Television
Hooked
Richard Ingrams
The debate on TV violence has again reared its head, provoking pious sentiments from both channels to the effect that they will be keeping a vigilant eye on their programmes. In all the humbug that is churned out one error should be exposed, namely that it is only children who need protecting from violent scenes. It is the same argument that is often used about pornography: we adults can absorb as much of the stuff as we like without any ill effects but children must be safeguarded. But there is nothing to suggest that children are any more susceptible than adults to the undoubtedly harmful effects of the stuff.
If violence, ie: explicit life-like brutality, is wrong— and, as I have said before, writers and dramatists have managed quite well without it in the past — then it is wrong for everybody young and old. Secondly, the argument presupposes that there is a clear distinction between telly programmes for children and adults, but this is not the case. Many so-called adult programmes like The Duchess of Duke Street and Starsky and Hutch are entertainment of the type likely to appeal to children of about fourteen. There is nothing wrong with that, so long as we accept them as such. Children watch too much television not only because their indolent parents allow them to, but because the standard of most programmes is pitched at their level. Meanwhile the adults, seeking an escape from the purely infantile are happily watching so-called children's programmes like The Muppets.
You cannot eliminate television violence with the censor's scissors. It is a necessary consequence of broadcasting tripe and can only be got rid of by aiming at a higher standard.
The first episode of any serialisation is all important if the viewer is going to go on watching its successors. He has to be hooked by the story and sufficiently interested by the characters to want to know what happens to them next, especially if he knows that come what may he is bound to miss one or two episodes later on owing to boring social engagements and the like. In arousing interest in Episode One the question of overall length is an important factor. If the story is cut thinly into two many slices, one episode won't be enough to whet the appetite for more. Such was the case with Love for Lydia, LWT's thirteen part adaption of H. E. Bates's novel which got off to a funereal pace last Friday, as if the producer felt he could only convey the boredom of provincial life in Northamptonshire in the 1920s by lingering interminably over each scene. But Bates's story of a nineteenyear-old reporter and a young Lydia (the beautiful Mel Martin) returning after her father's death to live in the Big House with an uncle and two old aunts (Rachel Kempson and Beatrix Lehmann) is not quite riveting enough to stand up to such a long drawn-out adaptation. The aunts looked right but did not come alive. The only real character was the boozy, choleric editor of the local paper Mr Bretherton (excellently played by David Ryall) who was so vividly unpleasant that he must have been drawn straight from life.
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