Credit and Debt (1959)

TV Review from the January 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is television worth while? An appalling question, this; but it happens to be the important one. There have always been the disapproving few who would permit it only for education in gloomy authoritarian utopias. Warmly, one would reply that entertainment and fun should be part of life as well.

The awful fact is, however, that the small screen lives and is memorable mainly in its rare instructive moments. Steele of the Spectator told his readers that when the paper was dull there was always a purpose in it; on the TV, when the programmes are dull (which is most of the time) there is never a purpose in them at all.

All this is brought to mind by a half-hour which was purposefully educational, and single-handed—certainly unaided in the last four weeks—showed the television to be worth while after all. This was Dr. Bronowski’s New Horizons account of atoms and energy. Wonderful.

But what’s even more wonderful is the thought of this coming into a quarter of a million homes. The casual question here and there, next day, discovers several who were “going to turn it off” and were still drinking-in at the end. The adversaries of television should consider this. So, too, should all the snobs and ignoramuses who like to think the working class can understand nothing. Would anyone have conceived, only a short space of years ago, of the quantum theory being expounded to council-house tenants

That is the credit side. There are debits innumerable, of course. What is more, fresh ones keep appearing. The newest and worst horror is Keep it in the Family: the heart turns as heavy as lead to see respectable suburban families being wildly acclaimed and sent home with refrigerators because between five of them they know the names of five poets or six rivers.

The interesting thing, however, is that the producers, compères and general overseers in the rubbish factory from which all this comes belong without exception to what are considered the educated layers. University men preside in panel games which are low, vulgar and humiliating; while in the commercials public-school chaps and men known to public life for their forthright integrity give specious eulogies of advertisers' wares.

The obvious moral is that even the educated will do anything for money. But that leaves one important question unanswered. This is also the group from which all the sneers at working-class “ignorance” come. Granted, the dog Prolus may look unattractive with televisual tin-cans on his tail—but who keeps tying them on?

Robert Barltrop