In a provincial hotel the other evening I went to
the 'television room' to look at a much-adver- tised general election programme. The darkened room was crowded—but with people absorbed in the rival show, a courtroom drama. Clearly there was no hope of getting even a majority vote for switching to the other channel. The Manager, with the surliness some provincial. hotel managers specialise in, refused to let me look at his own set, so I abandoned the idea and went out into the town. The street was empty.
A shop selling television sets had, in its lighted Window, one of its specimens switched on. No sound was audible: but there on the screen, his features strained with urgent appeal, was—well, the leader of one of the major political parties. (It could just as well have been his opponent, no doubt.) The contrast between the politician mouthing wordlessly in a shop window in an
empty street, and the crowded room intent on its anodyne televised fiction, was inescapable. Real life sometimes presents a scene so loaded with unrefined symbolism that the most hard- Pressed cartoonist would shrink from employ- ing
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