Long life
Time to show off
Nigel Nicolson
Since then I have probably spent more hours watching television and listening to radio than I have spent reading books. While I am slightly ashamed of this confes- sion, because pictures and sound make fewer demands on our minds than print, there is no doubt that I have derived from them sharper facts and impressions than books and newspapers could have given me in a comparable time. I can discover what New Zealand looks like without going to New Zealand, and roughly how a fridge works. I can judge a Cabinet Minister by his performance at and on the box, and I can learn how trout breed. I can join men- tally in debates on subjects we would never discuss at home, and I can learn how the corn growing outside my window will even- tually reach a table in Damascus.
All this I can enjoy because our TV channels produce the best documentary, science, art and current affairs programmes in the world. We boast of it no more than we boast of the Ordnance Survey, our postal services or quality newspapers, but we should.
It is not only that in this way I gather facts that otherwise I would never bother to seek, but I discover new delights like the skill and grace of professional footballers. I would be unlikely to read a novel about dressmaking in the 1920s called The House of Eliott, but its dramatisation has me enthralled. I can get some idea of the stresses of hospital routines by seeing them fictionalised in Casualty, and East Enders tells me what I could only learn by unwel- come intrusion into the intimacies of a world to which I do not belong. Television and radio have enormously widened our mutual understanding, and the British do it better than anyone else. If this is disputed, give me any foreign equivalent to the Today programme on Radio 4 or News at Ten on ITV, and consider what courage it must have taken to screen Steptoe, Alf Gar- nett or That Was the Week that Was.
When my father was a Governor of the BBC he would have done his best to sup- press such programmes, because to him a programme was a bad programme if he had no desire to watch or listen to it himself. Judging by the BBC's Annual Review, today's Governors are still a little uncertain where to draw the line. 'We insist on stan- dards ... in issues of taste and decency', writes Marmaduke Hussey in his Foreword, but we also have a responsibility to serve all licence-payers with programmes that are Popular', and later he says that the Gover- nors must 'ensure that BBC interviewers maintain standards of proper courtesy', without defining in either case what those standards are. The Generation Game? Jere- my Paxman? The Governors cannot make decisions of that kind because they are not allowed to interfere with the content of programmes or even preview them. They can only speak in platitudes like a Greek chorus.
John Birt has greater powers over his producers, but he can exercise them only at his peril. Sooner or later he must issue an encyclical on the subject. Let it be called Tot Sententiae.
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