The Language of Priorities I am often baffled by the
way the people who run television ignore their real opportunities. Last weekend provided a ludicrous example. After a spate of preliminary press and television pub- licity, the Prime Minister was making a presu- mably important speech to the Labour conference. Opinions will vary about the value of what the Prime Minister actually said: at least it made the main news for •the next day's Sunday news- papers. Did television leap in to present this news as it was being made, many hours ahead of its
printed rivals? Hardly. Commercial television showed no sign of caring about it on Saturday afternoon. The BBC mounted its vast parapher- nalia of cameras and so on in the conference hall and seemed ready to show us what was hap- pening. But all we got was a little snippet of the speech. Then we were switched over to watch women playing table-tennis. Mr. Wilson would not count me among his warmest fans, but I thought this assessment of priorities positively bizarre. Of course, Britain was beating Hungary at table-tennis: perhaps some patriot at the BBC thought the reverse was happening at the Labour conference. I switched over to sound radio to find out whether the Home Service was transmitting the speech. Well, they were certainly transmit- ting a speech, but it was not Mr. Wilson's. It was a recording of Sir Hughie Greene's oratory at the opening several days earlier of BBC-2 in Birmingham. They have their own values at the BBC: an old speech by the Director-General is of greater interest than a new one by the Prime Minister.
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