An American Looks at British Television

IT IS difficult to persuade the English that their television is superior to ours in America. Conscious as they now are of their nation’s decline in power and of the dominance of the United States not only in world affairs but industrially and technologically, they automatically credit us with a cultural accomplishment appropriate to our national energies. Especially in a field like television, which is big industry in our country, they assume that we put out the better product. Should an American visitor undertake to tell them that this is not the case and that British TV is well in advance of that of the United States, they respond as they would to an obviously undeserved compliment.

But at least for one viewer British television has much to teach us even in purely technical terms. American TV is no doubt more mobile than that of Britain — this was the single score on which, for example, the screening of the Churchill funeral failed to match the filming of Kennedy’s funeral. Certainly they have fewer channels, if that is to be counted against them — three are the most in any city, even London. And I can suppose that our coverage of world news is wider, if not more instructive, than theirs. Too, one can’t deny that British TV breaks down with a frequency we in America wouldn’t happily tolerate; one gets used to being told that the fault on the screen or in the sound is not a defect of one’s set but of the system and will be adjusted in a moment or two. Still, the actual picture the British receive is incalculably better than ours, which makes for a superiority of no small importance.

The reason for the difference between the two kinds of picture, the British and ours, has been explained to me several times, but I lack the technical knowledge to understand it; it has to do with the different number of lines per inch in the British process of reproduction from that which we employ in this country. The gain in viewing ease and pleasure is enormous; the British cannot themselves be aware of the visual comfort they enjoy simply because of the brightness on their screens. To watch British TV is to enter a world of light as compared with the shadowy, murky world of our own television screens. Every image is clear and sharp. There is none of the merging of grays which makes extended viewing of television in America so wearing on the eye and spirit.

But in addition to the physical quality of the British picture, there is its distinction as photography, also immeasurably better than ours. Whereas in America, TV photography alternates between dreary conventionality and equally dreary artiness, British television would seem to have available to it an endless inventiveness, but with none of the selfconsciousness that characterizes attempts at variety in our own photography. For instance, one watches the British telecast of a symphony concert, the way in which the camera can at one moment particularize with exquisite precision the hands of this instrumentalist, the face of another, and at the next moment capture all the tension and impact of the orchestra as a whole and of the public occasion, and one can only be confounded that a nation which still seems incapable of mastering the intricacies of central heating should be this expert in the management of such a complex mechanics.

The whole television industry is of course differently set up in Britain than it is here. In fact, in England it isn’t an industry at all, certainly not in the sense of being designed for private profit. The British Broadcasting Company is a governmentestablished but not altogether government-run corporation. Until recently it earned no revenue except from a tax on privately owned sets. In addition to BBC’s two main channels, BBC 1 and BBC 2, the government licenses a system of commercial stations run for profit, on which an advertiser can buy time, but under much more stringent control by government strictures than is the case of American broadcasters under the pallid purview of the FCC.

To buy time on British commercial television does not imply that the advertiser has bought a program. Not only are all commercials multiple

— there can be as many as seven or eight advertisers supporting a single half-hour show, each of them permitted his very brief promotion of his product, thirty seconds or less —but no sponsor can in any way dictate or even influence the nature of the program he helps pay for. As in the case of noncommercial British TV, the programs are entirely within the jurisdiction of the government-employed producers, who in turn answer to various governmentappointed supervisory commissions.

Also, at least as compared with American television, there is virtually no intrusion of advertising into the programs themselves. The quality of British commercials may have no more to recommend it than ours in America — TV advertising in Britain is almost as noisy, and surely it is as inane as ours — but British commercial TV is protected against the kind of steady punctuation of advertising we endure in this country. Although a program on any of the British channels may be interrupted for a variety of reasons which seem illegitimate to an American viewer —an hour-and-a-half film, for instance, will be presented in two installments on the same night, with an entirely different program sandwiched between the two halves — the incessant interruption of a program for two-minute assaults on behalf of a new floor wax or laundry detergent is unheard of. And this of course means that even on their commercial TV a play need not be devised to provide a series of minor climaxes, many of them false, as ours are in America.

Yet, finally it is neither the physical superiority of the British picture nor the absence of our kind of bombardment of advertising but the nature of the programs themselves that gives British TV its distinction. In New York I have nine channels from which to choose a program I may want to watch, and most times I can find nothing. In London, with a choice among three, there was often an embarrassment of riches. Two years ago, when I lived for a year in Oxford, only BBC 1 was available on my set unless I undertook to install a special aerial. I never found this necessary. Although in prospect the idea of being limited to a single station had suggested a substantial curtailment of possibility, it turned out to be only a relief not to twirl the dials from station to station, as I do at home, in the hope of finding something I could bear to look at. The one station provided all the entertainment I required.

