Television
Medium Drama
By PETER
FORSTER
Houston is an admirable player who seems easier to cast than he actually is, and 1 am both sorry and glad that shortly after watching his bearded master-crook I happened upon a re- proach delivered by Mrs. Patrick Campbell to Noel Coward (reported in Alan Dent's new biography), after the first night of The Constant Nymph: 'You're the wrong type—you have no glamour—you should wear a beard.'
What was of interest to the critic as against the cracksman was that as a second instalment in ATV's Drama 61 series, coming after their Saturday serial The Avengers,, it seemed to epitomise the genus ATV drama. From the North come Granada and those advertisements and plays which for preference were once pro- duced in Manchester or might now receive the approbation of Miss Horniman's ghost. (Don't tell me this is not always the case: I talk in trends.) From A-R comes the mixedest bag of all. From the regions, anything they can slip in; and from the BBC a variety which (so help me) seems often in its selectiori to be rather like madam visiting the poor. But ATV have de- veloped a line of their own; and more than most, the fingerprints of producers like Quentin Law- rence are detectable. There is usually a good, strong, light, short-story idea—a situation with at least one variation, but no particular theme, and the execution is seldom as smart as the conception.
Now this is, I suggest, not an accident so much as a portent. The ATV drama department is unusually free from supervision by the bosses, Yet a recognisable ATV product emerges. Nor am I mounting a backhanded attack on ATV : the point is that shrewd, intelligent people have started to evolve a drama to suit the medium. This is Benthamism in action: fewer producers will starve if more plays click, and the plays that click are of the sort described. Nobody, therefore, can be blamed for producing them, and they are by any standards a great deal better than the kind of American pap like Klondike with which the BBC thinks it neces- sary and possible to make concessions to popular taste.
All that is left out is the higher quality which makes drama an art form as well as an enter- tainment medium. Obviously ATV organisers may here protest that they would be only too happy to discover a new true-quality writer, to promote modern classics: and so occasionally they, and all the rest, do. What is out of balance is that a situation is being created whereby classics (an arbitrary division in itself, but don't let us go into that now) are done usually in the afternoons or by the BBC, while a category of bogus quality,. like lesser Maupassant short stories, is put up at other times, the sham façade of a film-set city.
The conclusions to be drawn from this are as impalpable as obvious. We would all like more quality; everyone is eager to find it; laurels await the Laureate who can appeal to the masses. And everyone (or almost everyone) does his best— but there are times when it is well to remember that even the scruffiest MS in longhand which arrives on one's desk may perhaps . . .
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