Culture for Everyone
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff Culture for Everyone One can still remember that quaint time when cultural stalwarts refused to buy a TV set, as if the mere purchase constituted some...
...A few weeks ago, there was a respite from modern dance and the program presented an uncompromising view of the problem of a family with a mentally-retarded child...
...So now a kind of chastened common sense prevails...
...The clerical answer provided only pale comfort: "We musn't feel that we are singled out We must accept the givenness of life You never learn to solve such a problem...
...It sounded for all the world like the kind of lay sermons that emanate relentlessly from daytime soap opera...
...This was TV at its best...
...For the churches are doing some of the most sophisticated programming around today...
...It concerned an organization called "Atheists Anonymous" whose rationale is "You'll break the prayer habit if you have complete faith in not having complete faith...
...The question raised, in the light of the tragic events, was: What kind of God is it who creates such misery and havoc...
...Moreover, the religious programs have done more to banish unemployment among modern dancers than any other segment of the entertainment business...
...The program opened, for example, with a tasteless gag about the recent dynamiting of trains in Florida...
...One no longer hears claims that educational TV or cultural programming will remake America, save the United Nations, and solve the problem of leisure...
...You sold it to me...
...Some of the discussion was a little too "inside," and there were phrases bouncing around like "interpenetrating characters" and "camera as a textual and textural experience" and "opening up new metaphysical dimensions of time.' More important, though, there was none of the grimacing and attention-getting hysteria of the "discussion shows"—just two bright people talking animatedly about what they know best...
...The best thing in the show was a spoof on the anti-religious drive in the Soviet Union...
...Channel 13's straight talk programs are another matter...
...There has been some excitement about a new TV cultural effort first conceived on the BBC in Britain, the satirical revue This Was the Week That Was (Friday-NBC...
...you merely learn to live with it creatively...
...I caught a program recently, a spirited but uneven affair in the cool, hip manner of The Premise...
...they are good yet not exciting...
...the earnestness and spontaneity are so stuffy...
...Everyone knows that Johnny Carson can't really subvert hard-won cultural gains...
...But Sunday morning, surely not the worst time to watch TV in this secular age, is loaded with vitamins...
...Sometimes one feels that all the philistine strictures against artiness are warranted...
...And then there is always Channel 13, militantly cultural all the time, and its regional equivalents elsewhere...
...Sunday morning is the time when the churches seem to take over on TV...
...Not only was it highly literate talk, but for a change ideas were developed without all the cross-cutting that goes on in a larger group...
...The results, of course, are uneven...
...Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is a curious no-man's-land between academia and commercial TV...
...In fact, the programs in both areas tend to hew to a common level of competence...
...In Squaresville, of course, the TV set squats in the middle of the living room like a household deity, while elsewhere people consign it to bedroom and rumpus room and basement, suitably camouflaged...
...Their children were ashamed of them, etc...
...But the die-hards have finally made their separate peace...
...To be sure, prime evening time is pre-empted by commercial shows...
...Off track 29...
...In print the line seems lame, but somehow on the program it worked...
...I learned, for instance, that the highest salaries in educational TV overlap the lower reaches of commercial TV in a kind of inverse relationship to the programming, in which the least ambitious of the educational programs overlap the most serious commercial offerings...
...At the end, a young thug turns the rifle he has just bought on the proprietor of the sporting goods store...
...Given the amount of Jewish creative talent, one would expect the synagogue programs to have this character, but they tend to have a kind of Eternal Light stodginess...
...On the commercial channels, the documentaries have the same professional gloss they had in Edward R. Murrow's pioneering days...
...And for the unwary, there are surprises indeed...
...The trouble with this program is that it simply does not have enough cleverness to go around, with a corollary tendency to strain...
...From the listings, it appears that there is enough cultural programming for even the most voracious appetite...
...Lamp Unto My Feet (SundayCBS) is a hardy perennial which in its long career has won prizes and done practically everything...
...But the thug answers: "Why not, sport...
...You pick what you like or need...
...Is that the Chattanooga choo-choo...
...This was followed by a satiric freefor-all about the easy availability of dangerous weapons...
...A clerical bull-session followed the dramatization...
