The Suez Show
TELEVISION
By STUART HOOD
THE BBC is notoriously addicted to com- memoration. There are the internal anniver- saries—Twenty-Five Years of Woman's Hour or A Century of Twenty Questions—important occasions in the life of an organisation, morale- boosters, cpportunities to acknowledge and cheaply reward faithful service. Unfortunately, they are believed to make good broadcasting and are duly inflicted on the public, which does not remember further back than the last issue of the Radio Times. In the world outside Broad- casting House or what Eric Maschwitz has called 'the circular mousetrap' of Television Centre, there are other more important occa- sions to be remembered—some out of a sense of duty, some because they are genuinely in- teresting. In this area, the BBC, like ITV or the press, plays its part in bringing history into focus. It was natural and proper, therefore, that in both radio and television the Corporation would have mounted extensive programmes on the tenth anniversary of the Suez Crisis.
In radio there were no fewer than eight pro- grammes, ranging from an hour to twenty-five minutes in length. Their aim was `to recall the events of the war; to present as much as pos- sible, as authentically as possible, of the back- ground of the war and the motives of the participants, and to see where the participants stand now.' The television programme was a two- part two-hour documentary—one of the longest programmes of its kind ever made for television. It aimed more simply, in the words of its pro- ducer, David Wheeler, 'to give viewers a clearer picture of the intricacies of the Suez story.' There is no doubt, to my mind, that on this occasion radio proved the more effective means of com- munication, being livelier, more informative, more thorough.
The reason lies partly in the space each medium was prepared to give to the subject. The discrepancy was not—as some enemies of tele- vision might be inclined to suggest—an expres- sion of lack of seriousness on the part of BBC Television. It sprang, I have no doubt, from the different magnitudes of the cost of producing a television, as opposed to a radio, programme. A television documentary is expensive in terms of manpower, freightage of equipment, time spent, and of pounds, shillings and pence to buy library material, which is frequently exorbitant in price. The costs of radio are tiny by compari- son. Two hours was, indeed, a long time to spend on the subject. A series of programmes parallel to the radio series would have required an operation of great complexity and immense cost —a minor version of the effort required to mount the First World War series. It would, on any count, have been uneconomic.
Where the television programme failed, I be- lieve, was in its technique, which was rooted in the old-fashioned belief that a programme of this kind must be entirely on film. Since a good deal of the script was expository and dealt with political ideas, it was impossible always to match the words with pictures. There were too many sequences in which the film did little more than keep the screen alive while a verbal point was being made. The second weakness was that the polemical element was lacking. The viewer had little sense of the passion and fury of the Suez days. Some old newsreel clips of Bevan in Trafal- gar Square hardly sufficed.
That it is possible to do things otherwise was demonstrated earlier this year by ATV's When the Saints Come Marching In, in which an equally sensitive subject—the history of pacifism —was dealt with as polemic, as a theme to be argued over with passion. Interviews, newsreel film, re-enacted parliamentary debates, were the weapons of the disputants, who could call up a film clip or a quotation to make their points by the mere pressing of a button. The ATV programme had a basic weakness. The argument was conducted by actors, playing parts in which they may or may not have believed. Might the BBC not have found a couple of historians, a brace of politicians, two journalists, prepared to argue the old debates over again and give their comments on the material David Wheeler had collected—using it as the essential stuff of their discussion?
As it was there were moments to relish—visual points which radio perforce misses: Nasser's star quality as a performer to camera; the visible crumbling of Eden's persona; Selwyn Lloyd stonewalling; and one extraordinary military figure, filmed in Suez, who spoke with an accent and expressed a mentality which seemed to take one back, not ten but twenty years or more. Television is the illustrated supplement and will soon become the colour supplement. Pictures are important. But they are not eve4ything.
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