Having been invited last week to see an example of
com- mercial television, I feel a little more competent to pronounce for or against that projected innovation. In America, of course, it is no innovation at all. What I saw, indeed, was a half-hour American film, starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Constance Cummings and other celebrities with whom I am more slightly acquainted, at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of which a very well turned-out gentleman proclaimed, with many ingenious variations of voice and action, the merits of a beverage called Rheingold beer. I give it a free advertisement here to compensate for the expression of a fervent hope that I shall never see it or any other commodity, liquid or solid, adver- tised on a British television screen. It was very kind of the exhibitors to ask me, but I can but record the impression I received.
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