Raymond Williams on Television (Routledge Revivals) by Williams Raymond;

Author:Williams, Raymond;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 1989-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

ITV’s Domestic Romance

It can only be prejudice that prevents the general reviewing of those programmes between programmes that are now so important a part of television. The other night, for example, I watched a 35-minute programme (ITV) into which, I do not doubt, as much care and effort and money had been put as into anything else that evening, and yet, to judge by what the critics said, it might never have been put out at all. It is true that it was rather intermittent. It ran in short snatches of anything from 45 seconds to about three-and-a-half minutes, over the period between 5:45 and 10:30 p.m. Nevertheless, it was an interesting blend of naturalism and fantasy, with some clever photography and a few good if recurrent tunes. And it was centred, clearly enough, on domestic issues.

When you think of all the study and research (much of it drawing on the services of professional psychologists and sociologists), of the script conferences, the negotiations on timing, the search through the casting agencies, the rehearsals, the editing, it seems a bit hard that there is no considered reaction at all. Some people say, of course, that the ads aren’t art, though they have probably forgotten that every group making them has its creative department, which is even, to prevent misunderstanding, known and referred to as such. Moreover, there is a good deal of mutual voyaging between programmes and commercials. Some of our best directors, it is said, make little programmes about products between their bigger programmes about processes, and many popular performers seem as willing to appear smoking a cigar or eating an ice-cream as doing anything else—murder or detection—that the current script may require. The acting skill needed is in any case approximately the same. Certainly there are plenty of girls who can be guaranteed, after rehearsal, to manage to look coy and sultry in the same lingering glance. But try casting a housewife who can repeat “biological” as if it were a faintly improper suggestion which she’s naturally a bit wary of but is by no means certain to refuse. Or the ordinary man, just home from the office, who’s depressed thinking he’s going to get tinned food for supper and a few minutes láter is delighted and affectionate when he gets it out of just the right kind of tin. That, brother (as they say in the trade), is skill.

* Williams had been critical of Harold Wilson when he was a junior politician at the Board of Trade in 1947. He resigned from the Labour Party in 1966 because Wilson’s government was collaborating in the process of reproducing capitalist society rather than attempting to create a socialist society. Barbara Castle was First Secretary of State and Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity in the Wilson government.

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