IT IS a fundamental British assumption that television is a leisure-time occupation, not a way of life. Apart from an occasional hour or two of daytime programs designed for children who are for some reason out of school, or perhaps a program on nutrition or some other aspect of health, British television doesn’t actually begin until late afternoon. There is no British TV aimed at the bored housewife: no soap operas, no shopping quizzes, no sentimental diversions such as are supposed in America to get a woman through the tedium of her domestic routine.

Not only does British television begin late, it stops early — between eleven and midnight —and is no respecter of the hour, the half, and the quarter hour. If a program runs thirteen minutes or seventeen minutes, then very well: it runs thirteen or seventeen minutes; it is not tailored to the demands of the advertiser who insists on the exactly appropriate moment for his blast. Indeed, it is a regular happening on BBC that a program runs later than scheduled in the papers. Far from this constituting a national emergency, it is taken to be part of the day’s business, and BBC 1 or 2, whichever has finished first, will simply announce that the current program on the other station is taking a bit longer than was expected so they will play some music until they come abreast of each other, in case the viewer had it in mind to switch channels.

Second, and more significant, is the preponderance in any day’s schedule of documentary or educational features over other kinds of programs. Apart from soap operas, there is no category of American TV entertainment which is not covered by the BBC: drama, domestic comedy, adventure, news commentary, variety shows, sports reporting, classical and popular music, special features for children. It is the proportioning of the day’s programs between those that are meant to enlighten as well as entertain and those intended merely as diversion that is markedly different. There is no special educational TV in Britain as we know it in the United States. The same stations that have the amusement of the public in their keeping have the responsibility for television as a medium of instruction. It is the way in which this duty is interpreted and discharged that makes British television a model we in this country might study.

The idea that something which is instructive can also be pleasurable would seem to be alien to the American national character. We have only to address ourselves to “culture,” by which we mean anything superior to the occupations of the ordinary citizen, to become pious and portentous. In fact, the basic assumption of our popular media, among which television is of course the most widely distributed, is that education is a force not for unifying but for dividing the population. Although in America the people who run television have themselves had “superior” educations, the very advantage which earns them their jobs becomes a disqualification in terms of meeting the needs of a wide audience. Contempt for the general public is built into employment in the American media of mass communication and soon translates itself into self-contempt —to work for television, in particular, implies that one has turned one’s back on the values most prized by education. One has become, if not a huckster oneself, then his henchman. This is the price which the profession of television in America pays for having been born in the service of advertising.

In Britain, too, television is manned with men and women who have had first-rate educations. But if—which I doubt—they suffer from selfcontempt because of their choice of profession, certainly it doesn’t show in their public stance. In part, the difference is perhaps explained by the fact that in working for the BBC they work for an important government organization, but I think there is another, deeper source of their self-respect. Not only is there a constant and powerful current of sympathy between the best-educated classes of Britain as demonstrated by the regular appearance on British television of the country’s most gifted and serious artists and scholars — philosophers, theologians, historians, poets, critics, scientists. But television also inherits some of the responsibility of the older privileged class in English society, and along with the responsibility, a commensurate dignity. Curiously enough, in class-structured Britain as opposed to democratic America, television is a force for minimizing the alienation of class from class. It binds together the citizenry instead of separating it into those that give (or sell) and those that receive (or buy). In that most democratic of media, television, the greatest force for aesthetic as well as social good is the BBC’s decent regard for the public it addresses. Because it respects its audience it can respect itself.

PARTICULARLY in its political reporting British television accomplishes something of which American television scarcely has any imagination: the BBC can manage to make events that are taking place on the other side of the globe seem of immediate personal concern to someone seated in front of his set in some small English village. This is not a matter of better coverage than we offer in America; our American reporters probably canvass the territory more thoroughly than their British colleagues do. The difference is a matter of approach and tone.

Perhaps because Britain was once such a farflung empire and is still the center of a far-flung commonwealth, countries which seem remote to an American seem somehow to be directly connected with the life of England. Information about Gibraltar or Aden, the Congo or Malaya is presented not so much in the tone of bringing distant news as in the spirit of “reporting home.” On the surface, this sense of familiarity with the world which is communicated in British foreign newscasts is contradicted by the evidence on English TV of Britain’s persisting insularity. Certainly British television, concerned as it is on a national level with local events which in the United States would be reported only on local stations, is a constant reminder of how tiny a country England actually is. But this seeming contradiction is resolved by the intimacy that runs through all of British TV, the sense it conveys of direct personal connection between station and viewer. Whether a program is dealing with a political problem in Nigeria or with the latest decision in Parliament, it is reported on the air as if it were an immediate family matter.

