Television
The Great Debate
By PETER FORSTER BEWILDERED and rather bored though we non-technicians may be by the technical details, the fact r is clear enough, that a third band A is possible, and somebody is there- fore going to get it. Shall ITV give us what it thinks we want, or the BBC what it thinks we ought to want? Yet there is, more to the problem than that, and I would offer two considerations.
One, surely the most important factor of all, is that TV time is not merely merchandise but a most potent means of establishing and exerting power, and the fact that in TV at the moment there are too many little men behind large desks only underlines the possible dangers. (Blithely they are talking about a schools' network : teach- ing what, and in accordance with whose doctrines and systems?) While as for the big men; who are they? We know, for example, where Milords Beaverbrook and Rothermere stand politically, yet greater influence than either of these possesses is now in the hands of Mr. Harold Drayton, who controls much of ITV, and what do we know about him?
Personally I distrust any concentration of power, be its purposes sublime or subliminal, in a few hands, and would therefore be glad to see as many networks as possible. Divide, and nobody can rule. But power is the possibility and there- fore the stake in this game, and that was the main point omitted by Sir Robert Fraser in his cheery advocacy of ITA in last Sunday's Observer. It was a good letter for a PRO, rather worrying from a Director-General.
On the other hand, and contrariwise, the tech- nical difficulties only begin with the arrangement of a workable band. It seems to be assumed that there is an ample number of skilled producers and cameramen, not to mention entertainers, ready to staff any new network that may be called into being, yet nobody explains where they will come from. Consider how poor is the present general standard of production : is the same butter to be spread more thinly more widely? More Henry Hall Guest Nights, panel games, Westerns, Harding, Mayhew? TV will have earned its new network when it has made the best of the two that already exist. Meantime the great debate continues.
Otherwise the small highspot for many of us in a somewhat doldrum August week was Sir Leonard Hutton's appearance on BBC's Press Conference and his defence of Wardle. He talked as he bats--terrier-like tenacity, immense con- centration on each question as it was bowled at him. Embodying Yorkshire, he made the most regional impact of any character seen on tele- vision in a long time. And how fascinating in its contrasts was the questioning panel. To the direct and burly Frank Rostron, of the Daily Express, the guest was `Len'; to the Observer's suave and bearded Alan Ross he was `Leonard'; while to note the way in which the Telegraph's E. W., Swanton looked at his old enemy, Mr. Rostron, was to realise how close cricket can sometimes come to being a blood sport. Mr. Francis Williams, journalism's Big Daddy, was also there, but Mr. Williams is almost always there on this kind of occasion as a tubby anchor- man, though this time his sole qualification ap- peared to be that he knew nothing about cricket.
Last week also offered one of the best editions in that variable series You Were There, showing the liberation of Paris in 1944. The dramatised scenes linking the newsreel shots were inoffen- sive, but one noticed how throughout there was reference only to Nazis, never to Germans. (See what I mean about the insidious power to in- fluence?) Random thoughts. Recently I suggested that producers could dress the mutton of poor plays to look like lamb; last week this was done brilliantly by D. G. Bridson in the case of The Bullet, a play by D. G. Bridson. . . . The Chief Minister of Singapore, interviewed by Alan Wicker, puffed at his pipe like a Chinese Baldwin and faced a possible electoral deluge with an aplomb which would ensure him a permanent future on panel games if he is voted out of office. . . . Is not the sight of close-harmony groups one of the most persuasive arguments yet devised for a return to sound radio? . . . Tony Hancock, all jowl and discomfiture, like Laughton in little, comes triumphantly through the test of revival and proves that the BBC were wiser to show his series again than to have spent so much on Sid Cesar for so little return. . . . Why, with all their spokesmen blethering away about TV's cultural mission and their own deep sense of responsibility, etc. etc., is it that neither network offers any programme dealing with books?
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