Peaks and Putridities
Ar the end of my television stint (and with the Mediterranean around the corner) geniality seeps through the critical membrane; you try to remember the peaks, to forget the putridities. Peaks? Well, sizeable hillocks: Sir Gerald Kelly, Miller bowling, A Show Called Fred, Gun Law, some of the Big City series, a couple of Sunday plays on the BBC (particularly Mrs. Patterson and Rodney Ack- land's quietly, chillingly produced The Sed- dons), Billy Cotton, bits of the old boxing films, Ascot, moments of Panorama, Robin Hood, some of Jack Jackson; and Reg Dixon being bullied. These are the nuggets hidden in the mud, glinting the brighter because of the mud's greyness. Greyness? Acres and acres of it : Yakity Yak, palais nights, holiday camp comedians, My Wildest Dream, give-away programmes (and particularly the bouncing, boorish, beastly giving-away gentlemen), Inner Sanctum, most half-hourly celebrity films, most interviews, arch explainers of science (like Mr. Marvel), shopping guides. Adventures of the Big Man, Life with the Lyons, the lamentably mounted reappearance of Jack Buchanan, any show called This Will Make You Laugh, ice-shows, The Count of Monte Christo. I've Got a Secret; and Reg
Dixonsls medium, people tell you. And oo nit ss inn mass
sure, the lowest common denominator is a powerful greying force. But so much of tele- vision that is bad wouldn't be bad if only someone with talent got at it and worked on it as television; not as thirty-minute playlets, or filmed variety, or any one of the 500-odd other ways to go on being dull just because that's the way we're used to being dull, but television designed for the small screen, designed to be viewed in the quiet of the home. designed to take advantage of every electronic twist and turn, all the urgent excitements of up-to-the-minute actuality, of person to person immediacy. Lowest common denominator, fiddlesticks! Miller is meat for a mass audience, so is Mr. Harding, so is Mr. Cotton, so is Sir Mortimer Wheeler, yet all these manage to be distinctive, to be alive, to make use of television as people; they don't slink about trying to create false personalities; their impact is vivid and true because there's no cheating between them and us. And the rest of television could be as good as this if only real talent could be brought to bear on the whole complex of programmes instead of on isolated spots.
Television is going to shape our lives whether we like it or not. It needs fresh think- ing at the very top—a new kind of impresario- producer-administrator. It needs all our good- will; and all our insults. For we shall get the television we deserve. Apathy will give us worthy, grey stuff; and watching it we will become worthy and grey. Most able creative people still look on television as a kind of suburban peepshow. It's this attitude that the BBC and the ITA must break down. For with- out those people television will stay bogged in its present mediocrity for ever. Television ought already to be regarded as the most stimulating creative medium of our time. The fact that it doesn't begin to be so regarded is a clear enough indication of where to start.
For the moment, though, I'll take petanque.
JOHN METCALF
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