THE ANNUAL FOR 1952 Edited by KENNETH BAILY CONTENTS PAGE !mot It's Tough for Tele- 11 Stars in Camera. 82 vision :The Editor's 12 The Magic Window. 110 Review . 5 13 1 They Put the Eye into Is There a TV Type of Radio . 13 Beauty ? byDorothy Worsley . 115 2When You Bring the TV Set Home . 17 14With Hammer, Paint- 3Around and About brush and Scissors . 119 the Studios . 23 15 Making the TV News- 4The Laughter Shows. 31 reels, by Bryan Bellamy -Gardner . 122 5 Plays in Television . 37 16HowDoYou View ?. 128 6The Announcers Off Duty,by McDonald 17Towards a National Hobley, Mary Mal- Network . 131 colm and Sylvia 18Technical Advances Peters . 47 and Trends . 136 7 Seeing Facts . 59 19 Behind theScreen 8They Capture the Who's Who . 140 Living Moment . 65 20Television as a Career 154 9Putting the Music into TV,by Eric Robin- 21 TelevisioninOther son . 73 Lands . 156 10Ballet in Television,by Index . 158 Felicity Gray . 77 Acknowledgements . 160 ODHAMS PRESS LTD. LONG ACRE, LONDON A glittering Festival of Britain TV event was the fashion show by London's "Top Ten" designers, collected for H.M. the Queen and Princess Elizabeth, and televised from Lady Rothermere's historic Warwick House, St. James's. (bie4j7") THE TELEVISION ANNUAL FOR 1952 On the day the Festival of Britain opened viewers watched the Royal Family at St. Paul's. IT'S TOUGH FOR TELEVISION The Editor's Review TELEVISION is having a tough time of it in Britain. Whilemore and more people put it into their homes, more viewers of experience grow critical of its programmes. While the BBC Television Service needsmore money and equipment, and as people outside the reception areas grow impatient to have their own local transmitters, the country's defence programme threatens to reduce the financial and material allocations planned for television's development. The prolonged development of a national service is not helpfulto the creation of satisfactory standards in programmes The BBCcan always pit the enthusiastic appreciation of the newly converted viewers against the querulous criticism of viewers for whom TV's novelty has passed and who find insufficient satisfaction in the programme material. No reasonable person expects to find the type and quality ofevery TV programme item to his especial taste.Visual broadcasting, unlike sound radio, cannot be a background to domestic activities. Thecon- centration it requires means that first there must be a conscious and dis- criminating selection of the programmes to be viewed. But as things are at present, what the viewer may have chosen most carefully too often turns out to be too much like what he has seen several times before. New programme ideas, fresh approaches to small-screen production, new talents, new personalities and the delights of the gen- erally unexpected are all too rare in transmission. The plays on TV are often highly commended. Certainly the BBC can call on the considerable reserve of first-class acting talent that is always available in London. It also has a team of producers whose com- petency can be relied on, including three or four who are capable of handling most of their productions with real brilliance. To the TV consumer by the fireside, however, neither technical com- petence nor artistic brilliance will turn a play with a poor "viewing- story" into a good play. The close scrutiny of the TV cameras, and the hard -to -spoof audience of the drawing -room, demand plays of more credibility and more genuine power than is necessarily required to reap 5 Television Annual's editor, Kenneth Baily. He declares that television is a "revolu- tionary challenge" still wait- ing to he accepted by the BBC and the Government in "an open-minded spirit of uninhibited enterprise." He is radio and TV critic of The People anda leading commentator on TV topics in the magazine press. success on the theatre stage. Television has dramatic potentialities greater than the simple ones whereby it can act as a peephole through which to watch stage plays recently moved out of the West End. Insufficient trouble is being taken by the BBC to find good -for -TV plays. And the output of two plays a week is too much of a strain on all the possible sources of material, and would still be so even were these being efficiently explored and farmed. It is strange that the programme planners do not accept this truth, and do not severely curtail the number of drama transmissions. Certain it is that so long as they struggle to find material for a hundred such transmissions every year they will be forced to use unadaptable and sometimes quite unsuitable stage plays. The stage play in its conventional three acts is too long for convenient and comfortable home