TELEVISION AND RADIO
ANY cops-and-robbers game we played when I was a child was always called French-and- English. Adults could talk about the entente till they were hoarse, but we knew better. Our memories were longer than theirs, back with Shakespeare or at least at Waterloo, with France the traditional enemy, and not at all to he sneezed at. Adults, for all their talk of friendship, seemed to be sneezing vigorously. And they are sneezing still.
For there is more than the Channel between us, or even our temperamental differences. There is an ignorance of France here that springs less from incomprehension than from lack of sympathy, that simply will not learn. Dangerous when unadmittcd (the entente, particularly among the elderly, still sits in the best armchair and cocks an eyebrow at frank- ness), an ignorance as enormous as this is not mended by a liking for French films or a fort- night's trip to Paris now and then. It needs a reversal of sympathy; and what can you do about sympathy, that intractable and slithery quality that modifies all the rest? Knowledge is so closely allied to it that even familiarity. if it is unsympathetic (you have only to look at families to see), can still mean ignorance. You may even follow and admit the reasons for a particular course of action, a particular outlook, yet bitterly resent what you have understood. There was seldom a sillier saying than Tout cotnprendre, c'est tout pardonner, since you can understand, or think you under- stand, with your head alone, and forgiveness presupposes something heartfelt.
The television programme We, the French admits—though with a bit of shuffling—some- thing of the sort. It never mentions the entente; it rather presumes that, for everyday purposes and between individuals—Frenchman and Englishman—it hardly exists. That scores point one. The armchairs begin creaking and the eyebrows cocking, but all in a healthy cause. To admit misunderstanding without being aggressive or apologetic is something of a feat, and M. Auriol, who introduced the pro- gramme, was neither. He had disadvantages— no English and a ponderous television manner ---but these were outweighed by the sound sense of his method. His success might well put ideas for the future into producers' heads.
The idea is to put the burden of explanation on to the country itself. A few men are given the run of their own nation, and told to put it across. All right, we say, we don't under- stand you; go ahead and make us. No prying from outside, none of the ordinary interview- ing techniques. The first instalment was factual
and optimistic. but with the optimism played down and the facts carefully illustrated.
Between the two wars, it said, what with losses in the first war and a declining birthrate, France had become a nation of the middle- aged : middle-aged people, middle-aged opinions, creaking and middle-aged action. That led to 1940. (At this point the programme rate had since soared, the primary schools were crammed, the secondary schools would next be crammed, and the universities after that. Here lay all the certainty of future great- ness, since it was impossible to despair of France politically or socially when there was that gratifying 'population bulge' in exactly the age-group it ought to be.
If you wanted a pin to prick this argument, I think you could find it in the fact that M. Sauvy, who took over from M. Auriol, is a population expert who appears to read the moral temperature of a people in its birthrate graphs. Granted a young nation gives at first glance a more hopeful impression than an age- ing one, I cannot see that the mere fact of a bulge in the primary schools is enough to guarantee France's greatness during the next generation. 'Ah youth, youth,' the programme seemed to be sighing happily, without asking more exactly : 'But what youth?'
Yet, though it creaked and blundered tech- nically, and M. Auriol's remarks, fading from French into commentator's English, kept pull- ing you up into remembering this was a bi- lingual effort, the film itself was always inter- esting and often beautiful. Perhaps it tried to say too much, to compress too many arguments into half an hour; but it managed to say plenty. The farming parts were splendid, and an excellent rap on the knuckles to those of us— too many—who tend to think of France entirely in terms of the Deux Magots. (Though the alcohol figures, rural or urban, were rather hair-raising.) A new man will conduct each of the next two instalments, so that the flavour and outlook will presumably vary with each. but however they turn out, this first one, for all its faults, was one of the most stimulating things we have seen for weeks on television. I can sec the same idea being happily applied to all sorts of nations besides the French.
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