Television
THE excitement of the first. CTV week died rather fast in the second, when what lOoked likely from the beginning—the fact that we need expect no enormous innovation—became perfectly clear. Words like 'Channel Nine' and `Rediffusion,' that had an exotic ring to them for the first few days, have now grown as homely as BBC phrases like 'Bright intervals' or 'I beg your pardon,' and, apart from a tremulous stripe on mid-screen when CTV comes on, there is not much to tell you plainly which is which. The advertisements do, of course; but there is no longer that agreeable newness of presentation on CTV, that salutary feeling of shock and foreignness. Stylistic man- nerisms are creeping in; repetition is making, as, of course, it must, what was once strange and surprising, familiar and—in time it may be—dull.
Yet when you have a session of viewing, sitting through a morning or an evening, you lind there are differences. Speed—you might call it scrappiness—seems a feature of CTV. A typical morning programme, for instance, changes programmes at the following times: 10.30, 10.45, 11, 11.4, 11.15, 11.45, 12, 12.15, 12.30—nine breaks, that is, in two hours, not counting the advertisements. Jumping about like that, of course, makes for a certain pace and sparkle, if only because you hardly have time to tire of a face or voice before it vanishes; it also gives a choppy, breathless, headlong air to things, unlike the sobriety of BBC viewing.
Vicarious excitement of a rather new kind is another of its features. The BBC realised long ago that people, as opposed to actors, were fun to watch; being yourself, as opposed to being someone else. But it imposed no dreadful ordeal on them, and allowed for no excessive emotion. CTV has discovered the facile thrill that stronger emotions, felt not by them but under their noses, can give to an
Oddly the BBC, until now rather more tasteful in this matter of encroaching on pri- vacy, has stolen a march on CTV with its lonely hearts programme, is This Your Prob- lem? — as unctuous a bit of noseyness dis- guised as social service as ever surely was televised anywhere. A cartoon in (I think) a pre-war Punch showed two autocratic chars stalking into an elegant house and sweeping aside the duchess with a 'Stand aside, my good woman, we've come to inspect the houses of the rich.' How I longed for one of the pathetic advice-seekers, clasping and unclasp- ing.anonymous hands (which was all we could see of them), to turn and bite the smug, loquacious panel with a home truth or two! Professional advisers, excellent people though they may be, are at a disadvantage if caught in the act of advising; the contrast between their inadequacy and the case's need, between their immunity and the case's involvement, between their eloquence and the case's in- coherence, is rather painful to see. Paraded for our entertainment, it is plainly indecent. And an actress — beautiful, well-dressed, electric with sensibility, the antithesis of her drab, dumb cases—is not the person to choose. as an introducer, there being a lot in the old notion that social workers ought to be dowdy, if only because it knocks some of the stuffing of their position out of them. Of course, the cases need not come there in the first place— as you can say about all these people whose humiliation on the screen we are asked to watch. But because people are silly, their silli- ness need surely not be exploited—not, at any rate, by the organisation we have, rightly or wrongly, come to look on as guardian of the proprieties, the BBC.
uninvolved audience. The parlour game in the BBC sense of the words—panels, riddles and the rest of it—looks grandmotherly beside the new (and I think nastier) forms of party enter- tainment, all of them variations of the old game of forfeits, but with ludicrously large prizes, to make the viewer's pulse race with envy, apprehension, and other mildly ignoble feelings thrown in. Most of the players, I must say, show up remarkably well, and lose, when they do lose, with an admirable degree of sang- froid. But when hundreds of pounds hang on some trifling skill or on the chance of a num- ber, hope, despair, wistfulness, defiance and the rest of the gambler's emotions do pass rather violently through the most philosophical heart—private feelings, I think, that ought not to be paraded, even when the victim is willing, for our rather dubious entertainment.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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