World apart
TELEVISION STUART HOOD
I have a nightmare vision on any fine weekend of the day—it will ineluctably arrive—when the portable television set will be as common as the transistor set now is and as ubiquitous. Then it will be possible to see a new safari with Dr March Tracy of Daktari over a picnic lunch on the Downs or, sitting in one's car with the waves breaking at the end of the pier, to watch Holiday Grandstand. Until that day comes it is a fair assumption that holiday weather will bring some sort of a dip in view- ing figures. Put it another way: - because a ridge of high pressure is stationary over the British Isles a vast amount of specialist talent, thought, invention and energy will be dissi- pated. What I am discussing is the dilemma of the communicator, who is concerned with addressing himself to very large numbers of his fellow-countrymen and who must, if he brings himself to think about the subject, in- creasingly wonder what effects, social and moral, are produced by his efforts.
The men and women who were busy in the control rooms and studios, on the OB sites and in the vans, over Easter were able to go on functioning because they were sustained by what Professor Tom Burns has called 'the private world of an occupational milieu.' He uses the phrase critically as the description of a closed system, an 'isolated world of ideas, activity, involvement and resources,' into which the producer of television programmes with-_ draws. It is seen at its clearest in the control gallery of a studio which I remember a high naval officer comparing to the fire-control centre of a battleship. It is a necessary milieu, for without the element of isolation it is doubtful whether any programme could be produced at all.
But such isolation is dangerous. The judg- ments within the milieu can become the judgments of professionalism, concerned with means and not with ends. It is one of the virtues of the new critical approach to television, as exemplified in contributions to a recent mono- graph published by Keele University (The Sociology of Mass-Media Communicators edited by Paul Halmos 30s), that it examines the institutional and social reasons for pro- fession isolation and draws attention to its perils.
It can be taken as axiomatic that the programme-maker will view attempts to break down his isolation with considerable suspicion. There are, as Professor Burns points out, strong psychological reasons for his fears. Even if the attempts are confined to a study of what effect his programme has on the audience, Of how effectively he got his points across, 'the pressure on those responsible for prog7mmes is such that fuller or deeper analysis of audi- ence reactions would amount to an intolerable strain.' These fears do much to explain the reaction of programme staff to attempts by outside researchers to investigate their methods or analyse their aims.
There is the further complication that tele- vision, even at its most modest, is concerned with creativity. Creative programme-makers may be inarticulate or solitary or uncommuni- cative. The researchers must therefore be men and women of great tact and understanding. They must go warily. This having been said, it is difficult not to accept the criticism, which is being increasingly voiced in academic circles, that too much television research has, up till now, been audience research in the narrowest sense of the term—concerned with the measure- ment of audience magnitudes and insufficiently curious about the effects of television.
Ideally, what the researchers require is full cooperation from the television organisations and, in particular, the provision of 'research services' over and above what the organisa- tions need for their own day-to-day purposes: tapes, videotapes, films, together with playback facilities for researchers, and the provision of greater opportunities for studies of the pro- duction process and decision-making in the industry. These are the desiderata set out in the recently published second progress report of the Home Secretary's Television Research Committee. If the broadcasters are to live up to their claims of public service they will have to take these demands seriously.
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