TV in the Sixties

1. The Case of the Thirteen Viewers

By PETER FORSTER

NOT every day is one quoted in the Otago Daily Times of Dunedin, New Zealand, so let me start there. Following the New Zealand Government's creation of what will be a State Monopoly television service, a leader writer in this delightful and perceptive newspaper quoted My Spectator piece on the fifth anniversary of

ITV, to the effect that television does give a great deal of pleasure to a great many people, 'a point almost always overlooked.' He then went oil to warn that any Socialist policy would give viewers what is thought to be best for them, Instead of what they would find most pleasing:

here I can return the compliment by agreeing With him, and will now leave New Zealand to fend for itself.

At any rate, we in this country have got over

the first and worst of the hurdles facing the New Zealanders. The BBC, without being overtly Socialist (though more of this in a minute), has Still a bias which is educative at best, priggishly do-good at worst, while ITV is more concerned With catering for the customers. Yet neither bias Is intolerably over-weighted, so that BBC still truckles a good deal, and ITV frequently aspires, With a resultant overlap which makes it tempting to reach for clichés about our national way of evolving compromises.

. This in itself is not necessarily for the good— indeed. if 1 had to name a trend in which lay danger at present it is that (however their protag- onists howl) all too many of those in power could be interchanged among ITV and BBC, neither having a special vocation for either; and that the growth of the industry is such that television Programmes are coming too much within the Power-orbit of non-television, specialists. The Other day I heard an accountant laying down the law . about camera-angles; yet the producer Present did not tell him to get back to his adding machines.

Thus we find ourselves, five and a quarter years Oil from the introduction of commercial tele- vision, with two immensely strong and well- established organisations in a competition that is Often more ostensible than real. between them Clearly satisfying multitudes.

For the second successive year, BBC has an- nounced a top appointment around this time. Last year it was of Hugh Carleton Greene to be Director-General : it is hard to tell from the out- side how strongly his hand has been felt, and Perhaps it has not been easy to tell from the Inside, either. Now Kenneth Adam, an able and forceful former journalist with special knowledge of publicity, has been upranked to Controller of BBC TV, and he made some most heartening inaugural remarks to the press about the danger of getting into ruts, and it being far too. early for television to become respectable.

lhe appointment of Stuart Hood to be Direc- tor of Programmes'in place of Mr. Adam may Five rise to less enthusiasm, since Mr. Hood has been in charge of news bulletins, and there are those who fear that we may now be in for a variety show called 'The Robert Dougall Hour.' However, we shall see.

But there is one name that has not been men- tioned in connection with all this. If there is a single person whom all television men (and I don't mean administrators) on both sides of the fence would agree in calling the prime visionary in British TV since Baird, it is Cecil McGivern. More than anyone else he has built up the skill and standard of programmes since the war: he was clearly no politician, but he was undeniably the prophet of the new medium, and it is right to remember this and pay him honour at the moment when he has been overtaken on the road to command. How far Mr. McGivern was well treated by his masters it is not for me to specu- late; enough to say that ruthlessness is part of power, though if some in the BBC had been able to hear the comments made by a senior ITV executive with whom I lunched recently, they might be able to understand why their competi- tors often regard BBC protestations of morality with contempt. I only hope one such competitor will now persuade Mr. McGivern to change sides when he is over his illness; at fifty-three, he has still much to give that television cannot afford to lose.

Of course, it is almost impossible for anyone today to be a 'pure television' man. The industry is not like, say, the Comedic Francaise, where a player may sign on to dedicate himself solely to his art for the next twenty years. Even in the BBC (I nearly wrote, especially in the BBC) there must be jockeying for careers, and most pro- ducers are aware that their work brings in con- siderations of their personal prejudices, politics and suchlike. This is most noticeable in features and current affairs programmes. I do not know how many Tories work on the Tonight team, but I doubt if they outnumber the Leftist sympa- thisers. In fact, it might be instructive to count how many Tory journalists-commentators- politicians were employed in BBC programmes this year as against Labour. It is difficult for producers to find competent performers, but I have been struck by a tendency to put up some harmless truc-bloob to be eaten by Mr. Michael Foot under the pretence of a two-sided discus- sion.

One good example of partisanship has been the growing willingness of interviewers to play it tough. True, I got a little tired of Robert Kee accusing me of personal responsibility for the Irish horse trade, but there is no reason why a TV reporter should remain content with bland, handout-type answers, any more than press re- porters are. Mt written post-mortem into the News Chronicle's death, for example, was more revealing than Derek Hart's brilliant interview with L. J. Cadbury on Tonight. (By way of ironical pay-off, Mr. Hart received a letter from Mr. Cadbury some seven weeks later, saying that Mr. Cadbury entirely agreed with an attack on inquisitor-interviewers which had appeared in— the Daily Mail. . . .) For the rest, the past year has shown the need for Mr. Adam's behest to get out of the ruts. BBC Drama at least tried bravely with its Shakespearean history An Age of Kings, which improved greatly after the beginning. Both net- works are building up an impressive school of talented young writers of realistic contemporary drama, among whom Clive Exton is still, for my money, much the best.

