REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Clive Gammon on the channel nobody needs
In keeping with the high seriousness that you have come to expect from me on the subject of television, my first reaction to the prospect of the Fourth Channel was one of suspicious coolness. Mean more work for me for a start, wouldn't it? More checking through programme lists. More decisions. A sharply increased chance of trouble from the children when a clearly riveting programme on Channel Four clashed with High Chapparal. This was followed by a sharper pang. If it goes to ITV, where's the advertising coming from? The newspapers, obviously, and other periodicals from which I earn my living. They might take another nasty blow, just when they are looking thicker and more prosperous than they have for years. I'm honest, you see. The reason why other critics want to see it devoted to four-hour lectures on symbolic logic and the like isn't because they are hungry for learning to be disseminated. It is merely because they are hungry. Or frightened of being hungry. They remember what happened to Life magazine (is it thirteen channels they have in New York City?) and compare it with the healthy fatness of Paris Match that flourishes through the weakness of French telly.
Mind you, if they had the sense to hand it over complete to the Welsh Language Society that would save a lot of trouble for everyone, especially me. The great flowering of talent which would undoubtedly arise from the Cardiganshire chapel belt would have full scope and could happily blush unseen to the considerable easement of the rest of the Welsh population.
(I have been told that I shouldn't go on about this topic because it only affects a small proportion of the UK's population. That is like telling someone from Belfast to quit rabbiting on about his boring bombs. Well, yes, that's exaggerated but you know what I mean). I suppose it's too much to hope for a cordon sanitaire to be erected around Welsh broadcasting even if it squeezed up and made room for a little Gunerati or Urdu. So let's think again about a second commercial channel. It would, in fact, be disadvantageous to our society if thereby our already weakened press were weakened further. It would be easy enough to make special provision for newspaper companies to have guaranteed holdings in commercial television companies operating the new channel as happens to some extent anyway, and will do in commercial radio. But that misses the point. We then have a situation of newspapers being subsidised by television: inevitably, in the future sometime, the logic of this is bound to be questioned, losses cut and the monstrous McLuhan situation finally come about.
I wouldn't say I'd be worried aesthetically about what would happen if ITV took over the new channel. I am quite unconvinced that the BBC has been 'dragged down' by competition. In fact in certain respects it has been dragged up — in news features for example. Programmes like Panorama are a long way from perfect, but compare them with the pompous, creaking stuff that was our lot before ITV took a hand. BBC-2 is feared for by many if a second ITV channel comes about. Would the BBC sacrifice its standards to fight off the new competition? Who knows? But there's an equal chance that the .result might be just the other way around, that an I1'V-2 would have scope for drama of quality that ITV can't afford right now. Who knows?
The great temptation, of course, would be for the present companies merely to expand to take up the new slack. Even now there is talk of moves towards a new, tighter clustering of the big companies that would absorb smaller units like HTV and Anglia. This surely cannot be allowed to go on any further, for Granada and ATV and the other big fellows to absorb ITV-2.
Other alternatives have of course been canvassed, a 'democratic,' vaguely Free Access service, for example, run by programme-makers, technicians, maybe liftmen and tea-ladies. That might be fun too, except that we'd all have to pay for it. Maybe that's not a valid argument against. We have to pay for the lot, anyway, even if it's only via the price of detergents.
Yet again thiere's the thought of a fully 'educational' programme. 0 word of fear! Somehow (from the brief glimpses of the Open University sessions that have come my way through inadvertently switching on BBC-2 too early), I find something dauntingly alien about being taught via the screen. It's because you can't answer back I suppose. What, God forgive them, educationalists call 'the learning situation' can hardly flourish in those conditions, can it? What used to be called the give and take of the classroom when I was taught how to be a teacher.
Maybe. . couldn't we just leave it? The fourth channel? they're bound to want old films on Sundays aren't they. And the supply can't last for ever . .
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