For the American viewer, in fact, this quality of intimacy is among the chief charms of British TV; the English themselves are not conscious of it. It seems never to occur to them that in American broadcasting, intimacy is an aspect only of vulgarity, its style borrowed from the forced rapport between performer and patron in a nightclub. For instance, on the political front, nothing could be more striking than the contrast between our presidential news conference, useless and sterile as it is formal, and BBC’s stand on the steps of 10 Downing Street, waiting for the Prime Minister to appear so that a microphone can be thrust in his face and he can be plied with awkward questions. Measured by American standards the British procedure may seem undignified, even rude, but actually it is neither. It simply describes the close tie that the English electorate still feels with its government even while it bitterly complains of the chasm which increasingly divides the ordinary citizen from Whitehall.

But then, the English and the Americans have very different ideas of what constitutes rudeness, especially in public life. A dramatic demonstration is the different way in which the two countries debate public issues. In England an official concerned in some matter of national interest will be put on the screen and publicly grilled by a BBC interviewer in a manner and degree that would be unthinkable in our country. I still recall, for example, from the early days of my first stay in England, a program about housing conditions in which a local official — I think it was in Birmingham — was being questioned about rot in the foundations or framework of houses sold in his district. (Who in American television takes a domestic matter of this kind seriously?) Two interviewers, not one, were (as I felt it) badgering this man. The information they had accumulated with which to indict him in the public eye and the relentlessness with which they pressed him would have done credit to Perry Mason. But at the end of the session, when an American in similar circumstances would have been steaming with anger, the person at whom this attack had been directed smiled happily at his interrogators and they all thanked each other with the greatest courtesy for the pleasure of the interview.

More recently, in airing a case that has been agitating the British public —it involved what appeared to be the brutal caning of boys in a state corrective school —the BBC gathered together on the screen not merely the headmaster of the school and the teacher who had brought his disciplinary fervor to public notice but also the chairman of the school’s board of governors and the head of the association of headmasters of schools in the same category. Here, that is, the interviewer had to pick his way among a whole group of people whose careers might hang on the public assessment of their probity.

In this program what was most striking to the American viewer was the interviewer’s obvious partisanship, his refusal to take that much-honored American role of “objectivity.” The BBC interviewer, far from thinking of himself as the moderator in a well-mannered debate, made it entirely plain that he believed the headmaster guilty of inflicting severe corporal punishment. While he saw it as his job to give the defendants their full say, he was determined to spare them no iota of the public censure he thought they deserved. I know no one on American television who could have conducted himself with such severe justness, nor can I conceive of an American station undertaking this kind of investigation as part of its public duty.

OBVIOUSLY the principle of giving the public as much information as possible in controversial areas, and even opinions which they can take or refuse, is not always easy to apply. On the vexing contemporary problem of drugs, for example, the BBC appears to be having considerable trouble deciding how it should proceed and whether, in fact, it will diminish or only increase the attraction of drugtaking among the young by airing the subject. Certainly a program on the American LSD situation that was recently shown by the BBC was an ambiguous affair; borrowing our stance of “scientific objectivity” it managed in the long run to communicate what looked like a substantial tolerance of the LSD phenomenon. For the most part, however, British television reveals a combination of boldness and sound judgment in its approach to charged subjects such as we in America have not yet begun to approximate. With no advertiser to worry about the proprieties and to act as public censor, British TV has managed to bring homosexuality, abortion, adultery, not to mention atheism, full into the domain of public discussion, and this despite government ownership, and, paradoxically enough, the continuation of government censorship in the theater.

The standard of propriety in British television would seem to be that of taste as defined by people who are no less responsible than enlightened. The processes of life — and this includes deviations from a proposed norm of sexual conduct — are thus not taboo. Compared with the simple unsensational frankness with which sexual subjects are treated on British television, the American public approach to sex is worse than puritanical, it is prurient. We may pepper our novels with language and scenes that would still be impermissible in British publishing. But we have yet to treat even the matter of human reproduction, let alone sexual aberrancy, with the grave straightforwardness that is taken for granted by British TV.

And in dealing with sexual subjects, too, we find the same human directness that characterizes the approach of the BBC to politics and other public events. If the theme of homosexuality is being discussed on British television, it is not assigned to white-coated gentlemen who obscure the subject in mystifying technical language. A few months ago, for example, there was a program called Consenting Adults about male homosexuality; it consisted of interviews with a hairdresser, a doctor, a clerk in a small town, and a pair of aging male lovers, and its purpose was to investigate how the social and emotional lives of these individuals — and it is worth noting that all of them presented their faces to the public — had been affected by their sexual preference.

