This Month

FOR sporting events and spot news, television is wonderful. Herewith a few notes on some other aspects of TV.

“ What comes after Haiti?”

“Haiti-one.” (Tumult, laughter, applause by studio audience.)

TV is not for the eye alone. Whereas radio spared us the sight of its performers, we have to hear them as well as see them on TV. But many TV sets seem to have a sound unit of dime-store quality. Thus television shows us what we suspected all along — that an operatic soprano is not hired for pulchritude; but it also makes her sound like the goings-on in a haunted house. As for orchestras, the TV customer, presumed never before to have seen one in the act of making music, is astonished to hear what meager toothings are being produced by the hard-working musicians on his screen.

The studio audience likes television better than radio, and its frantic endorsement of an old joke or a solo constantly smites the receiving set in great echoing gusts. (The TV camera peers out over this audience at short intervals to prove to the listener that their brayings are not the figment of his disordered mind.)

Only the velvety, flavor-sealed, creaming voice of the commercial announcers comes through as heretofore. But the announcer is now tossing his marcel and fixing you with a hypnotic eye and forefinger when he commands the sprint to your naborhood druggist for the arthritis pills. It’s all one can do — even the lame and the halt — not to run out on the show, quarter in hand.

Because about a third of all television seems to be low-budget puppets and marionettes, about a third of its sound out put is the caterwauling and gobbling of these little creatures.

Roughly another t tird of TV is old movies—not vintage films but just worn-out quickies that no audience would lay down money to see even in a Penny Arcade. Intended for the children in TV households, the films are usually Westerns or he-man schemes abounding in gunfire, hoofbeats, and saloon brawls. These films make a fair amount of noise.

“ Young man, you are accused of stealing a petticoat.”

“Gee, Judge, it was my first slip.” [Whistles, cheers, stamping of feet.)

At this stage, pending coloration by the Federal Commumentions Commission, TV is mostly gray. Black things look black, everything else gray. The plush curtains from which emerge the roller skaters, tap dancers, jugglers, and other old-time vaudeville acts are probably in the best color tradition of Balaban & Katz, but they look slate gray on all the shows.

The people look gray without exception. Athletes, matinee idols, dodderers, or the most blooming young trollops from a floor-show line — all these seem to be made of putty or modeling clay; and another of TV’s queer new impressions comes from the sight of so many gray-faced people appearing so abruptly in one’s living room and cutting assorted capers.

Television is also the domain of the gray dinner jacket, but we may be sure that this garment will be worn in tartans and magenta once the FCC permits color. (The maroon feathercarnation with matching tie and handkerchief gets absolutely nowhere under present conditions.)

The gray curtains are TV’s principal scenery. Some shows will venture boldly with a street-corner drop reminiscent of the Orpheum circuit in 1910, but TV is mainly a plush curtain job. A battered dais, with the plush curtains as background, is the basic piece of studio furniture. At forums and quizzes, the panel of experts sit behind rather high desks, so that they may read their spontaneous witticisms by furtive glances— which the studio audience can’t set* half so clearly as they show up on the screen in one’s living room — at concealed script. Because television spends so much money on “talent,” most of its other props are rudimentary and in constant use; they take a frightful beating and look, on the whole, like the handiwork of toddlers in a progressive school.

Television’s greatest problem is how to show one or more human beings on a “giant life-size” 10 or 12 inch screen — a life-size screen in the sense that a $10 Kodak takes life-size pictures. Awkward fact: the only life-size reality that will lit into such a dimension is a life-size face. The more the lens takes in, the smaller the performers have to be, and a ballet number becomes a troupe of midgets willy-nilly. Aware of this failing, TV resorts to close-ups. At this point, out the window goes any sense of illusion that the home audience might have enjoyed in a theater, insulated by kindly distance from so minute a view of Adam’s apples, back teeth, ears, and other distracting details of the entertainers. Example: —

A noted diva is announced by the ecstatic master of ceremonies to the delirious studio audience, The TV camera discloses her, midget-size, languorously reclining on a chaise longue. She is wearing a frilly negligee — gray — and in her state of intimate disluw elment she looks to be, midget-size, quite a babe. Apropos of nothing in particular, she begins to warble a naughty little song in French.

But relentlessly the television lens closes in to show us what she really looks like: an astonishingly massive chin; little pig-eyes; considerable deviation of the septum — nothing that a good plastic man couldn’t straighten out but such as to show up a nose slightly off center; large ears; a hit long in the tooth; probably a round forty. Having thus wrecked any possible enchantment which the diva might have exercised at longer range, the camera puts her back on the chaise longue, but by that time we know too much about her.

“Did you see the old ruins in Europe?”

“ Yeah, I wasout with one of them every night. “ (Ovation, pandemonium.)

There are three kinds, generally speaking, of TV performers: the worried, the gauche, and the brassy.

The most worried people on TV are the non-professionals who have been drafted to make a speech, sing, or be interviewed. Their hands shake, their voices quaver; coached against scratching themselves and twisting their handkerchiefs, they take refuge in a desperate immobility, and the customer at his home TV out fit is bound to share their tension.

The other great worrier is the smalltime professional, who hopes that his act with an acrobatic fox terrier will give him about the same Broadway status as South Pacific but who is afraid the dog is going to muff their great chance.

The gauche performers are those who are not at all worried how they look and sound but who ought to be.

The brassy — who represent about half of television — are case-hardened mid-Manhattan personalities in various stages of repair. Tough, selfassured, they are thoroughly at ease in the half-world atmosphere they create by one’s fireside.

“Do you know what a rare track is? A rare track is where windows clean people.” (Screams, hysteria, guffaws; studio audience pummel one another in delight.)

In its present state, TV tries to cram the greatest possible number of acts into a half-hour show, lest the audience become bored by seeing too much of any one thing. The result is a hectic, lickety—split succession of offerings. The customer in his own home is given no time for accommodating himself to TV’s fantastic changes of pace and mood.

Just as he is trying to size up the effect of a cellist, the musician is hustled off, the master of ceremonies bounces out with a new old-joke, and three men in lights emerge from the gray curtains on unicycles. A minute and a half of brisk wheeling ends, and a ballet offering begins, only to be cut short by the appearance of a male quartet, dressed as filling station attendants, to sing an interminable commercial. A famous ball player is introduced, takes a bow, and bolts. Three genuine midgets in evening dress — two men and a woman— dance a lilting waltz, and the woman then waltzes with a full-size man so that the audience can see that she really is a midget and not merely one of those little figures on the TV screen. At this point, an expert demonstrates some extraordinary trick shots on a pool table. The show winds up with a comedy bagpipe act, a commercial, grins and applause for himself by the master of ceremonies, and a final commercial.

In its great haste, TV today is much like the early Hollywood “features” in which the principals met, wooed, married, misunderstood, and reunited — all in about twenty minutes. On this basis, TV is eating up scripts and performers so rapidly that any old turn — by decree of the master of ceremonies — looks like a lifesaver to its producers. This is true of filler intervals as well as variety shows.

In less than fifteen minutes one evening, a single station offered a British travelogue, a vocalist, and part of a Navy documentary of the assault on Okinawa.