derek Hart summarised for us the argument for and against travelling to Spain during the present crisis over Gibraltar.

Everything was impeccably well-mannered and balanced. Mr. Callaghan answered questions from the reporters without being remotely drawn on anything concerning the Budget or anything he had not said in the House.

Mr. Heath and Mr. Chambers made their statements to which Mr. Callaghan listened with firmly closed lips since it appeared obvious that they had agreed not to talk to each other but at each other. The new Cardinal’s profile was friendly – almost obituary-like in tone with John Morgan failing to take up the one issue which non-Catholics might have been curious. The Cardinal said it was the Church’s view about contraception he was supporting and not his own. own. [sic] He was merely concerned with the truth.

He agreed, however, that he would find no difficulty at all in accepting the changed attitude to contraception if the Church decided a different line was valid.

If, then, to-day’s truth can become to-morrow’s lie, how is Cardinal Heenan so convinced that what he supports to-day is the real truth? John Morgan did not ask the question.

Derek Hart’s contribution on Gibraltar, with its efforts to brighten up to discussion with some long-ish sequences of flamenco dancers was, by journalistic terms, a very dated story that should have been scrapped since it had nothing really new to offer.

A typical Panorama week. A dehydrated discussion, a scrappy profile and a tired news story. The programme has been better but, of late, traditional reporting and respectability seems to be clogging its arteries.

This Week, under Jeremy Issacs, has streamlined its format by eliminating the resident compere and being more flexible in the time it gives to any one subject. Lately, indeed, it has tended to devote a whole half-hour to subjects that hardly warrant it.

With James Cameron in the chair, it managed to inject a note of urgency into an analysis of the recent financial dilemma facing the United Nations.

By stopping the story for pressing transatlantic telephone calls to Desmond Wilcox in New York one was given the feeling that Albania’s intransigence was about to smash the United Nations and that we were in an international crisis not far removed from Vietnam.

The programme’s chief weakness is using the same trite techniques – silhouetted, shadowed, masked figures – for probing into taboo sociological problems like homosexuality.

The sight of the crunched face of Magee or Wilcox displaying concern in film reverses (shots taken after the actual interviews) has now become one of the cliches of TV.

World in Action, once Granada’s challenge to This Week, has deteriorated recently in both the artificiality of its anger and the strident, hysterical note of its commentary.

It programme on bronchitis was marred by a sensational lingering on sputum and coughing sufferers as well as a faked-up procession of coffins that jarred, and to some extent nullified, the reality of the problem.

The programme last week on Vietnam was practically all old newsreel clips with a minimal amount of film shot specifically for the programme.

Its best item, seen before – was an evangelical sequence of President Johnson, before he became President, in an unbelievably home-spun and corny frame of mind.

But no one should be allowed to get away with a script that contains lines of such bathos as “This is a civil war… brother set against brother”, or: “This is a battle for the hearts and minds of Vietnam… (the Americans) failed to win friends and influence people.”

Alex Valentine, the producer, should immediately get himself a new scriptwriter or this series will drown itself in its own muck sweat.

All these programmes, exciting and provocative as they sometimes can be, are suffering from an inability to get out of a format rut.

There is no evidence of experimenting with fresh techniques of presentation nor any signs of new thinking about the way in which an old problem can be given a fresh impact.

They all tend, in addition, to see only the ponderous, significant and urgent side of life. It is a long time since any of them gave me a laugh.

Since they profess to be mirroring life surely they must sometimes be tempted to show us what life looks like in a distorting mirror and with its trousers down.

The post Just for a change why doesn’t Panorama etc get out of the rut? appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

At the moment she is working in New York, where Dick Fontaine and a television camera team spent four days following and filming her every move for World in Action, which is why she is on our cover this week.

On Tuesday you can see the results of their work in “The Face on the Cover”, which in telling the story of Jean gives pointers to success for 50,000 other models.

“Jean Shrimpton is at the top now,” Dick Fontaine told me. “I think she’s overtaken Suzy Parker, for she is wanted all over the world by the best photographers, magazines, agencies.

“And she has achieved one of her ambitions — modelling the Autumn Collections for world – famous photographer Richard Avedon.”

Dick has been to New York three times but has always been too busy to see much of it.

“The first time I saw only the inside of the United Nations building ; the second time, I saw the inside of the Plaza Hotel with the Beatles,” he said. “I’ve still no idea what there is in New York apart from taxi cabs and treble-deck sandwiches.”

American photographers are efficient and professional, according to Dick. Models are professional and used to working at speed—though most of them are German, English or Danish.

“They all work harder. They all get more money,” he said. “It was the top thing for Jean Shrimpton to go to America. All the best-known photographers are there, and they are not necessarily the best.”

Jean Shrimpton was well established in Europe before she went to America.

“When I was in Paris a couple of months ago, I counted eight covers of different nationality magazines with Jean’s face on the front — on just one kiosk,” said Dick. “It’s becoming the same in America now. She’s so much in demand. People recognise her in the streets.

“She is the face of this year and last year, and every woman wants to look like her. They all adore her in New York. In fact, it’s ‘the thing’ to be English in America at the moment.”

While the World in Action team in New York followed Jean Shrimpton, their liaison girl and researcher in London, Jenny Isard, was talking to Jean’s parents for more facts on the world’s most sought-after model.

Dick was worn out chasing Jean Shrimpton in New York — “she moves pretty fast,” he said — but he would like to work there. “It’s a good place to work if you like working hard, and if you like cities, and, New York is a real city.”

The post The face on the cover appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.