On Television
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff The Private Image Most of what one reads about television is of two kinds. There is, first, the sour disdain of the culturally enfranchised. (It is interesting...
...In this commercial an ordinary germ, whose deathless lines are recited by a well-known t? personality, says: "Lots of my relatives are in your mouth and throat right now...
...A somewhat more sophisticated commercial, described in the November issue of Television, is that of Band-Aid...
...Overnight Minow rose from obscurity to national prominence on the strength of one speech containing one dramatic phrase and a general indictment of everything on television...
...Secondly, even if they are, they may well be avoiding much of the cultural fare because it is not good enough...
...but this ritualistic, Goldwaterish cant about "free" research and initiative and the use of the talismanic word "creative" are wearisome indeed...
...This is the way of 'free' research—the kind that encourages creative initiative...
...On the tyranny of ratings: "They've had certain fallacies . . . the job is to improve them . . . they're still the best measure we've got...
...But the most interesting part of Television is a section called "Playback" where industry people sound off...
...Not a word about social responsibility (except to scoff at TV's critics), not a word about art, not even the faintest hint of ironic awareness that TV'S executives are the caretakers of the biggest cultural junkyard in the history of mankind...
...Around ABC, Moore is regarded as "a high-type individual with brains, ability, straightline thinking—the logic required to sort out what's important and what isn't...
...The guess becomes fact...
...It was—wouldn't you know—The Beverly Hillbillies...
...But no, they are solemn as bankers...
...What hope can there be for the English language when the people who control it at its wellspring are contaminating it...
...And looking at the number of companies headed by former salesmen, you get the idea that selling is still a pretty good route up...
...This is, of course, a questionbegging statement...
...apparently, even his ingenuity was taxed by the necessity to find new ways of saying No, No, No...
...This will hardly come as news to anyone, but to be confronted with the grim reality page after page is a little disheartening...
...SOME interesting sidelights are also provided by a portrait of Tom Moore, the new head of ABC-TV, in Television's October issue...
...But we do have our troubles, and we survive 'cause we're tough...
...In the imperial age of television, everyone—including the most benighted prairie dweller—is an authority on Trendex and Nielsen...
...Then ABC-TV began to slip, and Treyz went out...
...And this awareness of ratings tends to strengthen their stranglehold...
...But getting back to my original point, there is yet a third kind of TV literature—the trade magazine...
...There is a sneering piece by Robert Samoff, chairman of the board at NBC, in which he seizes jubilantly on recent research findings to slap down TV'S critics...
...If they're so rich, why aren't they smarter...
...I do not pretend to know the trade aspects of the issue —should ad agencies do research alone or in concert with networks...
...He was, in fact, vice-president in charge of public relations at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, the cemetery (forgive the crudeness) which achieved a grotesque immortality in Evelyn Waugh's famous novel...
...The hush was so intense I assumed there was a momentous event on the screen, perhaps Khrushchev taking a worldwide audience on a tour of the Kremlin...
...First, nobody really knows that "light viewers" are in actual fact discriminating or better educated...
...According to The People Look at Television, a book by Gary Steiner, light viewers (presumably more discriminating, better educated, less addicted types) actually devote a smaller proportion of their TV time to information and uplift programs than the heavy viewers...
...That's where we do our best dirty work —like causing bad breath...
...After all this antisyntax folksiness, the voice stops, and one hears a sepulchral voice in the distance intoning "Lister . . . renenenene stops me dead in my tracks...
...Here he is swinging from both sides of the plate on a variety of issues: On the FCC: "Washington has made us examine ourselves . . . [but] the responsibility for what ends up on the screen must stay with the station...
...In videoland, everyone loves a winner...
...Television reads infinitely more like a trade publication in advertising than the vehicle of what is currently the most powerful and pervasive of the arts...
...Then there is that immense realm of TV gossip in newspapers and magazines, an implausible mixture of Hollywood scandal (temper and temperament in the television studios, who is making it with whom) and the latest ratings...
...There is a regular feature in Television called "Focus on Commercials," in which particularly ingenious commercials are described admiringly...
