Video, I Love You

I AM under no illusions; my days of glee are surely numbered. Television in its swaddling clothes may permit uproarious touches of reality to enter the solemn rites of merchandising, but I know well enough that its commercials will soon be snatched from the live camera and be canned safely on film or worked into grisly animated cartoons. Meanwhile my life brims over.

I first glimpsed the glories of TV’s abortive commercials during a syrupy hymn of praise to cigarette lighters. The announcer chanted a familiar hypnotic ritual, holding the lighter of destiny before me in his hand, large as life. He turned confident eyes upon me. “Flick,” he said in his network baritone, “and it’s lit.” He pressed the lighter and continued to look at me for a sublime second, then glanced sidelong at the lighter. It was unlit. Flick, flick, flick, he pressed madly on the lever, consternation on his face. When the lighter recovered, his magic was gone and I was prostrate across a littered coffee table, enjoying with all within reach of the coaxial cables the spectacle of the crack-up of the Atomic Age.

Two nights later a cream-voiced young announcer beamed at me from a Washington station. “Deep-down smoking enjoyment with never a scratch of the throat,” he sang. He inhaled deeply on a cigarette and exhaled. “Never an irritation,” he said — and then broke into an almost apoplectic cough. The camera, its operator probably frozen with fright, remained steadfastly upon him while he struggled and choked.

The blight also touched a hawker of beer, one of those bit players whose duty is to hold a beaded glass of the brew close to his lips, grinning lustfully as he eyes its goodness. I knew the routine. He might pretend to drink the stuff, but could not. He would sigh at his beer, and the camera would switch for an instant, to return as he held the empty glass before him, still sighing in ecstasy while the announcer sang of malten glories.

This time the camera did not switch. The drinker held his smile a moment, then turned and sloshed the beer into a pail at his side.

A Baltimore announcer once delighted me with a simple station break between scenes of a remarkable pageant wrought of sports results, drama, song and dance. Apparently he was accustomed to speaking over a microphone which was cut off immediately after he intoned the call letters of the station, for he said: “Station WMOO-TV, Channel 7, Baltimore.” And then, turning his head with an exasperated expression, he added for us all: “What the hell’s going on around here?” I never found out.

I was once richly repaid for the crude interruptions of a football game by slides picturing huge moving vans. The same transportation firm was presenting a newsreel. In the midst of it the commercial flashed, a huge portrait of a transfer truck, with an announcer warning me, for safety’s sake, that I should move all my chattels in this great van. The next moment, the newsreel pictured the result of a highway accident near our city. In the center of the crash, turned on its side and badly damaged, lay a great transfer truck, with the name of the sponsor in huge letters on it.

I have seen, too, a young man selling bread hold a loaf of his sponsor’s product aloft and shout at me that I should buy the loaf of a local competitor. I have watched a great city’s mayor incorrectly identify the name of the station on which he was a guest — and seen him squirm as the knowledge came to him after his third repetition.

There have been other, lesser, pleasures, and perhaps I shall always be rewarded. For, so long as we can actually see the participants in programs at their work, we shall now and again catch them in a moment of frustration. And that, it seems to me, is the refreshing interlude in national life as lived in the air waves.