Ordeal By Television

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30739, 1 May 1965, Page 4

Ordeal By Television

1A Fourth Leader in "The Times’’]

Politicians past, present, and no doubt, future will heartily echo Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s wish that television had never been invented except for sport. A classic expression of this same sentiment was uttered in the early days of television by the greatest of elder statesmen. Reflecting in conversation that he had spent forty years seeking to gauge the effect of what he said on the electorate, he went on to say that he viewed with alarm and despondency the prospect of also having to take into account what he looked like. A leading opponent who was present endorsed this with emphatic alacrity. Other seasoned warriors in the parliamentary lists will sympathise with Sir Alec Douglas-Home when he remarked [recently], with characteristic cheerfulness, that “People say I look like nothing on earth” on the television screen. It would take a complacent self-satisfied performer to be sure that his image appearing in every home would do him good. That mischievous old half-truth—the camera cannot lie—is equally misleading if applied to sound broadcasting or television. I How far it is untrue of the camera can be seen by glancing through any family album. Poorly though we maythink of our forbears, we know that their anpearance in those mercifully faded 1 t

prints is libelled and many modern photographic portraits are.no better. The proverb maker was a treacherous guide. So he remained when he asserted that sound broadcasting could detect insincerity and always brought out the true tones and inflexion of a speaker’s voice. Sometimes it did, but often, as can still be heard, it plays strange tricks. Television is even worse. The cameras must be full of imps, judging by the way in which, without quite disguising the identity of the person, they manage to portray a face that, somehow, is a caricature. not infrequently a malicious one. The process is subtle and leaves the viewer familiar with the flesh and blood look of the victim puzzled to put into words what has gone wrong. The cameramen can say truly enough that like the legendary pianist they are doing their best. But they are helpless in the irresponsible hands of those gremlins. The little beasts have their favourites—as they had with the still camera and the microphone. How they choose remains a mystery. They certainly do not divide the sheep from the goats by any system of justice and fair play that can be made sense of by the human mind, This is tough on politicians. But. then, they would not be in the ring and so on the screen unless they were tough themselves.