On Television
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff An Excess of Virtue Educational television is like the affluent society: You yearn for it, but when it arrives you come to regard it with sullen discontent....
...In its determination to avoid the sins of commercial TV, educational television has fallen into egregious errors of its own...
...Channel 13's Court of Reason gets rid of that kind of intellectual barbarism...
...That was triumph indeed...
...Yet with all this working for the program, it was tiresome...
...towering in his pomposity, he spoke in unwieldy clots of jargon...
...No matter what they said, or withheld, this was stunning drama...
...there were casual forays into related fields...
...When he was not sounding off about the contributions of immigrants to American society, another man, dressed in shirtsleeves like a bartender in a western, sat at a piano and sang old songs...
...You leave the studio feeling like a PhD candidate after his orals...
...And if we are going to subsidize the life of the mind, we ought to think of helping magazines, which, by and large, do a much better job...
...The experience called into question the unexamined piety that television is— or can be—an important medium for the transmission of ideas...
...Fine, except that the program was almost impossible to follow...
...I am alluding, of course, to the discussion programs, an area in which educational t? allegedly can do a better job than its commercial rivals...
...What I am getting at is that television is not so much a place for high-level discussion as for the dramatization of attitudes...
...The other was a transplanted Northerner, big, fleshy and expansive-looking, who intoned racist cliches in a hearty way, as if he were preaching some nice, wholesome, forward-looking philosophy...
...What more could one ask...
...I am as affronted as the next fellow by Susskind's mixture of middlebrow sanctimoniousness (he is the Uriah Heep of t?) and Broadway cynicism...
...The conclusion that I reluctantly came to is that t? is all wrong as an intellectual forum, and that when it comes to handling issues and ideas, the middlebrows and hucksters have a more realistic appreciation of its possibilities...
...For many New Yorkers...
...The symposiasts were Michael Yudkin and Robert Jastrow, two bright, attractive scientists...
...Ideas never collide...
...Each had the opportunity to develop his ideas systematically...
...The other, an attorney, was a parody of the parvenu professional...
...At the risk of excommunication, I am prepared to argue that David Susskind does this better...
...The air was full of fugitive allusions...
...Anyone who has participated in a TV discussion program knows the pitfalls of the commercial variety...
...One was the Mayor of Albany, a pinch-faced, spare-looking man with generations of Calvinist repression stamped on his face...
...Somewhat implausibly, the trouble is an excess of virtue...
...You know they are there—the thought is vaguely reassuring—and you mean to take full advantage of them...
...I do not want to slight some magnificent things that have appeared on Channel 13—the Casals Master Class and Playwrights at Work, for examples...
...To put it plainly, this was material to read—slowly and ruminatively—not to listen to...
...If only you had a chance to deal with those questions all over again, would you tell them...
...But he brings to the discussion program—as organizer, not as moderator—a sense of drama that the more intellectual architects of educational TV might well emulate...
...One of the Negroes— calm, wise, confident—typified all that is best in the integrationist movement...
...Assisting him on the program I watched were Charles Frankel, another Columbia professor, and Paul Weiss of the Rockefeller Institute...
...Simply to see the two pairs maintaining a frail bridge of politeness was a rare experience...
...The director and producer genuflect to ideas—they are oh-so-respectful—but their hearts are not in it...
...Court of Reason was fine when either Yudkin or lastrow made his case...
...And given the fact that most academic people who provide the clientele of Channel 13 are visually and not aurally oriented, I suspect that my experience was not untypical...
...I watched a program called Turn of the Century, in which the particular episode, called "The Melting Pot," was a blend of commentary about immigration (full of all the received attitudes) and turn-of-the-century songs...
...They constituted an arresting panorama of social attitudes and behavior...
...It had the bad decor of a Gay Nineties sketch—a man with a Jerry Colonna mustache, corny dialogue, and a tinkling piano...
...But at this juncture educational television has neither forged its own idiom nor learned to use the commercial vocabulary with any flair or imagination...
...The songs were pleasant enough, and they did have a turnof-the-century flavor, but "The Melting Pot" was neither good social history nor sprightly entertainment...
...They are forever looking for an intellectual gimmick...
...There are two symposiasts, each of whom has a substantial period of time to present his case...
...When it is determined to be serious—really serious—it succeeds only in being dull...
...With matters of any intellectual density, the aural medium is singularly unsatisfactory, and as matters now stand the visual dimension is hardly exploited...
...Channel 13 is to be commended for trying, but we ought not to expect too much intellectual nutriment from television...
...When I first tuned in, I thought it was a situation comedy...
...The Court of Reason— the Aristotelian Board, so to speak —consists not of t? personalities worried about their Trendex rating but solid men of academia...
...Finally, the Rotarian-type segregationist reached over and extended his hand to the Negro attorney...
...The trouble with Court of Reason is that it is, in a sense, too reasonable...
...The white racists were highly unsavory, but in contrasting ways...
...His facile expertise is a chronic vexation...
...There is no dramatic polarity...
...The Colonna type was supposed to be an immigrant who was going to present the case for unrestricted immigration before a Congressional committee...
...You never really get a chance to warm up...
...The subject was C. P. Snow's thesis of the two cultures...
...I suspect, Channel 13 is much like the city's museums and concert halls...
...It was like attending a good lecture, but no better...
...Or they paw you intellectually in the nope tnat you win maice some outlandish statement that will provoke your fellow discussants...
...Having sampled Channel 13's wares, I am delighted that it exists, but I cannot help wishing that it were better...
...Perhaps the best example of this was a program last fall during the crisis in Albany, Georgia...
...When after many false starts and divagations you find yourself for the first time intellectually engaged, it is time for a station break or a commercial...
...This disgruntled reflection is occasioned by a massive dose of educational TV I recently administered to myself...
...And there was a memorable moment when, the program over, the camera moved in on the four figures stirring uneasily in their chairs...
...But there is no rush...
...they merely modulate each other...
...Here was a swift interplay of good minds...
...With a superb sense of theatricality, Susskind assembled for Open End four principals in that struggle—two Negro integrationists and two white racists...
...Unhappily, when educational TV sets out to be entertaining, the results are not much better...
...It was the program's discussion, however, which demonstrated the peculiar disabilities of television...
...The chairman is Robert Merton, the distinguished Columbia University sociologist...
...He had a conglomerate foreign accent, a tie like a flag, and a peasant face...
...One obvious mistake was not to have a die-hard humanist on the program—God knows there are enough of them around—who, in his own person, would epitomize the second culture...
Vol. 46 • March 1963 • No. 6
