Television
Inflation
By CLIFFORD HANLEY Leaving Miss Keeler aside (no great effort is required for this), I was curiously fascinated by what the BBC did with Lunik IV, in a special, hot-stuff, up-to-the-minute, hold-your- breath programme chaired by Patrick Moore, our favourite woolly-bear of the science de- partment.
I like Moore's effervescent earnestness, the mixture of cool knowledge and boyish exuber- ance. But the boyish exuberance, the entertain- ment end of his personality, is in danger of swamping the scientist. The programme turned out to be 10 per cent information and 90 per cent high-pressure hysteria. It was cloudy all over Britain at the time, but the camera kept switch- ing to an open-air telescope to make sure that there was nothing to be seen through it; back to the studio; back to Jodrell Bank, to discover excitedly that there was nothing doing there either. It was the big, urgent treatment, by which three interesting facts can be expanded into half an hour of purely mechanical excitement, and the only result in the end is that you vaguely remember the excitement and can't imagine what the facts were.
We've had the same nonsense with the Budget, and the attitude of television seems to be that the facts may be as mundane as boiled cod, but they must be exciting because we're bringing them blow by blow. This brand of synthetic excitement is a product of the advertising age, of course. It's all inspired by that commercial which works you into a fever about being able to pay a tanner for a chocolate bar filled with air. The Bing Crosby Show, I grieve to report, demonstrates the same principle. The 400 studio hands and 2,000,000 dancers failed to conceal that Bing and Mary Martin had practically nothing to offer. Their near-nothing, in fact,
might have looked more like something without all the deMille nonsense.
In total contrast, I have found genuine excite- ment in a plain, little-advertised series which Scottish Television is currently running, devoted to post-graduate medicine. This show is not net- worked, but other stations might well watch it and imitate it. In effect, STV is merely giving studio and crew facilities to a team of medical lecturers during a late-night period. No tricks, no cheer-leaders, no nonsense. The programme is for general practitioners. If laymen choose
to look in, no concessions are made to them.
Obviously, in such a public lecture-room, certain inhibitions must impose themselves, but these don't appear to cramp the programme seriously. Last week we had a lesson on chromo- somal abnormality, which I swear was a model of what 'heavy' television ought to be. Doctors in Glasgow are watching the series and approv- ing of it. What do I want to know about chromo- somal abnormality? you ask. I'm nosy, that's all. And I still believe that television could be a kind of university, as well as an entertainment.
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