Television
Pro Bono Publicists
By PETER
FORSTER FOR the past fortnight ITV has been smugly congratulating it- self on its three first glorious years—alas, in some far from glorious ways. A-R came up with a marathon triviality called Women in Love, five dim play- lets for starlets, linked by George Sanders, whose suavity grows rather faded, like an old suede shoe.
Patriotism in the drama is all very well, but ATV are hardly justified in plugging their autumn schedule as' a demonstration of faith in new British dramatists when out of the first four, one (The Franchise Affair) turns out to be an adaptation of a novel, also much adapted for radio, by a writer now dead, and two of the others (Web of Lace, Murder in Slow Motion) versions of thrillers by the Frenchmen Boileau and Narcejac. As well claim that the Schiller-Spender Mary Stuart at the Old Vic strikes a blow for new British drama.
However, the shareholders of ITV cannot com- plain about their first three years' trading, though some may be looking anxiously across the Atlantic to the current situation of a TV-saturated land where sponsors are defecting. When so much else has crossed the Atlantic, might not that come too?
It is enough to freeze an ITV executive's expense account, not to mention his blood. Yet perhaps in the end the Government of this Old World may itself help to redress the unbalance from the New and do its bit to bolster private enterprises. By way of tiny portent I notice that Premium Bonds are being advertised on commercials, which pre- sumably means that the Government is now trad- ing with ITV, who are in turn seeking the Govern- ment's favour in the matter of that third network. The sad fact so far about the winter season is that if ITV is over-publicising itself, the BBC is not blowing its trumpet enough, and indeed shows every sign of trying to fight a rearguard action against ITV's higher viewing figures on quite the wrong grounds. It would be too irohical if the BBC became so like ITV that eventually ITV had to be given the new network in order to provide an alternative service ! BBC's new policy of bring- ing over top, very American shows, like Steve Allen's last Sunday, would be more laudable if one thought it done strictly on account of the show's own merits rather than to counter-balance ATV's Sunday Night at the Palladium.
For ITV's publicists may tend to make people forget the sheer size, achievement and potential of the BBC. Compare the two programmes, and decide which is the more flexible, which the more indigenous. Nor should it be forgotten that even in the popularity stakes the BBC has, in its massive sports coverage, a lead so great that ITV seldom tries to compete. (I wish, though, that the other commentator on Sportsview, not Major Dim- mock, wouldn't shout so.) There is a very great ideal to be said against the BBC—and of course the worst thing about the Corporation is some of the people running it. But no amount of protesta- tion by the ITV boys, that to pack programmes with quizzes and American films is to vindicate the democratic process of popular choice, can disguise the fact that the BBC aims its sights higher, being inspired by a more explicit ideal (and, incidentally, being more closely answerable to Parliament) than networks whose natural basic responsibility is towards the company share- holders. To thine own Charter be true : the key- note of that Latin dedication in the hall of Broad- casting House, 'Rectore tohanni Reith,' is still not so much towards 'qutecunque pulchra sunt et sin- ecru' as `inclinans populus virtuti et sapientice.' Omit that tacit evangelism, and the BBC deserves to be scrapped tomorrow.
Random moments: Jimmy Edwards getting away with, of all antediluvian notions, a school- master comedy series in Whack-0 (BBC), by virtue of his own splendid moustachio'd apoplexy and the most unmistakably stylish writers in the business, Muir and Norden. . . . A delightful turban-swathed Nigerian potentate, the Sardauna of Sohoto, slyly assuring Derek Hart on Tonight that he would welcome the enfranchisement of women in his country because it would benefit his party, which is mostly Moslem. . . . Free Speech (ATV), still the liveliest discussion programme of its sort, with Michael Foot still walking dialectical rings round his companions, like a famished wolf among plump, well-settled, raucous roosters. . . . A quite brilliant concentrated documentary impression in Monitor (BBC) of life in repertory, filmed in Bolton by Schlesinger with commen- tary by Alex Atkinson; though ITV's donations to rep. might have been mentioned in the list of sources of financial patronage. . . . A promis- ing new little late-night travelogue (BBC) by Charles and Elsa Chauvel about walking across Australia; a step nearer that ultimate in husband- and-wife adventures in which the team are sent out to the wilderness and come back with pic- tures of Armand and Michaela Denis.
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