TELEVISION WILL MAKE “TREMENDOUS IMPACT”

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29401, 31 December 1960, Page 16

TELEVISION WILL MAKE “TREMENDOUS IMPACT”

Television is bound to make a tremendous impact in New Zealand, according to Mr Gordon Grimsdale, a former radio broadcaster in Christchurch, and later manager of the Pasadena Players, who now directs his own television and documentary filmproducing company in Sydney. Mr Grimsdale arrived in Christchurch yesterday in the course of a visit to New Zealand to open a branch of his company in Wellington, in anticipation of television development in this country. “New Zealand is not notorious for night-time entertainment” said Mr Grimsdale. "Television will provide people with evening entertainment in the home which they could not afford to go out to see every night at the pictures or the theatre—nor would they want to do so. "Television is not the educational danger that people think it is,” said Mr Grimsdale. “In fact, some of the most popular TV programmes overseas have a high educational content.” Mr Grimsdale cited as an example the “Meet the Press” programme which consisted simply of a celebrity in some field being interviewed by a panel of journalists without any prior prompting or rehearsal. “I feel television may be abhorred by many who have not seen it, and regretted by those who have, and failed to control it in their own homes; but if any medium of entertainment or mass communication is designed to make the people vocal and quite demonstrative about their preferences, television is that medium,” said Mr Grimsdale. “The television announcer or actor is an invited guest in the home, and people can turn him on or off at will,” he said. “In Australia, where there are three television stations in most of the capital cities, and people can switch from one channel to another, they feel a great personal interest in the announcer or the actor, and if he is not to their liking, they say so. Any television programme thgt is no good will therefore eventually disappear from the air waves.” Mr Grimsdale said he was satisfied New Zealanders would welcome television (as it was already being welcomed in Auck-

land) and would freely buy television sets ranging in price from £145 to £2OO. “And the price of sets should drop as the demand increases," he said. Aucklanders were seeing programmes of an extremely high technical transmission standard —“higher than we had to start in Sydney,” Mr Grimsdale said. “Also, the quality of their programmes at the moment is higher than we saw initially in Sydney,” he said. New Zealanders would eventually be able to enjoy “the cream of world entertainment” on their television programmes, said Mr Grimsdale. In toeit own homes, they would be able to see and hear artists who might never be seen on the films, nor visit New Zealand. For example, they might see Bob Hope or Bing Crosby as master of ceremonies of an hour-long programme, which might include the world’s leading ballet dancers, the world’s leading ventriloquist, the world’s leading flamenco dancer, and singers such as Connip Francis and Frank Sinatra—that was one programme he had seen just before leaving Sydney, Mr Grimsdale said. Mr Grimsdale’s own contribution to television programmes consists of directing the making of short “commercials” (five minutes or less), and documentary films, of from 20 minutes to half an hour’s duration, commissioned by industrial or Government organisations for instructional purposes. Before entering this field, Mr Grimsdale was producing radio programmes in Sydney, many of which, such as “Odette, The Dam Busters,” “Reach for the Sky,” and “Around the World in Eighty Days,” have been heard on national and commercial sations of the New Zealand Broadcasting Service.