...Like the advertising business it so faithfully mimics, Television plays its part in debasing the language...
...What I am waiting impatiently to read in a later issue is an account of the new naturalistic mode of TV commercials, the Actors Studio type, in which unrelievcdly plain Janes and Joes mumble, Brando style, about their headaches and abdominal cramps and how ***** enabled them to carry on in the local cookie sale...
...Hurry up the healing...
...is really three little girls—the face of one, the legs of another, the hair of a third...
...Sarnoff's argument is typical of the way the industry attacks anyone who dares criticize its philosophy of "cultural democracy...
...His brightly-lighted tenure as FCC chairman may not have gotten him his present job as executive vice-president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., but neither did it serve to arrest his progress toward the executive suite...
...Air vents over the pad let the healing air through...
...It is interesting that Paul Goodman abandoned his TV commentary in the New Republic...
...And the rich, creamy voice is that of Alexander Scourby, the distinguished actor, who has such Shakespearean lines as: "Kiss it with a Band-Aid sheer strip...
...t? executive, in a criticism of "joint research activities," for example, wrote in the June issue: "The creative advances in research practice, to my mind, will be achieved by individual practitioners...
...A good case in point was a nasty editorial smear of Newton Minow in Television's November issue: "The trick of using television baiting as a publicity device may not have been invented, but it certainly was perfected by Newton N. Minow...
...On advertiser interference with programming: Advertiser and agency influence "should extend to the degree that program content might be in conflict with their policies," but final decisions should rest with the network...
...Instead of those appallingly cheerful, unspeakably handsome models, the naturalistic commercials now come up with walking delegates from the lower depths...
...Far less flamboyant than his predecessor, what Moore obviously has in great abundance is a positive genius for equivocation...
...A few weeks ago, I flew into Raleigh, North Carolina, and there at the airport a group of people were gathered in a tight circle around a TV set...
...In the palmy days of Hollywood, nobody outside the industry paid any attention to "grosses...
...What kind of man is his successor...
...But there is a Parkinson's Law at work even in the hypertensive TV business...
...They have a greater awareness of what TV has to offer, they take advantage of it, and they find that, generally speaking, it serves them well...
...The discussion of this commercial concludes on a deadpan note: "Listerine has no further humor campaign planned beyond this one...
...With respect to the latter, television is like baseball and horse racing: fascinated with who is on top...
...Moore, though, was not exactly a salesman...
...Such are the ways of progress...
...When TV people do things, you can be sure they do them big...
...Intramurally, TV people feel less need to make pious protestations than when addressing the public...
...When they decide to get out from under a stereotype, they clutch frenziedly at the anti-stereotype...
...This is in the new realistic mode of TV commercials, where the fun mystique of American life achieves new heights...
...in which a small girl is seen running on the beach...
...They could at least be entertained by some of the absurdities of their business...
...The Loved One...
...The primer on how to become a president of your company is full of musts," the article on Moore explains...
...Any shackling of research entrepreneurs will turn back the clock...
...Moore succeeded the infamous Oliver Treyz, who for a while parlayed ABC-TV to the top through brash merchandising and a heavy dose of violence, making that channel look, as one observer remarked, like a hospital for the criminally insane...
...Then it describes "sales with a smile...
...For we learn that this spontaneous, innocent little scene required a four day "filming safari" to Fire Island, and that the little tyke (deceitful wretch...
...As a result, Television—a handsome, glossy magazine which looks a little like Show—is a rather frightening demonstration of the fact that t? is a business first, foremost and always, and that social and artistic obligations are irrelevant...
...It's the truly antiseptic mouthwash that kills germs on contact by millions...
...Germs can be funny," the June issue declares...
...Thus, in a very real sense," Sarnoff crowed, "the heavy viewers appear to be the true television sophisticates...
...One of Moore's first official acts was to dump Naked City, the channel's big prestige program, because it was being clobbered by NBC'S Eleventh Hour...
...But there is one thing us germs are deathly afraid of...
Vol. 46 • November 1963 • No. 24
