Contemporary Arts
Mother Tongue
ONE of the unspoken aspirations of ITV seems to be to get away from the standard English developed and defended by the BBC since its foundation..I am sure ITV is right : that the BBC's spoken word divides it from its mass audience, and identifies the BBC with the they' who run the world from London. Once during the war, somebody at Broadcasting House had an inkling of this and, as they were democratic days, an experiment was tried of getting Wilfred Pickles to read the news. Mr. Pickles is a very good reader but his accent Was northern and grated harshly on the refined southern ear. The experiment did not last long.
ITV now seems—perhaps unconsciously— to be aiming at a regionless, classless accent. I would call it deracinated mid-Atlantic but for the fact that Mr. Alistair Cooke uses that term to describe his own carefully synthesised speech in which Professor Higgins could dis- tinguish traces of his native Blackpool, of Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Mass. The ITV accent is not quite the Cooke melange but is rather near to it. Some of the news readers on ITV have what is basically a standard accent but they have taken the starch out of it and have got away from the unctuous Pomposity and moral superiority which has become the pattern for the BBC. I wonder sometimes if the BBC realises what a curious Pattern it has imposed on news reading. I remember once listening to a talk I had written being read by a professional news reader. Although its matter was quite remote from the news, it sounded exactly like a news bul- letin, If ITV does evolve a standard English different from the current standard, which is the dialect of the upper and educated classes of South-East England, millions of English-
speaking people from the Dominions and the Colonies, as well as from the barbarous parts of this island, will rejoice.
It would be interesting to know the listening figures for last Saturday night. Both the BBC and ITV were ladling out slush during the peak hours. The BBC, for its Saturday Night Out, had constructed one of those artificial parties for film stars, and two interviewers took a trailing microphone around and asked them pointless questions, hurrying away from an actor whenever he or she appeared to be on the point of saying something interesting. This was followed by a show with Tessie O'Shea. Miss O'Shea has a ripe, warm per- sonality but the show built around her I can only describe as a stinker—or at least the parts of it I saw. For from time to time I switched over to ITV in the vain hope of finding some- thing better. The Strange World of Planet X, which has had some good episodes, petered out—tamely I thought—though a child who should have been in bed was shaken by the monster blood-sucking brain and howled: 'And we're going to do science at school next year!' ITV provided also its dreary 64,000 Question and a song and dance show, Young and Foolish, whose title seems to be wholly appropriate. Yet one feels from time to time that ITV is striving, especially in the presenta- tion of plays. The Wednesday play, Yellow Jack, was a story of the efforts made by the American army which was occupying Havana in 1900 to cope with yellow fever. Now it was not a very good play. Some of the dialogue was wooden, and improbable charac- ters were seen in impossible situations. Yet I commend the choice of this play for a shock- ingly old-fashioned reason : for its moral content. The crucial experiment in the play is made on two common soldiers who volun-
teer to allow fever-carrying mosquitoes to feed on them and refuse to accept the generous fee which the government is willing to pay. This struck me as a remarkably useful contrast to the standard ethic of 1TV, which suggests that rewards are to be had for the most trifling services performed before the camera. The Sunday night play, The Mother, had, similarly, many technical faults and a forced melodramatic ending; nevertheless, it was about something—a family in a displaced per- sons camp who were trying to emigrate to Canada.
The more I see of television, the more con- vinced I am that to present conventional esthetic judgements is not the only responsi- bility of criticism. One must pay regard to the social effect of the programmes too. The case against ITV is not just that it is by and large esthetically insufficient : it is, as Joubert put it, that nothing shrivels a man so much as con- tinuous addiction to shallow pleasures. We want ITV to be different. The problem is now to change it and yet not make it impossible for the companies to earn a profit. I hear that the struggle for a subsidy is still going on. I have a question about that for Sir Kenneth Clark : is the £750,000 he is demanding intended to pay for the production of serious programmes or to reimburse the companies for the loss of advertising revenue which the presentation of serious programmes may bring? JOHN BEAVAN
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