Living with colour
TELEVISION STUART HOOD
it is rather large and rather frightening. No doubt we shall get used to its being there. The man who came to install it did nothing to assuage our fears. It was, he explained, im- possible to hoover within six feet of it. You will have to use a brush. We wondered ner- vously what the daily's reaction would be to this new chore. It may be moved only along the axis on which it has been set- in a corner of the room. But how am I to get at my books? The children must not on any account put magnets or toys containing magnets any- where near it. You will be seeing a lot of me, I expect, he said cheerfully as he left; they keep going wrong. So far it hasn't. We still have to experience that moment of which friends have warned us ominously when the colours fuse into a knot in the centre of the screen.
Perhaps the most alarming result of acquir- ing a colour set, however, is that it induces a particular type of regression. One is suddenly back in that obsessional state when merely to see a moving image on the screen was enthralling and one watched with a sense of wonder that embraced news readers, horses in the paddock, comics, old plays (any old play), church ser- vices and puppet shows. Now the pristine fascination is there once more. But the marvels of technology are for the viewer ephemeral ones. We are unaware or unable to compre- hend the effort of imagination, the virtuosity, the elegance of thought that makes possible the miracles daily performed on our screens. Luminance means nothing to us: nor does chrominance or any of the new language of colour television. In a couple of months we shall no doubt be saying again, as we flip through the programme journals, that there is really nothing to watch this evening, this week.
So let us enjoy the excitement while we may. Man Alive is in colour. We must see that—it will be horrific. Look at the tie Michael Dean is wearing—and Enoch Powell's_ eyes. Did you know Play School was in colour? Isn't that wonderful with the holidays upon us any minute. What will colour do to Middlemarch? Nothing to make the dialogue come alive but a lot to give the feel of period. Even subfusc looks better. The Rev Mr Casaubon is tre- mendous—like an intellectual undertaker. What about Cosi? Perhaps opera will look reason- able at last. As one watches and the initial euphoria begins to wane, a truth about tele- vision begins to emerge. It is that we are somehow right in our philistinism, in our quick adjustment to new wonders. The fact is that good programmes do not spring from the ex- ploitation of electronic gadgets—witness the great satellite flops—but from a creative act, however modest. There were, in the old days of black and white, producers who begged to be allowed to put on programmes that would `really exploit the medium.' This usually meant a great deal of fancy lighting and a whole bagful of mechanical tricks—split screens, star- bursts, wipes. David Attenborough, who has been in the business a long time, has learnt to avoid this pitfall. It has been his thoroughly sensible policy not to put into his schedules programmes that merely 'exploit colour.' The result in less wise hands could have been a spate of spectaculars with a minimum of con- tent and a maximum of special effects. One element affecting his decision has naturally been the need to make the output of BBC 2 interesting and acceptable to all those viewers who can watch it only in black and white: fully compatible, in fact. The programmes had therefore to be good television in their own right. What delights me is that, by following this policy, he has demonstrated once again that MacLuhan is wrong. The medium is not the message. What you say with it or on it or by it is what matters.
Previous page
