On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television MARKETING THE PRIME MINISTER BY MARVIN KITMAN LONDON-reat Britain is so terribly backward a country that it wasn't until July that a Prime Minister finally held a televised press...
...I suppose we should be flattered...
...They were all so orderly and to the point, so terribly controlled Inevitably, this led me to wonder if the whole event hadn't been staged, like the spontaneous in-the-round forums of Richard Nixon's 1968 tv campaign...
...But the most surprising thing about the British experiment was the journalists' questions...
...What the Prime Minister intended to say about the Common Market beforehand is about all the journalists got out of him...
...In a burst of anti-Americanism, the Evening Standard called the event "The Ted Heath Matinee Quiz...
...Such wonderful doors, the advisers predicted, would neutralize Heath's tv image problems...
...His exit might just as well be through a trap door for all the confidence it instills...
...The gold-and-white Chopin Room was picked, some believed, because Heath would look good against the background...
...As it turned out, his television advisers couldn't have selected a better backdrop short of posing him on the bridge of a yacht...
...Even American journalists in the audience, who should have known better, showed their backs to the camera or settled for a long shot...
...Time after time, they would stand up to ask a question and forget to play to the cameras, half rising as if asking permission to go to the w.c...
...He put the camera on himself and now he should give the reporters a chance...
...I bet more than 200 would attend if President Nixon scheduled a Chequers press conference...
...He gets very overexcited on the telly now, like a horse who has got the bit between the teeth...
...It's very British...
...All we know is that if they're asking us to come in, they must be pretty desperate...
...Thanks to those doors, at the end of the conference the Prime Minister was able to say, "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen," and immediately bound out...
...As I said, Great Britain is a backward country...
...He got that from Macmillan," I was informed...
...W., this question is from Mrs...
...The televised Prime Minister has a number of other annoying mannerisms...
...Everybody assumes the journalists are waving to get the attention of the interviewee," explained my reliable source for all of this information, Robert Morley, the noted actor and television expert...
...I'm not sure it wouldn't go to anybody's head," one student of British tv politics told me...
...When Ted Heath called on the great American institution, it was for a crucial mission: selling the Common Market to the British television audience...
...A colleague on the other side, the Daily Mail reported the next day, had pulled the great doors open on cue...
...To maintain their objectivity, the interviewers sometimes resort to reading queries from viewers: "Mr...
...For instance, he makes a half-circling gesture with his hands as he talks...
...not all of them are bastards...
...Traditionally, reporters get to talk to the Prime Minister outside 10 Downing Street or at Chequers...
...She writes, 'You have been a twisting, lying, cheap politician since the last election...
...He looked like a million ?(before devaluation...
...It was certainly a more satisfactory exit than President Nixon is forced to make down the aisle of the East Room, where Liberace once played for Dwight Eisenhower...
...I have a mother-in-law, Gladys Cooper, who always goes to the Henley Regatta just to stand on the tow-path and wave at me on the telly...
...The answers were far below American standards, too...
...They are only trying to get their mother's attention at home...
...And he's always 'absolutely convinced.' Never just 'convinced.' " That's like President Nixon always making things "perfectly clear" when his audience would be content if he simply made them "clear...
...If he's going to start answering the Bulgarians," Morley explained, "in my opinion he's in deep trouble...
...It probably won't be until late next month, when the Market proposition is put before Commons, that we will know just how effective Prime Minister Heath's use of the American-style tv press conference was...
...All we could see were the backs of the reporters' heads...
...Mother, I was the one who asked the question about the Crusades.' " THE REPORTERS in the Chopin Room left a lot to be desired by American standards...
...The golden shimmer behind his head would form a sort of halo, making him look like the archangel Gabr:el as he hawked the Common Market...
...If it's such a good idea," Robert Morley said after the press conference ended, "why don't you Americans go into it...
...The amazing thing about the first British tv press conference is that, despite America's years of leadership in this art form, it produced roughly the same amount of information in both countries...
...The Prime Minister often made the mistake of being very direct, even to foreign journalists...
...On Television MARKETING THE PRIME MINISTER BY MARVIN KITMAN LONDON-reat Britain is so terribly backward a country that it wasn't until July that a Prime Minister finally held a televised press conference...
...Before this summer, the best thing British tv had been able to develop to keep the public informed was the tough, hard-hitting interview...
...How can we ever again trust your decisions?' Can you answer that please, Mr...
...Though Nixon is always smiling at the end, too, he sometimes gets lost in the maze of reporters who, in a last effort at great television reporting, throw themselves in front of the cameras...
...There's a great future for a network that would let everybody wave for a price...
...And indeed, on the telly Heath did look like Gabriel blowing his own horn...
...But then he got himself elected...
...Nevertheless, more than 200 journalists showed up on the afternoon of July 6 for an American-style get-together in the music room of Lancaster House, heretofore famous only as the site of a special concert by Chopin in honor of Queen Victoria...
...Heath also has a tendency to rely on certain phrases when speaking extemporaneously...
...As soon as I see her, I turn the set off...
...People would pay a pound a head to be seen by their family...
...Those poor wretches will have to say, 'Mother, I was in the fourth row...
...What you people from overseas don't realize," he continued, "is that despite all the time the telly spends explaining the Common Market, nobody in England understands it, and we don't want to...
...It must have something to do with the institution itself...
...Either they didn't know where the cameras were, or they were overwhelmed with the magnitude of the historic event...
...Nobody I spoke to would swear that the Tories hadn't planted the questions...
...By the Morley standard, the press conference was a personal triumph for Heath...
...So the last thing viewers saw was Heath with a big smile on his face, the picture of absolute confidence that the British people had bought his Common Market scheme...
...tv journalists like Robin Day have for 10 years questioned their leaders as if they were on the opposition bench in the House of Commons—quoting statistics, throwing in their faces the allegation, "But you said previously...
...As presented on tv, Heath's arguments were marvelous...
...No one ever says the word 'colleague' with less enthusiasm," my source insisted...
...British tv fans weren't particularly upset about it, for apparently they believe the real reason anybody, from Prime Minister to journalist, goes on television has nothing to do with increasing knowledge...
...While everybody in the United States respects the television press conference as an information tool?the one complaint being that there aren't enough of them—British newspapermen seem to distrust it...
...He is not playing fair," the actor said as we watched it together in his dressing room at a West End theater...
...Reporters have mothers, too...
...Ted Heath acquired a reputation as a poor tv performer during the election campaign...
...He must have slipped the cameraman something," Morley said...
...However, I found myself absolutely convinced that the Market was super...
...The Queen makes a full circle...
...It consisted of magnificent, ornately gilded doors almost 20 feet high, whose handles were, incidentally, on the other side...
...J. of Warwickshire...
Vol. 54 • September 1971 • No. 18
