Accent on Living

THE predictability of the British has long been taken for granted. What is done or not done under a given set of circumstances is assumed to be a simple black-or-white choice: all parties behave as they have been trained to behave, or else they misbehave, and to misbehave is bad, very bad.

What are proper radio and television programs? Who shall decide? How shall they be financed? Why must no commercial advertising go out on the air waves?

For some decades the British have settled this simple black-or-white choice by vesting the sole power to answer these questions in the British Broadcasting Corporation, a somewhat flustered despotism which they have come to regard with a kind of affectionate despair. They are fascinated at times by the glimpses they get of American programs and commercials, and those who come here are impressed, at first blush, by what seems to them the far greater variety of choice offered the American audience. But it surprised no one that the British clung, until recently, to their own system; that they continued to tax receiving sets annually to pay for BBC programs instead of turning to commercial sponsorship; that they jibe the BBC among themselves while defending it, apologetially yet persistently, to others.

The BBC is engineer, impresario, censor, producer; it administers comedy, drama, news, the fine arts, the weather, and household hints with firmness and fairness; and if it feels so inclined (as it did), it will decide that the best possible program for 7.15 P.M. on an April Saturday is a fifteen-minute discourse by a woman on The Care of Suede Shoes, even though the expert on this occasion ran out of suede-shoe material at the end of ten minutes and had to eke out with how to prevent patentleather shoes from cracking.

The BBC is queer but it’s British, and so the BBC has remained, in TV as well as radio, the unique proprietor of all British broadcasting. And in all its tenure, it has never broadcast a commercial.

So far, the British and their BBC have behaved predictably enough. But who can predict the course of “free" commercial television, which is now scheduled — after years of debate in Parliament — to be introduced to the British public in September? The commercial stations and channels have already been licensed to private investors; their revenues will come from advertisers, as in American TV; and they will operate under a new government agency independently of the BBC.

The early stages of this phenomenon have been more or less predictable: the advertiser, it was explained, will have no control over program content and very little to say about when, and in what program context, his commercials will go on the air. His commercials, at the same time, will have to meet the standards of taste laid down by the new government agency, which has absolute authority over programs, commercials, and all else. Thus secured against making itself objectionable to anyone, the TV commercial awaits its British debut.

It will confront a public which has never heard, even on radio, the effervescence of a laxative dissolving in a glass of water, never been coached on how to avoid Offending, and which is unfamiliar with how to proclaim an all-beef frankfurter (Voice: “His Majesty — the King!!” — strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” fading into crowd’s roar — Voice: “Nepco, the All-beef Frankfurter, Monarch of Them All!!!”). The British will be starting from scratch in all such matters, and how completely from scratch will be seen in a few of the questions which an alert London advertising agency is offering to answer for those interested in the new commercial medium: —

How valuable arc established TV personalities? Are they valuable enough to be worth their price?

How useful is a jingle, and for what?

How will people who have opposed commercial television react to a product advertised on it?

Is it better to have a series of different films or go on repeating the same one? Does the value of variation outweigh its greater cost?

The American advertiser’s first experience with TV, shortly after the war’s end, had been preceded by decades of sledge-hammer results from radio commercials. But the degree to which TV was able, immediately, to sell consumer goods proved astounding. Entire corporations were founded and have prospered on no more than the availability of a popular TV performer to cry their wares. Today the production of TV commercials is a huge industry in itself, quite apart from the programs.

The British, meanwhile, have yet to hear even a radio announcer say, “Try Fruteswete Jam — You’ll like it” (or more probably, “You might like it”). When the BBC laid down a policy and moved, or decided not to move, in a given situation, no large commercial stakes hung in the balance. But in the new “free” television, Fruteswete’s commercial may mean a million pounds to somebody. Let Fruteswete begin, for instance, with a close-up of its familiar jam pot, followed by a persuasive young man who talks it up — all in the very best of taste. But Fruteswete’s competitor, Doakes, Ltd., counters with jam pots animated by the legs of Windmill artistes in close-order drill. Fruteswete responds by hiring a busty female announcer in a Bikini. At what point the tut-tutting by the government’s new television authority will set in is not altogether predictable, but it looks as if Letters to the Editor columns will be needing enlargement, come September.