If such a series of interviews could have been offered on American TV, which of course it could not, it is impossible to suppose that it would not have been made to point a clear moral, or moralistic, lesson. On BBC there was no lesson to be drawn other than that homosexuals are human beings like everyone else, some happy in their sexual situation, others, notably those whose residence or occupation makes for less tolerance in the community, not. The hairdresser could say, simply, that he had no desire to be cured of his deviance. The doctor was aware of no professional hindrance because of his sexual choice and even enumerated its advantages as he saw them. The two men who had lived together for twenty-eight years were wistful in their homosexual marriage, wished they had been born later than they were, when the world had become kinder to sexual deviants. That public opinion was nevertheless being influenced by the program was unmistakable. There could not have been more valuable ammunition on the side of reform of the old retrograde laws governing homosexual offenses.

Again, in other words, the American visitor is returned to the respect for the public that characterizes British TV, its assumption that it addresses itself to an adult population worthy of the best it can put on the screen and capable of making its own grave discriminations between right and wrong. That there is yellow journalism in Britain goes without saying; one has only to remember the flagrantly publicized Profumo case. But British television has nothing in common with the sensational newspapers of Britain, though it makes its appeal to an even larger audience. If the sensational press of England represents the seamy side of English life, its television represents its civilized humanity continuing into an era of mass communications.

But this sounds abstract, whereas in fact the genius of British TV is its concreteness. Whoever comes to England from America is bound to be struck by the actuality of one’s most transitory encounters in shops, buses, on the street. The same quality pervades British TV; one is not aware of how abstract American television is until one contrasts it with that of Britain. The difference was first impressed upon me when I watched a sort of English counterpart to our American “man in the street” programs, in which some dozen men and women in all walks of life, ranging from a shop clerk to a high church dignitary, were speaking on their relations with their fathers. In this telecast, the interviewer never himself appeared in the program, not even as a voice: the camera simply moved from person to person in his or her own home, doubling back on itself from time to time for a second or third opportunity to record a previous speaker. (It is a technique regularly employed in English TV interviewing, and enormously satisfactory.)

The persons who were talking could not have been more relaxed, dignified, or straightforward. Disparate as they were in class and education, they were joined in a common seriousness before a serious subject. No one giggled or clowned; no one put on a public front or shirked the job of probing his actual feelings about his father: had he loved or disliked him, and why. This was early in my London stay, and I had almost forgotten my earlier high regard for British TV: I didn’t know whether to be more incredulous of the beauty of the filming of these absorbed faces or of the fineness of spirit revealed in this public act of introspection. But soon I came once more to take performances like this for granted, much as the English themselves do — until I recalled what such a program would be like in America. Americans are not allowed to have actual faces, actual lives, actual problems on American television. Their poses have been contrived for them in the imagination of a culture which has lost its pride in its own diverse humanity.

EVERYWHERE one goes in England one hears, of course, of its escalating Americanization. Does this mean that British television, too, will soon follow our dehumanizing example and exchange its honesty and actuality for our sensational contrivances? Unfortunately there are signs of this possibility, especially on commercial television, which imports a great many American films and screen series. Permissive as British TV is in point of sexual truth — recently, when there was a program on newborn babies, the health of the genitals of infants was not only openly discussed, these forbidden organs were fully exposed to the camera — there is one thing it still (happily) frowns upon: exposures oF violence. Thus, American gangster films cede place to relatively moderate crime stories like Perry Mason. And imports like Bewitched or the Van Dyke Show take precedence in popular favor over noisier, uglier series that have high ratings in the United States.

Still, stories of violent action and crime are percolating into British TV, and if they come to substitute in the public taste for long-popular English police programs like Z Cars, it is bound to indicate more than a passing preference; it will be evidence of a significant change in the character of English society. For between Z Cars or even Softly, Softly, the program which developed out of it, and the usual American gangster story the distinction is of a most fundamental cultural kind: these British “crime stories” are stories in which crime is something to be thought about in human and social terms, not acted out in passion.

