TELEVISION
Lost horizons
STUART HOOD
That applications for the award of 1TA pro- gramme contracts should be made public seems obvious on the grounds that the public interest is involved. An 1TA contract hands over to a commercial organisation the monopoly of air-time and of broadcasting frequencies in a - particular area of this country. It allows the company to enjoy a monopoly in the broadcasting of com- mercials and in the revenue deriving from these broadcasts. Were the applications pub- lished, the public would have an opportunity to compare promise with performance.
It is a view which has had unexpected support recently from Lord Hill, who put it forward at the meeting of the Common- wealth Press Union. Behind it was the authority of an ex-chairman of the ITA who had had the duty of reading the last batch of applications and who has been able to draw his own conclusions as to their soli- darity. There is by now a considerable body of opinion which shares his opinion; fewer, however, who would follow him in his further suggestion—a surprising one because of its radical nature—that the hearings of the applications, occasions which have enriched television folklore with stories of tantrums by company chairmen, should also be held in public.
There is a considerable force of logic behind the proposal, although it is less likely to find support than another, which is that the Independent Television Authority should be required, by an amendment to the Tele- vision Act, to publish its reasons for grant- ing contracts, for refusing contracts, or for cancelling them. It may have been necessary to cancel one contract last time pour encourager les wares; it would have been more just had some reason been given for picking on -rww.
Read in this context, the application pre- sented confidentially to Lord Hill in 1967 by the consortium which later became London Weekend Television is engrossing. It has been published by the recently-formed 'Free Communications Group', and it brings back memories of those extraordinary days in 1966 and 1967 when unlikely characters from within television and from outside it, having raised the wind with surprising ease, were searching for two things: names to dress their prospectuses and application forms and 'philosophies' to adorn their more mundane objectives.
It was a period when, under the influence of a rosy optimism, a number of people in the television industry (including myself) felt that it might indeed be possible—as the London Weekend application puts it—to improve the quality of mass entertainment while retaining commercial viability; to get good ratings with good programmes; to . make accountants and programme makers lie down like lion and lamb. The phrases of vanished hopes are dead sea fruit read today in the light of the programme schedules of London Weekend or the plans it has announced for the autumn of this year: convictions that 'there are new ways of attracting a mass audience that are not being exploited and that this is particularly true of weekend programming,' a feeling 'that the contractors should realise the potential of television as Europe's first com- mon language', an insistence that 'region- alism is an important part of the service.'
Then there are the programme sugges- tions. Seven Days—Making the News make Sense—forty-five minutes each Sunday afternoon. What Went Wrong?—thirty minutes on Friday or Saturday evening for the examination of controversies in the public sector. The Treasure House—twelve programmes on the most important pro- perties in the British Museum. Rebirth of a River—an investigation into why the Thames has become an open sewer. Comedies that will make people laugh 'in the right way.' The list reads like the menu in one of these restaurants where every dish of interest is off or out of season or printed from old habit. Compare these aspirations with the TV Times any weekend. What went wrong? There is a good programme there if there were a station bold enough to put it on.
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