viewing. Recognition of this very practical factor should by now have caused the BBC to make strenuous efforts to have plays of no more than sixty minutes' duration specially written for the small screen. But the original play, commissioned for TV, and tailored to the home viewer's special requirements, is still a very rare bird indeed. I deal with plays at some length because, though the frequent excellence of their performance cannot be denied, they do to my mind characterize two failings to which the BBC is very prone in its management of TV. In the first place, much as TV men claim to despise sound radio, programme planning for TV is in fact dogged by a slavish imitation of 6 sound -radio traditions. Plays have always been a main staple of sound radio. The TV planners, bred from sound radio, have continued to want plays to be a staple of TV. But this medium is unsuited to any kind of heavy output of plays. Its drama must mostly be written specially for it from scratch. No country, not even the English-speaking world together, can produce even fifty new TV plays a year, let alone a hundred. In the second place, monopoly -complacency, that canker now firmly embedded in the heart of British broadcasting, has struck into TV as well, despite the enthusiasm for the medium among the TV staff. Professional writers whose word is reliable and reasonable, and is not the wild outcry of the embittered amateur, do not hesitate to say that a major failing of the BBC is the inadequate means it provides for finding new writers, and for encouraging new talent revealed in scripts and ideas which may, in themselves, be unsuited to current demands. This applies very acutely to all departments of the Television Service, and especially to its drama section. The fault must be laid at the door of the highest -level rulers of British broadcasting. Though they give oratoricallip -service to the BBC's responsibility in fostering the national talents, when it comes to pro- Television's Festival series, The Passing Show, harked back to the Lambeth Walk in Me and My Girl."Somehow or other TV light entertainment must attract men and women with a flair for original visual creation." On the balcony of the players' dressing -room at the Oval .. but this balcony was built in the TV studio for TerenceRattigan's Festivalplay, The Final Test.Patrick Barr (with binoculars) played the Test cric- keter hero.With him is Harold Siddons, as captainof an all - England eleven. viding the money, staff and machinery necessary to put the ideal into practicethe BBC's managers prefer to look the other way. The TV drama and light entertainment departments each need a staff of experienced script, story and ideas examiners; and by experienced I mean examiners whose hard -trained judgment could as well earn them good money from theatre managers, film producers and publishers. As it is, any attempts to start script departments or to establish script editors in the BBC have all been enfeebled by the Corporation's refusal to pay the bill for the highly skilled staff these services always require. The BBC counters this argument by claiming that it trusts the judg- ment of its staff producers. Indeed, it does leave to them most of the responsibility for finding new programme material. But if this claim is valid, it is remarkable how unanimously the TV drama producers appear to have decided that TV can get along quite nicely on a more or less continuous diet of conventionally shaped stage plays. The BBC's claim is not in fact in line with what happens in practice. Television producers are so hard pushed to fill the never-ending drama spaces in the schedules that they must necessarily resort to plays off the stage bookshelf. In the light entertainment department of television the poverty of ideas and material suited to the medium has now resulted in four to five years of "entertainment" quite remarkable by reason of its lack of imagin- ation, its banality and its shoddy production. 8 Onthe TV -camera site at the real Oval Cricket Ground . Television broadcasts of Test Matches with South Africa made an absorbing featurein viewers' summer pro- grammes in 1951. An exceptionalcricket TV eventwasthe Women's Test Match with Australia, tele- vised from the Oval. Out of the mouths of some of the highest officials in the Television Service light entertainment received honest condemnation in 1950. It received it again when the TV Programme Controller returned from watching TV light entertainment in the United States. Satisfactory as these purges of self -accusation may have been at the time, they ought to have resulted in more visible dividends. An upward trend in quality has begun, but it is a precarious trend.