Electronic getting together

PATRICK SKENE CATLING ON TELEVISION

There are experts (please don't ask for their names; they are only code-symbols perforated on tape in memory banks)— there are experts who say that automation creates as many new jobs as the old ones it obviates. These influential, faceless men say that there will always be a need for personnel to programme the computers to control the robots to activate the machines to do the work.

I am sceptical. I believe the time Will conic when almost unimaginably sophisti- cated software, without further human guidance, will be able to organise the hardware to operate and sustain all the factories and services required for man- kind's smooth, gradual phase-out from this mortal coil. We already have the know-how for the job. All that remains to be effectuated is the implementation. I foresee only one difficulty. Fortunately, however, it is surmountable.

When a recorded announcement at a locked office door informs the last be- wildered clerk that he, too, is redundant, Homo sapiens will be confronted with a difficult question: what will we do? Lei- sure used to be a luxury. It is already be- coming a problem. Soon it will be an acute problem, and eventually a chronic one. The answer, of course, is television.

In this relatively backward country, the average per capita viewing time is already two hours a day.

In the United States people deliberately watch television approximately twice as much. I have been in a New York house that contained six receiving sets, one in the `master' bedroom, one in the estranged wife's bedroom, one in the principal guest-room, one in the 'library', one in the children's 'playroom' and one in the kitchen. Over there, two-set homes are commonplace. In the kitchen, the room in Which many American women spend most of their days, television is customarily turned on with the coffee-percolator, be- fore breakfast and the first cigarette, and remains on until those evening talks shows that take the place of conversation.

Television is part of the environment, a cultural smog that reddens the'eyes and numbs the brain. When every set is turned off, the silence seems uncanny. I am not criticising American women or, by im- plication, American men. To the contrary, I am hailing them as the leaders of the World in the early years of the Tele- vision Age. It may not prove as long- lasting or as healthy as the Stone Age, but it may be the only age we have left. By the time our authorities eliminate traffic accidents, traffic congestion and traf- . fic pollution by the obvious means of banning all private traffic, people will not need nor wish to venture from their hab- itat-capsules. Television will bring the out- side world in—that is to say, a synthesised, better-than-life world-surrogate.

Children will play with their telly- mothers and will be instructed by telly- teachers until ready to graduate into the Open University (which I assume was given its misnomer because timid tech-. nocrats feared that some prospective telly- students might resist the loneliness of en- rolment in a visible student body of one).

Mothers will have plenty of time to watch all the exciting new commercials and the colour catalogue cassettes. Shop- ping will be done at home, by the use of dials and push-buttons and pneumatic tubes connected with the automatic com- missaries. Bulky goods will be delivered small and water will be added.

Fathers will loll about blowing pot and joining in hit-parade sing-songs and de- bates with pseudo-chums in the telly-pub.

In the evenings, there will be electronic togetherness, fun for the family—sport, pop concerts, travel, freak-outs, mayhem, fictitious war bulletins, Orgy for Tonight (on all channels) and TV Doctor.

There would be fewer television drop- outs if TV were more potent. There ought to be more of it. Would God have created days twenty-four hours long if He hadn't intended man daily to transmit twenty-four hours of television? Television should be on all the time in every room. Henceforth, by law, all dwellings should consist entirely of circular rooms, with every room en- doted by a ceiling-to-floor circular tele- vision screen, for 360-degree projection, with no knobs to turn then: off.

But, you ask, if everybody were con- tinuously watching television, who would there be to produce new programmes?

I thought you'd ask that. There needn't be any new programmes. There are enough old ones. Alan Whicker alone has seen to that, and he's still churning out travel- ogue film footage like crazy.

Introducing his latest series, The World of Alan Whicker, Yorkshire Television described Whicker as `television's most travelled man,' and I wouldn't dispute the claim. He seems to go everywhere and talk to everyone and he does so ex- tremely well, slicing the world into twenty- five-minute segments. Twenty-five minutes are enough for most places—appetising, nourishing, and never indigestible. He provides a richly varied menu of conden- sed history, potted geography and instant biography. He satisfies the curiosity with- out tiring the brain. When the real world becomes unbearable, Whicker's world would be an excellent substitute. He is amiably hedonistic and just and his world is picturesque and reasonable.

He opened the new series with a difficult subject, `Devil's Island—The Dry Guillo- tine.' It's a difficult subject. because, as Whicker mentioned without boasting, it's hard to get there. French Guiana, on the steamy north coast of South America, is a long way away, and when one reaches Cayenne the local officials try to dis- courage one from going the last few miles.

The Prisons on Devil's Island, the Ile St Joseph and the Ile Royale, after a century of infamous cruelty, were closed in 1952, but the French are still embarrassed. They should be. They banished about 80,000 convicts to the penal colony, of wham only about 10,000 survived.

Having chartered a boat and reached Devil's Island, Whicker faced another difficulty: he had to make a movie in a place where nothing was happening, ex- cept that a movie was being made. There were the ruins, the barred windows, al- ready partly overgrown by jungle vines. And there was Whicker, well tailored and well groomed. strolling about, telling what horrible things the guards had done to the prisoners and the prisoners had done to each other, in the bad old days. The drama was all verbal. The camera could show only the setting. Whicker demonstrated his smooth professionalism by giving an impression of grim reality where the grimness was no longer real. He was helped by Nigel Turner's research, Frank Pocklington's photography. Barry Cock- roft's direction and Tudor Lloyd's editing. But Whicker is a camera and Whicker's world is Whicker's. It is a comfortable television world. While he chats about a Whicker hell, one rests assured that a jet will rescue him and that next week there will be glimpses of a Whicker heaven.