Television
Another and Another
By CLIFFORD HANLEY Some people will be working tremendously hard, of course—the television people. There will be more and more of them, occupying a cor- doned area the size of Yorkshire, with permanent sets of Oxbridge hospital, the glass Compact building, Newtown docks. The actors will live their entire lives in character. Alan Dawson will actually cut people open and Violet Carson will scrub the vestry floor when the camera isn't pointing at her. The streets of this complete community will be populated by passers-by, chosen or bred for their absolute typicality, and worshipped as gods by ordinary, untypical passers-by like the viewers, Television will gradu- ally attain its ideal condition, in which cicwers will spend their entire lives looking at the screen to see absolutely typical people doing the ordin- ary, unentertaining things the viewers would be doing if they didn't have to watch the telly.
This will include quizzes, I imagine. I've been looking at quizzes recently, and I suspect that they will go on for ever. I myself am a sucker for them, as long as there isn't too much mess' ing about. Abracadabra, for instance, always e%' asperated me because it spent so much time on asking the contestants their names and hobbies, instead of getting on with the battle. Even Criss- Cross Quiz was guilty of time-wasting nonsense.
At the moment we have Double Your Atone,' and University Challenge on ITV, and the BBC has transformed its Top of the Form game from steam radio to the screen. Double Your Mond used to be an irritant, but I find that either Hughie Green has mellowed, or I have. He strives for jollity, but doesn't make the contestants ridiew lous. And by some process (which must be enor• mously difficult) the programme finds contestants who are not only bright, but entertaining. The whole thing is trivial and pointless. 1 like it. Top of the Form is easier to take on tclevisi9n than I found it on radio, where the adults e \'uded an unctuous condescension that wrung the This quality has largely diSappeared, and the children, inevitably, are star performers even in their failures, simply • beeause children are children and we once were. There's only me little danger in this progr-arnme that the or' ganisers will have to watch •Trigorous fairn•eSsin question and answer. The IQ type of question, fceeXample, is simply insulting, when it asks you to"name the odd rna° out in a list of five words: The official answer is always quite arbitrary, and • finding it is a matter of being lucky enough to choose the same category as the questinit-setter. The gilt tion-masters also have to be at least as sins as the kids, and not bound by their official answers. The Other week a girl gave Cant's as the author of The Outsider and was marked , down because the answer-card hadn't got beYon' Colin Wilson.
University Challenge is tougher stuff altogether, and it has the added attraction of speed. I dont know if speed in answering general knowledg° questions has any value to mankind. But the excitement is superb, and occasionally ONO occasionally) 1 find myself shrieking the missing answer; the undergraduate smart-alecks, tha° God, don't know it at all. For sheer entertain- ment. this is the best quiz of all to date. This journal, by the way, has an unwritten and very proper law against plugging 0°,!5 ,,t. own mates; but since the only time I met Bacup` Gascoigne was in the Spectator TV programme' when he was in London and I was in Glasgow, can probably say that he seems almost the ideal temperament for the quizmaster iob.
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