TV CYNICS ARE 'DOOM WATCHERS'

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34103, 16 March 1976, Page 4

TV CYNICS ARE 'DOOM WATCHERS'

(By

KEN COATES

The visiting English language authority, Professor Randolph Quirk, refuses to join the “doom watchers” who say television is causing harm. He describes TV as mind-stretching and imag-ination-awakening. In an interview the professor, who lectures at the University of London when he is not writing books or making overseas lecture tours, said the "doom watchers” who held the media were ruining things. “They talk just like my parents did when talkies began in the 1930’s and they said values would be ruined,” he said.

“My view may be a minority one, though I hope not — I talked at Canterbury University’s English department and some of the younger people there seemed to agree with me. “If you took the standard as an upper middle-class home 100 years ago when the family played chess in the evening, gathered around the piano and sang songs, and whose daughters would have painted and embroidered, then TV has had a catastrophie effect.”

But, Professor Quirk pointed out, the majority of people did not do that. “Watching television is more mind-stretching and more imagination-awakening than what the majority of people were doing before, and what they would be doing if they did not have television.”

This also applied linguistically. Teachers he had talked to in Dunedin said TV was ruining language. "Are they saying the language of the Otago farm, or the dock area, or in the playground was better 30 or 50 years ago, before television?" the professor asked. “Are they also saying that the language was inherently better than the language you would hear on a tough film, or whatever is being objected to on television?” Here the professor had to admit to some incompetence in commenting, because he does not have a TV set, and is not a regular viewer. “I just observe kids I teach," he said. “And they are becoming aware of other things going on in other countries of the worldWhen I was their age, I did not really know where the countries were.”

And Professor Quirk recalled that the people in other countries he read about in fiction when a lad were represented as sliteyed, or cunning, dirty, smelly and treacher6us. “This is one of the ways in which TV has drawn the teeth of these nastinesses,” he said.