...Only the idiom was changed...
...The next program on the same channel was Look Up and Live, which offered Part II of a history of asceticism...
...But the smiles you get from politicians are the smiles that don't mean a thing...
...Henry Morgan asked...
...I am more than ever convinced that discussion shows involving groups are inherently unworkable...
...A great deal depends upon the moderator, and I do not find August Hecksher in Books For Our Time much of a catalytic agent...
...Their social zeal, though, has leaked out...
...And here David Susskind is the best in the business...
...The program's most poignant sequence was a shot of wonderful Inca ruins followed by a neon sign reading "Inca-Cola...
...Oddly enough, there was little culture shock in moving from sector to sector...
...Then there was a fitfully clever parody on the familiar "There are smiles" song ("There are smiles that smack of paranoia like the smile of Mr...
...But Stanley Kauffmann, the movie critic, had a lively exchange on a recent Tuesday night with Arthur Penn, the stage and film director...
...It was a marvelous little exemplum...
...The staging was beguilingly simple: a narrator who discussed asceticism followed by actors in ecclesiastic garb who, in the guise of historical figures, described their strange mortifications (ashes sprinkled on food, beatings, superhairshirts etc...
...The best they can do is dramatize attitudes...
...Paar...
...To be sure, some of the actresses playing nuns had a full-fleshed worldliness and a lambency of personality that smacked more of Actors Studio and Downey's than of the cloister...
...Educational TV teaches and preaches more, but commercial TV is jauntier about the arts...
...Taking their cue from Camera Three—the grand progenitor of them all—and reaching further back to the old WPA Living Newspaper and even German expressionism, the religious programs are addicted to stark backgrounds, leotard-clad and slightly funereal figures, and a narrator...
...What a triumphant hour for the virtuous poor...
...To get back to weightier fare, I don't know whether it's because I haven't watched Channel 13 for a while or what, but when I looked in recently things seem to have brightened considerably...
...All well and good, except that the sketch oscillated between nasty, sick humor and preachment...
...A producer in educational TV with whom I recently spoke used the tame language of a dean in explaining his field: "You see, educational TV is like a college catalogue...
...On the other hand, the shrillness of the electronic prophets has subsided...
...You don't watch everything...
...In the story, a clinician tries to persuade an agitated father that he ought to institutionalize his retarded child...
...But little matter: The program was informative, the performance intelligent, and when the narrator confronted our own time he exalted not Catholic asceticism but a mild suburban humanism...
...The Protestant programs—and to my amazement, even the Catholic ones—are jazzily avant-garde...
...Not long ago, he had a group of millionaires tell what it's like to be loaded...
...Please give me a prayer just to taper off—a short one, a psalm, a commandment...
...But the deadening effect of talk, talk, talk was mitigated by slides, movie sequences and music...
...There was more straight exposition than in a documentary, and the level of discourse was far more scholarly...
...The subject was the death of indigenous culture in Latin America, and the obvious opportunities for contrasting the debased present against the magnificent historical past (as exemplified in ruins, monuments, and art were always effectively seized upon...
...With the exception of one aging exemplar of the Protestant ethic, who used his money for charity, the others exhibited more disgruntlement than joy...
...Nor is it the indigent slum that some people think it is...
...ON TELEVISION By David Boroff Culture for Everyone One can still remember that quaint time when cultural stalwarts refused to buy a TV set, as if the mere purchase constituted some calamitous fall from grace...
...How does this programming stand up...
...Meanwhile, educational TV has become still another sector of the academic landscape...
...Help me before I become a monk...
...Don't use that gun on me,' the hapless man pleads...
...One program I saw, entitled A Far and Distant Land, was an interesting fusion of lecture and documentary...
...In the last few weeks, I have been concentrating on programs with serious content on both educational and commercial TV...
...But on other occasions there is a remarkably successful fusion of movement, language and theme...
...Educational TV has learned how to break up the monotony of straight exposition...
...And there is the distraught man who gives this testimonial to his backsliding colleagues: "Comrades, I was a religious nut On my way home, I used to stop off and pray with the boys...
Vol. 47 • March 1964 • No. 6
