TV DEPRIVATION • SIR,—Many will sympathise like Myself with Clifford
Hanley that he was deprived of the new. Pinter play on ITV. I for one was surprised, not that Mr. Hanley was so deprived, but that we should have actually been allowed it here in the TWW country— surely the most luckless and ill-used of all regions. For some obscure reason of expediency the taste and aesthetic capacity of views in this part of England are deemed to accord with those of South Wales, with the result that features making any searching demand on the intelligence tend to be withheld, often in the case of a series after a few appetising instalments, as with Tempo and One Man's Music.
It is even more disheartening to find the BBC up (or down) to the same tricks in these parts. Profile in Music and Bookstand are only two popular attractions withdrawn locally in favour of some trivial feature of purely parochial appeal, if any. The much-publicised instalment of Bookstand in which Mary McCarthy appeared was actually announced in the daily press as available to all regions but, in the event, discretion prevailed and the BBC's viewers in the South West were treated to an evening in the home of some Cardiff industrialist.
Mr. Hanky is to be congratulated on so eloquent a plea for minority interests against a philistine censorship by both authorities which has operated now for far too long.
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