I do not mean to imply that all of British storywriting for the TV screen has the sweet appeal of Z Cars or of Dr. Findlay’s Case Book, the story of a pair of doctors in a small Scottish town, another of my favorites. Lucky Jim, for instance, although based on Kingsley Amis’ very amusing novel, is nothing like so sharp and witty as the book. And an unfortunate amount of the humor in other light British programs tends to center around the bathroom or in other ways yield to underdeveloped notions of what constitutes good clean fun. Too, when British television goes in for patently serious drama, it unhappily seems to patronize the same psychiatric clinic that supplies American television with the grim materials of its fashionable “high art.” But vulgarity or pretentiousness is still the exception rather than the rule of writing for British television: the straws in the wind of Americanization are still reassuringly few.

pROBABLY the most fascinating achievement of British TV drama so far in its history was last year’s serialization of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, than which it may at first seem hard to imagine a less likely item for general consumption in present-day England. But no doubt it is precisely as a document of social change that this series made its stupendous hit with the British public of all classes. Its popular appeal was so great, indeed, that each installment was shown on two different nights of the week so that no one would miss it. And simultaneous with its showing, the libraries were besieged with readers demanding the works of Galsworthy. Everywhere I went in England the latest Forsyte episode was the topic of talk, as how could it not be — the series manifestly represented a new high in the adaptation of fiction to film. Not only was it beautifully acted and spoken, and mounted with the most affectionate attention to social detail; it re-created the recent social past with no slightest taint of the sly condescension with which we in America approach any period which has failed to achieve the benefits of modernity.

I have watched other examples of the skill of the BBC in filming well-known literary works: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Scott’s Kenilworth, Henry James’s Washington Square, the stories of Kipling, Conan Doyle, Wodehouse. (Currently, they are doing a series of D. H. Lawrence dramatizations.) These productions have all of them ranged from estimable to excellent — I have seen no failures, and no instance of pretentiousness in the face of Literature. If The Forsyte Saga was a singular achievement in bringing new life to an almost forgotten book, there is no reason to think of it as an isolated success in the translation of fiction to the screen. It is in splendid company.

Yet finally, remarkable as these BBC films are, it is not on them that one forms one’s estimate of British television. They are not the staple of English TV, and one must base one’s judgment of the medium on the hour-to-hour quality of British television production rather than on these special offerings. If I were asked, then, what I most enjoy in British TV or what I most enjoy about British TV, I would be inevitably returned to its reality, to its close connection with actual life — whether by life we mean life as it is conveyed in literature, or life as it presents itself to the inquisitive eye of the professional reporter, or life as it is revealed in its big or little, public or private occupations and problems. A medium which in America is dedicated to evading reality is in England a celebration of its endless range and possibility.

And also — which is perhaps most important — of its immediacy. We in America are in the habit of thinking that we have more social, cultural, and human immediacy, because we have more activity, than the other countries of the West. Actually, just the opposite is so. The more we spin, the more of reality we cast off by our excessive motion —witness the way we use the mechanics of television as a means of increasing our distance from the actual material that is supposedly being brought us. When, for example, the new Philharmonic Hall in New York’s Lincoln Center was opened a few years ago, the occasion was reported on television. The report consisted in showing us the building itself as dramatically as possible, in giving us glimpses of the celebrities as they arrived for the big event, in broadcasting part (as I recall) of the musical performance. Between times, since nothing in American TV is as forbidden as an empty or silent screen, there were a series of ridiculous interviews with “personalities”

— with Jacqueline Kennedy, with the conductor Leonard Bernstein, even with Aline Saarinen, the widow of the building’s architect. The net result of all this scurrying and contrivance was that far from feeling that he was participating in the occasion, the observer at home in front of his TV set felt that life

— big, thrilling Life with a capital L — was happening somewhere where he was not and perhaps never could be. The experience of an opening concert in New York’s handsome new hall was not one in which he had shared, so much as one from which he now knew how fully he had been excluded.

While I was in London the BBC tried its first live opera telecast from Covent Garden, Traviata. Here, too, one was shown the handsome house, the audience filing in for the performance, the orchestra members taking their place in the pit. But no individual in the audience was isolated for notice, and no one was interviewed. More important, the announcer was repeatedly shown sitting in his box with his notes and microphone before him; there was no attempt to deceive the viewer that he was himself present in the theater when in fact he knew he was not. And this honesty had the salutary, and expectable, effect of making the home viewer feel quite as worthy as those in the theater; for, after all, all this trouble of putting a reporter and wires and microphones and cameras in Covent Garden had been gone to just for him. This, however, was not the only way in which the BBC stayed with the truth of the medium and thus increased the directness of the experience for the viewer: at the first intermission the announcer said that now most of the audience was going to the Crush Bar for a drink; perhaps the viewer was thirsty too, and so there would be a two-minute break while he got a drink for himself in his own home. “But you don’t have to queue for it. I imagine you can just reach for your drink.”

Condescension? Anything but: I found myself delighted by this confirmation of my own actual domestic existence. Once again the BBC was demonstrating its respect for reality and its wonderfully simple and direct communication with the real people who make up its vast nameless public.