Television
Llareggub Calling
By PETER FORSTER The Postmaster-General authorises fifty hours of programmes per week, with a maximum of a further hour each day for special outside broadcasts—only Schools, Religion and Welsh Language programmes can be produced over, above and outside this arrangement. How con- venient that religion need not interfere with ratings! How useful that the little ones may be suffered to come unto television without getting trampled in the rat-race for a mass audience! How privileged to be able to speak Welsh, let alone understand it!
The pattern of certain schedules would now seem clearer—those religious features which ITV so altruistically puts out early each Sunday evening: they must be very useful in sustaining the attention of that vast audience which is said to dislike actually turning the set off. The puzzle is why BBC absents itself from our felicity for the same useful time—could it be that the Corporation feels we ought to be at church?
Do not think I am casting aspersions on the motives of the Christian gentlemen who run television: their educationalist bias is well known, and the industry's concern for the Prin- cipality is so real that TWW enjoys the personal suzerainty of the Earl of Derby and Mr. Jack Hylton. All I do wonder, and would venture to suggest to the Pilkington Committee, is that if one really wishes to test the good faith and aspirations of the relevant authorities so far as these subjects are concerned, might it not be in- structive to see what would happen if they had to find time for Religion, Education and Wales Within the permitted hours? (Perhaps now is the appropriate moment to say that I would rather like to give evidence to the Pilkington Com- mittee, but cannot find out how this may be achieved. There are thirty-seven Pilkingtons in the London Telephone Directory, and I have hot time to ring each one to ask where to report. Information, if so desired. may be laid here.) Admittedly our national bent is to think in terms of safeguards—measures are taken to see that there shall be some religion, some education. some Welsh in programmes—as against the in- sidious idea that there should be more. (Other nations think differently: it so happens that at the time of writing a French. radio programme has just been interrupted to announce the result of the literary Prix Femina, and can You imagine that happening even on the Third?) But the whole need at the moment in television is for expansion. galvanisation, impetus. We tend to imagine that progress means simply a new drama series, and popularisation another panel game, and that the unusual is to be equated with those singing guitarists on Tonight, whom I am coming to think of as Frederick and Frederick it is not good enough, or even remotely enough.
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