The dream machine
Gillian Freeman
Tube of Plenty—the Evolution of American Television Erik Barnouw (Oxford University Press, £8.50) The first time I saw a television was in Maidenhead in 1944. It had a screen the size of a cigar box and a cabinet as big as an armchair. Since there were no transmissions I turned the switch in vain, but the schoolfriend in whose house it stood acquired an unchallengeable prestige. Sophisticated tele-years, later, long past the days when the test-card gave a thrill, I crossed the Atlantic and boggled. There was not only colour, but Christmas was approaching and I experienced the power of the sponsor. I had known only the gentle persuasion of ITV and now I was confronted by the Hard Sell.
It had been but a small step to switch on the motel television, but it was a giant step in the comprehension of this naive viewer. A product of the sexist society, I was mesmerised by the commercials for the dolls. The concept of advertising directly to children I thought perfidious (of course we have caught up since then) but the dolls themselves were stupendous. There was Tippy Tumbles who turned somersaults and Baby Throw-a-Ball who lobbed lightly into a plastic cup. There was Baby Thumbelina, so small she had to be loved, and Baby Grow-a-tooth, whose descending and retracting incisors made her Queen of my Doll's house, taking precedence even over the pink-bonnetted baby with three plastic faces and a rotating head. Made frivolous by the horror of this surfeit, I invented my own, the Hermaphrodolly by Ambivitoy, which, at the touch of a navel would put forth miniscule mammaries and other extremities, a reductio ad absurdum, or so I thought, until last November when I faced the moment of truth. Hurrying from Jumbo Jet to Holiday Inn, I made (as is my wont) straight for the set. There, between the cartoons (a fraction more violent since the last visit, it seemed to me) was the latest lilliputian to woo the nursery consumers, not exactly a hermaphrodolly but a childdoll which grew into a teenager and, by a twist of the arm, sprouted a pair of coneshaped breasts.
If this seems too personal an account, Professor Erik Barnouw's horror-story of the growth of sponsored television, pinpoints a progression in which the promotion of toys accelerated the decline of the medium from a lively (literally) source of entertainment and education to the present series of intellectual insults. Why is everything judged by the appeal to a mythical 'Middle-West' population of dunderheads? Have the executives ever been to the Middle West ? It's the expanse they fly over travelling to meetings between New York and the West coast.
The invention of television ranks with the discovery of fire, the designing of the wheel and the ability to print in its influence over the behaviour of mankind. It rears above the written word with its power to form opinion. When Alexander Bell exhibited his telephone in 1876, visionaries were already predicting both radio and television, and a popular song, entitled The .Wondrous Telephone included this verse:
You stay at home and listen To the lecture in the hall, And hear the strains of music From a fascinating ball.
By 1895 a London company (The Electrophone Company) had provided such a service, and by means of amplification, groups and gatherings were able to enjoy theatrical and musical performances, church sermons and election addresses. The company was in business until 1925, by which time the future of public broadcasting was secure. While in Britain Atm system developed free of sponsorship, the Americans found themselves (perhaps predictably) taking a more business-like route.
Marconi's 'black box' and wireless communications had opened the way for Lee de Forest and his 'Audion' (a machine which became the foundation of the Electronics Industry) and with the help of eager amateurs who queued for the privilege to perform, he began the first regular broadcasting service. Financing problems only arose when the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers demanded copyright fees for the songs and music put out over the air. There was a ready answer in paid-for commercials, the big break-through coming in 1923 when an advertising agency acted as mediator between Mineralava cosmetics and Marion Davies, who agreed to give a talk on "How I make up for the Movies". Fifty years later we have Jane Russell visually extolling her Living Bra. Progress?
American television programming took its early format from the radio, gradually diverting to suit the medium. News programmes, with an amalgamated radio/ cinema style, soon acquired sponsors. When NBC presented the Camel News Caravan, Fox Movietone (who supplied the pictures) was forbidden to include No Smoking signs in the films. Until 1947 politics (with the exception of newscasts) had remained out of the entertainment field, but J, Edgar Hoover, by objecting to a proposed licence for a group of Californians because they were communist sympathisrs, brought the cold war into television and by doing so chilled not only the industry but the rest of the Western World. Hollywood, already anxious over the decline of cinema attendances (television sets never appeared in the movies) was now beset by the Black List. Mrs Lela Rogers (Ginger's mother) identified the film None but the Lonely Heart as "communistic". She quoted the Hollywood Reporter review which had described it as being "pitched in a low key. . . moody and sombre throughout in the Russian manner." But the farce was limited. Senator McCarthy emerged as leader of the purge.
Ed Murrow, who had held a singular position in the development of documentary coverage dating from his days in radio, became the white knight of the liberal cause. His television series, See it Now, boldly undertook to examine the now historic case of Lieutenant Milo Radulovich of the Air Force Reserve, asked to resign his commission because anonymous accusers had levelled charges against his family for "radical leanings" and "questionable activities". When CBS refused to advertise the programme, Murrow and his colleague Fred Friendly paid the substantial sum necessary, taking space in the New York Times and personally signing the advertisement. The programme turned the tide of public opinion and, followed by others including a memorable interview with McCarthy himself, led eventually to the senator's downfall. When the network finally dropped the series and replaced it by an innocuous quiz show, Murrow compared it to Nero and his fiddle, while John Crosby, television critic for the 'New York Herald Tribune wrote: See it Now. . . is by every criterion television's most brilliant, most decorated, most imaginative, most courageous and most important programme. The fact that CBS cannot afford it but can afford Beat the Clock is shocking.
And the popularity of quiz shows, like Beat the Clock, brought its own form of corruption. Professor Barnouw has a matter-of-fact prose style and is not given to hyperbole, but his subject is sensational. There are just under five hundred pages (numbered, heaven knows why, where they meet the spine, thus making them hard to find in spite of the excellent index) of unpadded facts and relevant photographs, which both indict and exonerate the extraordinary North American Society with its blatant subservience to Mammon and its passion for revealing truth, a convocation of multifarious people, once disparate but now united before the altar of a single screen. Since its inception American television has been drawing life into the box until the boundaries blur. As ordinary citizens disport themselves ludicrously before the cameras in Let's Make a Deal, team with the 'stars' in The Ten Thousand Dollar Pyramid, choose their Presidents according to their television charisma and see them murdered 'live', existence becomes unreal until it has been put into perspective by a Zoomar lens.
In 1882, the French artist, Albert Robida, drew the picture of a future when a distant war was watched in the living room. That has come to pass (although the battles have not yet halted for the commercials), bringing with it an indifference to suffering paralleled only by the programmes themselves!
I like the idea of sadism (wrote Quinn Martin engagingly to a writer of The Untouchables) but I hope we can come up with another approach to it.
Where, 1 s onder, do we go from there?
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