The day after that
Paul Johnson
However, the real money-spinning gim- mick in this particular TV show was that, though billed under the category of 'Theatre', it was also what American TV men call 'reality programming'. News and news-related programmes are now the most commercially successful sectors of American television. Over here we are accustomed to think of news and TV cur- rent affairs docutnentaries as worthy but expensive ventures which the entertainment portions of a network's output must carry financially. I suspect this view is rather out of date and not now shared by shrewd TV strategists; personally, I have always believ- ed that Arthur Christiansen's dictum, 'You _can't beat news in a newspaper', also ap- plies to TV. But the notion that newstype programmes are loss-making is still widely shared.
Not so in the United States. This is not because US TV is more altruistic and public-spirited. It is simply that American TV executives can read their own balance sheets. You may have wondered why the BBC started its dreadful Sixty Minutes, a pretentious mistake despite the valiant ef- forts of poor Desmond Wilcox. The answer, of course, is that Sixty Minutes put on by CBS in America is probably the most commercially profitable prime-time show ever to appear on TV there. It has very high ratings yet, compared to prime-time entertainment, is relatively cheap to put on. Indeed, according to a well-informed article in Forbes magazine, each programme costs CBS only $400,000 on average, while a 30-second advertising spot on it brings in $175,000. Its presenter, Dan Rather, has become, thanks to a tough agent, a multi- millionaire, and this year the programme is expected to generate $60 million, one third of all CBS operating profits.
CBS is generally regarded as the most left-leaning of the big networks, all of which, like British TV, are to the left of centre in their current affairs presentation. But what does the boardroom care if it brings in the money? All the networks have increased the amount of time they devote to news and similar stuff in recent years, for hard-headed financial reasons. According to Forbes, CBS's news share has gone up from 14 to 40 hours a week.
The Day After was good business for ABC because most people saw it as 'reality programming' and watched accordingly; and the film, known well in advance to be a boost for the unilateralists, was given a vast amount of pre-showing publicity by the radical elements in which the American media abounds. So a large number of peo- ple switched on, and it was certainly the talking point next morning at breakfast. ABC's accountants must be rubbing their hands. In the area where I saw it, the net- work sold time during the film to a body- building machine company, 'Gourmet Pop- corn', men's scent (`Some guys don't think twice about the cologne they use'), 'designer clothes for men' — the accent on male products was notable — a 'Christmas horror movie', deodorisers, a James Bond film, Slim-Fast, coffee, hire cars, home computers, linear phones, a record made by the Kinks and Dial-a-Lash mascara. It is ' true that during the post-bomb horror bits ads were tastefully excluded; all the same, ABC must have been raking it in, and as an English viewer I get the impression that nuclear Armageddon is seen as a mere episode in the really serious American preoccupation with conspicuous consump- tion. The irruption of James Bond was par- ticularly disconcerting: why, one asked, wasn't Sean Connery in The Day After, rescuing Kansas City at the last minute?
Actually, a little of Connery would have been of help to a programme short on pro- fessional style. It followed the well-tried and wholly 'predictable formula of the disaster movie. So we got a series of vignet- tes of 'ordinary people' going about their daily business before disaster strikes, with chief focus on the star, Jason Robards, who plays the head doctor at a university hospital; then the disaster bit in which half the cast are killed off; then what happened to the survivors. 1 don't know why this for- mula cannot be changed. It is quite stale now, and to be made acceptable at all it re- quires sharp characterisation and vivid dialogue in the script, plus first-class acting. Both were painfully lacking in this vehicle. Moreover, the disaster bit — US rockets shooting off, then the Soviet ones coming back, though quite effective in its own way, was far too short. It was then followed by the bulk of the show, which was all much of a muchness: woeful Method actors miming left-wing emotions, sentimental crowd scenes in the sub-Brecht manner, and old Doctor Robards, the poor man's Henry Fonda, looking bewildered and gradually losing his hair. My withers, I must say, re- mained un wrung.
Of course nobody knows what would happen in a thermo-nuclear war, and sup- posedly 'scientific' estimates of death, damage and so forth, are probably no bet- ter guesses than yours or mine. In this field scientists get even more emotional than the rest of us, and the sort of scientists who pontificate about nuclear war often have a political axe to grind. It's interesting to re- mind ourselves that, in the early Thirties, many experts predicted that German bomb- ings would totally destroy Britain. General Fuller said that London would become 'one vast, raving Bedlam', the government `swept away in an avalanche of terror'. Churchill calculated 40,000 Londoners would be killed or injured in the first week; Bertrand Russell wrote that 50 bombers us- ing gas would poison the entire population of the city. Such alarmism helped to induce the pacifist panic which spurred on Hitler and Mussolini to commit unpunished acts of aggression. The circumstance in which a great power nuclear war is most likely to oc- cur is if one-sided moves to disarm by the West persuade the Soviet leaders that it is safe to engage in predatory acts. But I doubt if this will happen. Unlike the people who made The Day After and other simple- minded folk, most of us learned the lesson of the Thirties.
Previous page