Technically, standards on the whole are re- markably high—as compared with, say, French television. BBC exploits Eurovision Link, and ATV soon expect to produce a programme by direct line from Moscow. But oh, some of the shows on which ingenuity is expended—there is still Dancing Club and Top Town and Satur- day Spectacular. Likewise there are still most of the old panel games and new ones no less daft, and the comics go on and on and on, as they must, until their writers fall down dead.

The air of sameness has certainly been marked in ITV, which obviously has no desire to change

its present golden formula unless forced to do so by outside pressures. High ratings arc a

cushioning comfort against charges of low stan- dards—indeed, the reason ITV tycoons must feel invulnerable is that most of the criticism supposedly directed at them goes askew towards the wrong target. Accept the idea that a high rating is not necessarily a justification for a pro- gramme—like, say, some of the transatlantic guff—and you begin to get the case for the BBC: alas, the BBC is also vitally concerned about ratings in rather the same way.

Not that anyone, to my knowledge, regards the ratings systems as conclusive to a millimetre, though Mr. Val Parnell's particular boast with regard to ATV is that it has had a show in the Top Ten ever since ITV began. Doubtless BBC's Listener Research could prove the same. At the

same time it is ATV which seems to show itself most responsive to possible winds of change;

authority is more delegated than in any other company, and the showmen are said to have grown excited by the possibilities of serious programmes, so that James Bredin's USA series and the Trethowan-Connell reporting from the UN were among the year's more notable actualities.

By contrast, Granada, the most centralised of ITV companies, has gone into a comparative decline. Mr. Bernstein is still usually the first to respond to a challenge—to invite the Fleet Street editors to appear, for instance, after the Arch- bishop's remark about 'lonely men'—or to put on a non-moralising documentary about VD.

But the panel games grow more and more con- trived, the variety programmes have no real zip or originality, the drama harks rather to yester- day or the day before. Granada seems carried along by the tide instead of, as formerly, making the pace.

With the overall networking codified into a seldom movable pattern (as witness the scant change of format over Christmas), it is the more interesting to note what is happening in the ITV regions. Scottish TV vouchsafes no information to a Sassenach critic, but TWW offers a helpful flow of testimony to the vigour and pride of local Welsh programmes. As readers may have noticed

recently, any comment on Welsh affairs tends to be taken as an attack on an ancient culture and produces huffy, pompous letters fromthe valleys, whilst the pamphlet 'Wales: Today and Tomorrow. A Symposium of views personally expressed by the members of the Welsh Board of birectors, TWW Limited' and printed bi- lingually, reads like a bunch of Bardic utter- ances, showing that the spirit and idiom of Owen Glendower are not dead. Let me therefore note the admirable enthusiasm with which the most modern of media has been pressed into service to preserve and teach the Welsh language, which Must be of inestimable value to anyone in the modern world. Another region with a certain success to its credit is Anglia TV, which has sometimes got into the big league of ratings with Its star-embellished drama offerings. My only reservation with regard to such a policy is that, apart from the money gifts made each year, ITV regions might encourage repertory companies by occasionally allowing them the freedom of the screen—though I suppose such a notion Would be haunted by the unfortunate experience of Southern TV's attempt to enlist the Old Vic: it will be interesting to see whether Mr. Grade keeps his half-promise to Roy Rich and allows the plays already canned to be shown this Year.

Still, there is little profit, in a year short of novelty, in remembering Niggles from Granada or giggles from Huw Wheldon : the point is that In this coming year a lot of new stuff has got to be pulled out of the bag, because this year the battle for the Third Channel must warm up.

Personally I am quite prepared to believe that Mr, Norman Collins has already made private arrangements for what he wishes to happen in the matter. (The evidence about the creation of the ITV is all to the effect that the issue was virtually settled while the public imagined the debate to be still raging.) But there can be !luny a slip. For one thing, nobody can be lin doubt, as most were then, about the advan- tages of owning a ' television station.

The year might seem to be ending a little ominously for the BBC's chalices—what with Tory imports advising against them and the /NC's refusal to allow them to start colour transmissions next autumn. On the face of it, this proposal seemed rather a ploy in the prestige stakes (ITV is for the most part content to sit back and wait to reap the benefit of American colour research), but Mr. Carleton Greene has stated in a letter to the Times that the trans- rlission planned, on 405 lines, will be valid for Period at least as long as the lifetime of any set which will be purchased in the next year or two'—an impressive retort, which makes one suspect that this Government cannot be as BBC- minded as some once were.

But obviously nobody is going to be allowed to run a third channel on exactly the same basis as either of the two already in existence, and the Chances are that would-be contractors must show Intention of levelling up rather than down, and of attending more to minorities. Thus the neces- sary paradox is that in order to prove themselves Worthy of the Third, both BBC and ITV will haVe to produce some new, different, better pro- grams While angling to net the multitudes, tneY know their most important viewers in 1961 iTimber thirteen, which is the size of the ki ng ton Committee.