ABTS AND EKTERTAINMENT Preferring Old Films To New TV Plays

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30736, 28 April 1965, Page 8

ABTS AND EKTERTAINMENT Preferring Old Films To New TV Plays

(By

T. C. WORSLEY

in the "Financial Times’’ reprinted by arrangement J

The television play—the single one-shot play as opposed to the series or the serial—is, I am reliably informed, losing favour with the mass audience. There is now observable, it seems, a massive switch-off, or switch-over, during the course of nearly all the plays given on either channel; while at the same time it is noted that the same audience —presumably, anyhow, it is the same audience —is more ready than ever to stay through the showing of old films irrespective of whether they are good or bad. Just why this audience, if it is the same audience, is prepared to suck down uncritically dramatic fiction in the one form and not the other plainly admits of many answers: but the fact explains why British heads of drama and TV playwrights are at present so noisily on the defensive. WELL TRIED FORMULA The most obvious explanation is quite simply that popular films —and the old films shown are not naturally the films of the nouvelle vague—had behind them vast organisations geared to manufacturing box-office material in a box-office shape. Television has neither the resources nor the tradition for making these kinds of mass appeal fiction; and then, when you remember the number television has to supply in any one year, you soon realise that it has to be very much more modest in its approach. Still, it may be argued, scale is not everything. Why are TV plays not on their own scale very much more entertaining than they are? Why, argue those who dislike the new form which the drama has taken lately, do they have to be so gloomy? Why do they have to be so half-baked? Why not, in short, the good old, welltried formula of the strong story with a beginning, a middle and an end? It is easier to dismiss these common man objections loftily, as being horribly philistine, than to answer them. Yet they won’t do, MINORITY APPEAL | Entertainment to start with, is a question-begging term. What amuses Noel Coward disgusts John Osbourne. What distracts you bores me to distraction. And here we are, I suggest, at the nub of the question. The number of plays that can stake a claim to being universal is tiny; play-going is, and always has been, a minority taste. And different kinds of plays appeal to different kinds of minorities. Where the independent companies make a mistake, I suggest, is in trying to pretend that this is not so. They devote as much money, talent and effort as the 8.8. C. to their drama section—they

have been perhaps even more adventurous in their treatment of drama; and they hope that their plays will compete in the ratings with other popular programmes, when by their nature they cannot.

This produces odd results. What turns up on the drama nights is wholly unpredictable. It is as if there was only one theatre in London showing plays for only one night each, and you never knew in advance what sort of thing you were going to see when you got there. One night it would be a company enacting ritual murders in a fruit orchard; one night it would turn out to be an actor without his trousers. One night it would be an uproarious farce about corpses; one night it would be an uproarious comedy about Irish point-to-points.

BLIND DATE If all theatregoers were embarking on a kind of blind date of this kind, they too might switch to the cinema, where they had some idea of what they were in for. The time may come when we have a sufficiently cohesive culture for the playwright to write confidently and truthfully for a majority audience; but we are a long way from

that yet; and if playwrights are to explore the problems that interest them, then they, and their patrons, must be content with a minority audience and must cling to the hope that that minority will in fact, slowly grow. But there is a second and no less intractable problem over plays on television. This is a new medium, and those who are writing for it are necessarily still experimenting. Those who aren’t, are simply using the cliches of cinema or the stage, and are not helping.

STATE OF FLUX But while the , formal principles behind playwriting for television are still in a state of flux, so too the plays are likely to be. All the same, it would be a grave impoverishment if, in deference to the charts, these plays were edged out of the programmes. It would be wise not to gloss over the fact they are a minority interest and to try to collect the most intelligent and indulgent audience, not just the largest. For to such an audience, even when the plays do not wholly succeed, they offer many rewards. Among others, for instance, the acting: for many of Britain’s best young actors are specially adept at this kind of play.