Television
Blinking eye
Richard lngrams
There is a large number of producers at the BBC whose aim in life is to cut things up in little pieces and stop anything being made comprehensible. I have come to this conclusion after watching two programmes— the first a Tonight film about Private Eye and the second a mammoth ninety-minute Bore-In, written and produced by Bruce Norman called The Birth of Television. The Private Eye film, the result of days and days of filming was in the end spoiled by the producer's total inability to stay still for a second. Bits of old film, bits of new film, interviews, animated cartoons were thrown together into an incoherent mish-mash of two-minute snippets—all quite jolly, admittedly, but hopelessly inconsequential.
The feeling of disappointment is always more intense when one has oneself been involved in the back-breaking effort of producing something for the telly, when one has sat and waited patiently hour by hour while the eight-man production team grapple with their equipment and endured the heat of the lights and the clapping of the clapper board.
Part of the trouble undoubtedly is the overmanning. It is all very well for the BBC to engage in humorous nostalgia about the fumbling absurdities of early television, as they did on Monday night. But have things really progressed at all when a film crew is unable to operate unless it is eight men strong and if it cannot film without blazing lights all over the place? In those circumstances, no one can hope to 'act naturally'.
'What's the good of it when you've got it ? What useful purpose will it serve ?' So said one particularly perceptive member of the delegation invited to witness John Logie Baird's first demonstration of television at an upstairs room in Frith Street, Soho (now Bianchi's restaurant) in 1926. Unfortunately this wise man's views did not prevail and the march of progress continued unchecked.— though any viewer must have wondered after watching the hour and a half devoted to the early history of television whether it was all worth it. Once again we had a producer who could not stay put for a moment. No sooner had the only living survivor of the Logie Baird demonstration, Bill Cox, begun his quite interesting reminiscences of the occasion than he was interrupted by a ridiculous historical reconstruction of the scene with a number of elderly actors tottering up the Frith Street staircase. From then on the programme jumped about in such a way that it became impossible to tell what was authentic, what was faked, who was real and who wasn't. All that emerged, as usual, was the enormous gulf between the brilliance of the scientists who invented television and the dreadful banality of the programmes that ensued.
What has changed ? We were told about the first-ever television play 'Which had no action and only three characters'—such were the limitations of the apparatus. But many of the plays that get shown nowadays have no action and only three characters. Again, some fun was made of the early advertisement for a lady announcer—'a
superwoman', the BBC said, 'with chart). tact, and a mezzo voice'. The two successful applicants came on, both growing old gracefully, and [couldn't help thinking how similar they were to Angela Rippon. 'Tele. vision was ludicrous', said one old hand, 'but it was fascinating that it was possible at all'. The fascination has worn off, the ludicrous nature of it all remains.
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