Thin on the Ground
Television uses up talent fast. Television, to exist, needs more and more new, live people with something to say. The way it's going—spreading talent thin, pretending an ounce is a pound, when- evef it gets any talent dressing it up until it's buried—it will soon be close to ceasing to exist as a vital force, become a kind of animated tabloid version of the Light Programme.
Since Mr. Harding first rammed the opulence of his rumbling common sense through the vintage screen of the late Forties, no one has broken through with anything like the same impact. Is this because from Macclesfield to Marylebone there's only one Gilbert? Or is it because a little learning of the techniques of presentation has proved a dangerous thing? Today we're always being told how excited we're going to be about poor Miss This or Great Television Play That; nobodies and nothings are blown up like balloons, shaken in our faces, mouthed and mauled over— until they burst. We've salivated so often over false alarms that the rare, real lamb chop evokes only a half-hearted woof-woof.
Put it another way : more television is making us more sophisticated. In the good old days the Gilbertian blare could transform even the inanities of What's My Line? into a top pro- gramme. Today. it's different; the package, the show has to be right in itself before we are pre- pared to go all the way with the personality, even if he's right. Mr. Day would not fiave emerged as a breezy, likeable, all-round commentator that he is if it hadn't been for the breezy, enthusiastic news presentation policies of ITN. Messrs. Chata- way and Wyatt wouldn't have followed him along this year if Panorama hadn't, been turning out an occasional outstanding addition. The latest of these new-style personalities to move ahead are in the same pattern. David Attenborough is engaging because Zoo Quest is in itself the best animal programme that's about. With luck it will soon silence the awkward, coy intimacies of that intrepid husband and wife that we needn't name. And Mr. Michelmore, perhaps the most interest- ing of them all, gains steadily in stature as the BBC's Tonight gains in pace and ease. Mr. Michelmore is a man to keep your eye on. His modest and extraordinarily ordinary handling of his team of interviewers and celebrities, singers and football managers is as about as efficient as you can get. The basic reason why it works is that he is being his normal, interested self in front of the camera; gimmicks are all very well for pop
singers or leaders of skiffle groups or politicians but, as they learned in America a long time ago, if you want to be someone on television and go on being someone successfully you first of all be yourself.
That clever young woman Miss Jacqueline Mackenzie serves as well as anyone to bang this point home. Her amusing little trick, a gift for imitating people and things which no doubt enables her to be a wow at coffee parties, was all very well for a while in small doses. But now that her stunt has been blown up to a full-scale turn it is about as lively as a deb in an espresso bar acting out what her mother has told her about Ruth Draper. Miss Mackenzie doesn't know who she is yet. And until she finds out and starts being it, the tricks she pins on to the surface of her personality can only irritate. Now, was her appearance last week at a Whitbread'Hop Festival in any way improved by the extraordinary mis- handling of what could have been a fascinating outside broadcast? When the BBC bothers to take us down to Paddock Wood, what we want to see, surely, is the essence of the festival : the hop- pickers themselves. Instead we were presented with, a third-rate variety show centred round a series of amateur skiffle groups. Or maybe it only seemed like a series. Miss Mackenzie's flip re- marks were lost in the wind and the rain. And the male interviewer was of such heartiness that I still had goose-pimples five minutes after the programme was over. Bounding jovially towards a grandmother he urged her to take some of the food that was being dished out, crying merrily, 'I suppose you'll be doing a Knees-Up Mother Brown in a moment.' She gave him a look. 'No,' she said. It was one of the most effective squelches of the year. Joviality and all, I would rather have had a half-hour with people like grandma and her family, taken a look at the gar- dens themselves (which could well have been on film), seen some of the living conditions of the people, heard what they had to say about their own festival. As it was, all we were given of the proper flavour was some pearly kings and queens dancing sadly in the middle distance.
Ed Murrow, in a filmed programme on Mon- day on Puerto Rico, came up not just with a fine interview with the Governor but also with, to- wards the end of the programme, the symposium of views of the problem of Puerto Ricans living in New York. A dress manufacturer who said more in Brooklynese about racial equality than any dozen documentaries with specially commis- sioned music. Looking squarely and plainly at an unmoving camera he spoke for something like a minute and a half about the garment trade's need for this labour, about his having come to New York as a foreigner himself and about the need for these people to be welcomed for the contribution they were making. It was clear from the minute he started speaking that he meant what he was saying and that he was saying it in his own words. This is what personality means in TV. This is the kind of unexpected good thing that television can give us. This is what, because of fiddling about,
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