TELEVISION AND THE B.B.C.

By DENIS JOHNSTON

WHEN the Television Service was reopened at Alexandra Palace after the war, one of the more important blocks of offices was approached by way of a muddy lane filled with plank, and old bits of scenery, leading to an unlit door. The place was familiarly known as the Slough of Despond, and thirty or forty people had to stumble through it every evening on their way out to the bus from their offices. It was thought that this state of affairs might be improved by the provision of an electric light over the door, so that the inhabitants could see where they were going, and a key weekly conference known as the Operations Meeting used regularly to arrange for this to be done by a series of minutes directed to various technical quarters. Running more or less parallel with this agitation, there was also a project to take a camera and cable into a small existing room, and by making a few minor alterations, to turn the place into an announcers' studio. This would have got around the problem that presents itself every day, as to whether a valuable section of the studio in use should be wasted on the setting for continuity announcements, or whether rehearsals in the other studio should be continually interrupted during the afternoon in order to enable these announcements to be made. This was in 1946 ; and while it must be made clear that no opposition or dissent was ever expressed towards either of these fairly simple projects, there is still no sign of an announcers' studio at Alexandra Palace, although many larger developments have been mooted on paper. On the other hand, it is only right to point out that a lamp did finally appear over that door, just in time to be prohibited, together with the staff lift, in celebration of some fuel crisis.

This is the kind of thing that I always call to mind when the future development of television is under discussion, because it seems to me that the problems confronting it are not so much ones of principle as of personalities—not of permits or charters or even, at the moment, of finance, but simply a question of whether in our present frame of mind the average man in an office, in control of another man with a screwdriver, is particularly anxious to get any- thing done at all. I do not believe that in its present condition British television is noticeably starved either of money or staff. Very little more could be done in the matter of getting better programmes or longer transmission hours, even if the budget and personnel were doubled, because the work that is being done with the available studio space and equipment is already a miracle, and there is no room for any more. Nor is it of much importance to discuss whether the B.B.C. is the best organisation to run it, because the difficulties in the way of putting bulbs over doors and accommodating announcers in separate rooms are not really B.B.C. problems but national ones, and would be certain to occur no matter who was running television. As it is, no cruel or envious uncle is attempting to smother the little Princo in the Tower. On the contrary, the greatest obstacle in the way of getting these small and useful things done is a trick of elaborating them with loving enthusiasm to such an extent that they cannot be attempted for at least a year and• a half. Lights have to have special fittings and wiring, and no announcer could possibly be inflicted with a room that•was• not sound-proofed and ventilated. And so the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and announcers continue to perform in the main studios with neither silence nor ventilation to inspire them.

I have always been struck by the fact that all broadcasting organi-

sations tend to reproduce in miniature the characteristics of the communities that they serve. The American networks are slick, noisy, self-confident and surprisingly dull. Radio Eireann is genteel and folk-ridden, and as suspicious as an old farmer's wife of any- thing in Irish life that is brilliant but not respectable. Who but Radio Eireann could ever have paid a reluctant tribute to the dead James Joyce by referring to him as the well-known author of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? In the same way, most of the criticisms that are flung' at the B.B.C.—its departmentalism, its stinginess over small rather than large amounts, its internal frustra- tions, and its aptitude for loyally covering up incompetence on the part of anybody who has been on the staff longer than five years—all

these are things that should be said of England rather than of the B.B.C. For an institution so harassed by crooks and ridden by pressure groups, it actually does very well indeed, and there are many worse fates that could befall television than to continue under its control.

For example, it might meet with the living death of coming within the orbit of the British Film Industry, or even of becoming film- obsessed, as has happened to its opposite number in America. One of the blemishes on television O.B.s—that is to say, on broadcasts coming from outside locations rather than from a studio—used to be the uncertain quality of the sound The department that handled the production of these programmes was more closely connected with or recruited from the world of the films than the other sections at Alexandra Palace; and when enquiries were made in order to remedy this, defect, the responsible parties used to point out that it is difficult in television O.B.s to get the microphone close enough to the source of sound without allowing it to be seem

Very well, came the answer. Put it into view. The only response was a blank and unco-operative stare. That could not be done. Nobody ever puts a microphone into shct.

" What do you mean by ' nobody ' ? Who is it that never puts a microphone into shot ? "

" Well—the movies."

But this isn't the movies. This is television, a medium that is still at liberty to make its own rules. Television is broadcasting— broadcasting that we can see ; so why should we attempt an elaborate pretence that it is something else, by keeping our microphones out of shot ? There was a long battle before the present carefree use of visible microphones by O.B. commentators became the standard practice, and this resistance was largely rooted in a fear that friends and acquaintances in the film business might see this solecism being committed, and imagine that the television producer knew no better !

This obsession with rules that have been laid down for another medium is at the back of the peculiarly tiring quality of American television, and the feeling of overpowering boredom that usually supervenes after half an hour. A continual effort to imitate the montage technique of moving pictures by cutting from camera to camera, without the careful matching up of shot with shot that can only be done in the cutting-room. is a thing that the average viewer need not be expected to understand. All he knows is that he feels confused and tired out, and sums up the situation in the phrase, " Television has a long way to go yet "—meaning, of course, a long way to go before it can beat the movies on their own ground, instead of exploiting its own peculiar advantages. One of the things that has saved British television from this St. Vitus's Dance and enabled it to develop a smoother technique of its own is the fact that, until after the war, it was not possible to cut from camera to camera, and that a change of viewpoint had to be carried out by means of a mix or lap-dissolve, in the course of which one picture faded into the other, rather than leapt. This was a handicap in some respects, but it also had an important psychological effect on producers, and forced them to think on lines that were original, and that were peculiarly suited to the small screen and to an intimate, rather than to a mass audience.

Although they are both branches of the same medium—broad- casting—sound radio and television are not in any real sense rivals

of each other. What we get best from the one we shall never get

effectively from the other. Sound fills in a background to our lives, and usually demands little in the way of concentration. Television compels concentration in a most exhausting way (when it is badly handled) and should never be allowed to make demands on us except at stated times when we arc attending to nothing else. In this they are complementary, rather than enemies. The institution to which television constitutes a deadly threat is the local cinema and the second-rate film which it is not worth while going out to set Under the wing of the B.B.C. it may or may not be hampered by

personalities, but this is liable to be the case whoever controls it, and I cannot see how it affects the argument. To my mind the most

serious objection that can be levelled against the B.B.C. concerns finance, and the out-of-date tradition that programmes are things

that must never be sold, but have to be given away to the customers in return for an annual subscription that is fantastically small when applied to the expensive level of entertainment that television ought to and some day will be providing. But it ought not to be beyond the bounds of human ingenuity to devise some means by which the customer pays even a few pence for what he receives rather than the present system under which he virtually pays nothing at all, and thinks none the more of it on that. account.