Television
Silver Lining
By PETER FORSTER
But this said, much of the hour and a half seemed to be taken up with simple cutting from divers screens (showing what were usually Ameri- can shows) to rapt and credulous faces, black, white and every colour between. The effect was striking enough the first few times, but as the hour and a half wore on I began to grow less and less happy about the implications. For surely Mr. Cawston was tacitly commiserating with poor, ignorant, simple folk, deluded enough to be fas- cinated by a Western though they themselves were Eastern? Well, I am prepared to applaud TV for adding to the amusement of lives as generally abject as many we were shown, especially in South America. If it is objected that such lives would be better enriched by religion or good books, I would agree that this is a subject worth pondering at length, but such considerations only go to underline the basic weakness of Cawston's film, which was a lack of any apparent attitude towards television. The nearest he came to a positive statement was in a passage of the commentary extolling the virtue of live shows—which is true up to a point, but doesn't carry us very far, because with, say, the time-differences on the American continent, some taping is inevitable.
The same paradoxical fault of going on too long without going far enough suffused BBC's other big 'special' on Fall-Out. This I watched in quite uncritical mood, being simply one of the very many who must have tuned in with the hope of at last learning exactly what fall-out does involve. I ended up very little wiser. Surely knowledge should have been spelled out in the most elementary terms and language, assuming an utterly uninformed audience, beginning with an explanation of what radioactivity is; in fact, they began beyond that'point, and as we were led ever further into the maze, the visual aids became distracting rather than elucidatory. When told that cows are tested for iodine content, it is really not especially helpful to be shown said cows in their stalls.
In this difficult problem of how to be simple, many younger men (on both sides of the screen) may learn from the quarter-hour chats about world events which Sir Stephen King-Hall gives every other Monday at 5.45 (BBC). From my own childhood 1 vaguely remember him doing the same sort of thing on Children's Flour when he was a mere Commander. Perhaps I am less critical now, but I still think he offers an admir- ably clear, easy-to-follow, informative and un- disputatious survey.
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