P.A.Y.V.
ACORDING to press 'leaks,' the secret report calling for a five-channel TV system for Britain which, is shortly to be presented to the Government through the Postmaster- General's TV advisory committee recommends that one of the channels should be devoted to ?ay As You View—shilling-in-the-slot TV. This system has had its advocates here, among them the Spectator; but little has been heard of it, partly because there did not appear to be any immediate prospect of securing a channel, partly because of gloomy accounts of its alleged failure in the US.
But it has not failed in the US—for the excel- lent reason that it has not been tried there. The so-called Bartlesville Experiment was something quite different : old films were piped in to a number of Bartlesville homes for showing on TV, but, not unnaturally. the residents grew tired of so restricted a diet. Now PAYV, or Pay TV, or what Time is beginning to call `FeeVee,' is going to get a proper test; and there has been encouraging nos from Toronto where the International Telemeter Corporation has been experimenting with it. All the -indications are that once PAYV can get established—once, that is, the various technical problems (including how to collect the money, by whatever method is finally found to be the most suitable) are solved —it should prove the answer to the bored or angry viewer's prayer.
Unregulated PAYV, of course, could be a disaster. If the PAYV channel were simply handed over to contractors the fortunes they could make would leave the present commercial contractors spectacular gains far behind; and very ,soon we would be back where we are now, with mass-audience programmes filling every peak hour. and minority programmes put on early in the evening or late at night. PAYV can only break this wretched system if it is run by a body less remote from public opinion than the British Broadcasting Corporation and more public-spirited than the Independent Television Authority; an organisation with instructions to ensure that minority tastes should be catered for ----not in the way they now are, haphazardly, on the Third Programme. whose heavily subsidised esoterica reach an absurdly small proportion of their potential audience: but with a real deter- mination to cater for minority tastes, without the need to popularise programmes in order to scrape up a few more points on the ratings.
In the meantime, though, we still have com- mercial television; a depressing thought. People have now become so accustomed to the steady debasing of standards that protests about the ITA have become tedious by repetition.
The difficulty. of course, is to prove the ITA's inadequacy. It is easy enough to point to the clause in the TV Act which enjoins the Authority to maintain a high standard of quality, and to contrast this with the many disgraceful pro- grammes which are actually shown. But when defendant happens also to be judge, jury and police officer in his own ease, it becomes a little difficult to win an action against him; if the ITA blandly argues that even a 'heartbreakingly silly And vicious: programme (as the leading critic, Peter Black, recently called International Detec- five) fulfils the Act's demand for quality, there is nothing that can be done to prove it wrong. • The Authority's remissness over rubbish would matter less if it were not so terrified of giving serious programmes a free run. This anxiety is understandable. Independent Television natur- ally wants to get the Third Network, when the. time comes; it knows how thin-skinned Ministers (and Whips) can be; and obviously it would be impossible to insist that only the Opposition should be criticised, even if there is as little risk as there now appears to be of the Opposition eventually becoming the Government. So, the in- struction has gone out to the contractors to avoid offending either side, and 'decent programmes like Searchlight and This Week' (as Peter Black went on to complain) 'are flatly banned from taking sides in any political or industrial dispute, even to the limited extent of Panorama's attitude to the ETU.' Any serious programme on 1TV, in fact, may be subjected to a steady barrage of half-alarmed or half-angry criticism if it tries to project points of view which might conceiv- ably offend the party managers.
This is the fault not of the ITA's composition but of its function. One of the charges against the recently dismissed FCC boss in the US was of `representing the industry he was supposed to. police.' But this is precisely what the ITA is called upon by the Act to do. Nobody would dispute that the 1TA, and in particular Sir Robert Fraser, has shown skill and energy in converting com- .mercial television from a suspect and, for one period, apparently near-bankrupt industry, into the most prosperous of gold mines; but it has done so by breaking the spirit of the TV Act. And that is why, when the time comes for fresh TV legislation, the ITA's watchdog function should be handed over to an independent body, divorced from management.
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