The Curse Of Non-Stop Television

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31169, 20 September 1966, Page 10

The Curse Of Non-Stop Television

(By

T. C. WORSLEY.

television ;

critic oj the "Financial Times.*' Reprinted by arrangement.)

I am looking forward to a holiday. For four weeks I shall been away from television. My screen will be blank: the box will be silent. Merciful relief! It is not that I don't like television; just that there is too much of it.

Isn’t the curse of television its quotidian everydayness? Every day (but not yet, thank goodness, all day) it pours out its stream of fiction, good and bad, its facts true and garbled, its jokes, old and new, day after day, night after night, never stopping. Wouldn’t it, quite seriously, make the whole difference if it were visible, say, only twice a week? The whole difference not merely to the quality of what was broadcast but also—and perhaps even more important—to the quality of our response? For the everydayness of it ensures that a great deal of its material must be mediocre, but even worse, it ensures that we in watching become mediocre watchers, less active participants in the programme than a kind of blotting paper absorbing alike the good and the bad, the moderate and indifferent, until one can hardly any longer distinguish between them.

REPLACEMENT In any case one programme follows another so fast that there is no need to. What we are watching now may be puerile, and we may be able still to recognise the fact; but within 20 minutes or so it will be replaced by something else, and that may not be so bad. So we sit, letting the stuff wash over us, making a minimum of impassion one way or the other. We become inured to it all, so that we are content if we have been even mildly distracted for two or three hours. It is really rather extraordinary if you stop to think about it that we assume it to be natural for this one particular medium to be nonstop, and that we are pressing. some of us. for even longer television hours.

We would not expect—indeed, we should at once see the absurdity of asking for—the same conditions from the concert hall, opera house or theatre. There it is recognised that hours of preparation have to go into producing an event, and when we go to a performance, it is an event for us too. Even the most consistent London firstnighter gets on an average three or four nights off a week.

And even if audiences going to their chosen event are less discriminating than either critics or amateurs of the particular activity, they have at least made an act of choice over the entertainment they decide to patronise, rejecting other possibilities, and selecting this one, and so making an event for themselves. Why do we assume it to be right, proper and natural for television to pour out its offerings to us in this perpetual undiscriminating stream? Why can there be no silences, no intervals, even, in the never-pausing flow? it isn’t right, proper, or natural. It is all wrong and most unnatural, and In thinking it anvthing else we have simply fallen into a prevailing dottiness, and one which it seems we can no longer break. Or can we?

INTERVALS Why, indeed, can't we? The 1.T.V., being tied to its

advertisements, dare not, I suppose. But why should not the 8.8. C. revert to an earlier practice and give us at least five-minute intervals between programmes, and say, one half or three-quarter-hour interval in the middle of the evening? However undiscriminating the average audience is—and perhaps they are less so than we give them credit for—don’t they, too, feel the need to pause after a programme, to have a few words together about it, to discuss it for just a few moments? Perhaps on the other channel, the ads, do give just this opportunity. The 8.8. C. gives none. That would be a start; but only a start. What I would want next would be a selfdenying ordinance on, say, just one day. Saturday, traditionally the evening-out, might become the first dies non, when, after the post-prandial sport, both channels would shut down till Sunday morning. And once the habit of not watching became established, it could spread. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays might become blessedly blank nights. Just think how much rubbish this would clear out of the programmes, leaving only the best in the various fields to fill the other four nights? And with how much more relish we would switch on on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and how much higher would be our expectations and demands!

Impracticable? But why? Loss of revenue to the commercial channels? But that could be got over. Let both channels link up with the radio, and for those who require constant background music, the 8.8. C. could broadcast their Light or Home Programmes during the blank evenings, while I.T.V. could take over the pirate radio networks and intersperse their advertisements there.

So, in practice, it could be done. Yet why does it seem somehow Inconceivable? For any really good or sufficient reason? Just why on the contrary, can we fully expec". that within a year or two there will be no blank screens at all, from early morning to late at night? The answer is surely because we don’t stop to inquire what we really want “MORE! MORE!”

Non-stop television is feasable, and for that very reason and no other, it is going to come. Because we can do it we therefore will and to hell with considerations of quality, good sense, moderation, or even of the pleasure-principle. For, of course, we should enjoy it more for having less of It. At present we are surfeited with it and only children imagine that they will enjoy a surfeit—and find out the hard way that they don’t We are like children over this. We cry “More! More!” when a few moments’ consideration would surely convince us that we would really be happier with less. I can think of only one sensible argument against limiting the viewing time, and that would be if it could be shown that with less viewing time standards might decline instead of rising. Some would argue that there would be a great pressure on the shorter hours to relay only the programmes likely to catch the highest ratings. On this argument such serious or experimental work which does get through is given its chance only because there is a plethora of time,

and some of it can be allowed to be spent at present on what the popularity-mongers regard as waste, and which is at least allowed its chance at present in the non-peak hours. But no-one would seriously bring this- accusation against the 8.8. C., and as to the commercial companies, I don’t take so low a view of them as some. PRIDE IN WORK

There may be a certain cynicism about serious programmes in some high places. But the best of the companies really do pride themselves on their non-popular programmes, and it is up to the I.T.A. to see that only

people who can be trusted to do so are put in charge of stations. If one company can both make money and provide far the best programmes, as Granada does, other companies can be found to do the same things, if the present ones won’t. I don’t pretend that under our present dispensation, so rational and sensible a view, as I think it, is not Utopian. We must face the fact of an increasing instead of a diminishing period of transmission. This won’t, in fact, make an appreciable difference—it will mean only a further dribble of bad old films and second-class Ameri-

can material pumped into the system. This prospect alone should give us pause. But it won’t. Still, it is good for us to stand back every now and then and remind ourselves that things are as they are because we will them to be so, or can’t be bothered to will them not to be. If we willed them differently, they could be different—and better.

It is indisputable in my view that less television would be good both for television and for us viewers. If we have the worse arrangement, it is because we don’t choose to order things better.