THE STUDIO AUDIENCE

Press, 20 October 1976, Page 19

THE STUDIO AUDIENCE

Viewers regularly express disenchantment with the studio or dubbed laughter in many television programmes. Some of their dislike is shared by the British star of radio and television, June Whitfield and she expressed it in an interview this month in “Television Today.” She said she would very much, like to do a situ--ation comedy without an audience.

“I don’t myself need an audience, not essentially,” she tells you, “because I’m not a comic. I can understand how a comic needs an audience because without it, how can he tell how he is doing?

“We have a studio audience for ‘Happy Ever After’ and it’s confusion in a way. No matter how you try not to, you do play to them a little; it is their laughs that govern what you are doing. But they are not a typical audience and two people sitting in front of their set at home are not going to laugh in the same way.

“They say statistics prove that if you don’t have an audience the show falls flat on its face, but I’d love to try and prove them wrong. In fact we have almost got to the stage of doing the show without an audience, but someone has always got cold feet at the last minute.

“Certainly I’d rather have a live audience than dubbed laughter. But tele-

vision is an intimate medium; you are playing to two or three people in their own sitting room and as soon as you get a studio audience you are taking the show away from them, making them eavesdroppers.

“To do it fairly you would have to try with a show that was already established. If you did it with a new show and it didn’t stand up, everyone would say it was because there wasn’t an audience. “With the big, party sort of thing a variety show, something like ‘Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game’ you need an audience because Bruce uses the audience and is magnificent with them. But comedy drama gets its results without an audience in the studio. So why not try ‘Porridge’ without an audience?”