Television
EVER since Pilkington I've been afraid to enjoy anything too readily on the screen; in case it turned out to be trivial. I think I agree with the Committee's strictures on triviality, but I've been trying to find a common denominator among the programmes which I consider trivial, and the only answer so far is that they're not my idea of fun. Unhappily, to define that, would take one of those everlasting Proustian analyses, and by the time it was half-finished, television Would be superseded by Thinkpix. But-1 can very rapidly list some of the things I personally dislike about ITV. Nearly all the soap ads, for a start; all loud commercials; all commercials in the middle of programmes. This last seems to me to be carrying the profit motive too far. Never mind whether the break is natural ,Or not. How can any break at all be justified in a half-hour programme? A thirty-minute ITV Play, in fact, has a net content of around twenty- four minutes. Even more objectionable is the denial of viewer's choice by competitive programming. I assume that both ITV and BBC are equally culpable here, when a Western on one channel is matched by a Western on the other, and (almost worse) the Sunday evening plays over- lap. They did last Sunday, for instance, the BBC going for froth with The Man Who Opted Out, and ABC choosing heavy drama (heavy froth?) With Alun Owen's The Hard Knock. I enjoyed both, or as much as I saw of both. Sunday's Meeting Point (BBC) was a highbrow discussion on our appetite for horror films; by no means frothy, but profoundly trivial, and not Much fun. The first of the BBC's Dick Powell series, a pseudo-sexy spy comedy drama, was glossy, expensive trivial as hell. I liked it. I refuse to investigate the triviality-quotient of the new Scottish Sunday serial, The Dark Island (BBC). The first instalment stamped it as a winner, Whatever its classification. The real difficulty about triviality, or any OtherOther quality, on television, is that they can't, on channel, announce that they're going off the air for an hour because they have nothing tteallY worth seeing. The service has to be main- !lned. The television stations are in the same have as newspapers and heavy weeklies. They nave to deliver the product even when the Material is thin, and their consolation (and the customer's) is that it may be better tomorrow. Quite often, it is better tomorrow.
CLIFFORD HANLEY
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