Hullo Philadelphia U.S.A.

Now back from America after a visit to the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company Inc (Group W) is chris rowley, assistant to programme planning executive. He wrote this article after the first eight weeks of his stay and, as always in Fusion, the views he expresses are his own and not necessarily those of Rediffusion Television. ‘I would also like to express my most sincere thanks to all at KYW who have, with patience and friendliness, explained things to me – usually when they were very busy,’ he says.

In the two days we were in New York everyone who heard we were going to Philadelphia commiserated – it was sad we were to stay in such a boring, provincial town they said. Philadelphia, however, has so far not quite lived up to its reputation of total respectability and there has even been for the last 10 days an ‘Angry Arts Week Against the War in Vietnam’.

Westinghouse Broadcasting, which just to confuse the issue calls itself Group W as well, has five UHF television stations – which is in fact the maximum the Federal Communications Commission allows one company. KYW in Philadelphia where I am staying is the largest, and the others are in San Francisco, Boston, Baltimore and Pittsburgh. It is the job of each of these stations to provide the local part of the total transmission – to cater to the needs, whims and peculiarities of its own city and surrounding area. And as you will have gathered each city has its own flavour as well as its own local problems.

The three major networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, each provide their own affiliates with quite a large part of the station output and it is then up to the individual station to use the rest of the time to its best advantage. KYW, for instance is affiliated to NBC, and it receives about three-fifths of its programmes from NBC. The other two-fifths it can either make itself, take from other Group W stations, or buy from outside producers. All this must make KYW sound like a smaller ITV regional company, and to a certain extent this is true. But, there are two major differences: firstly KYW has six other stations to rival it (five commercial stations and an educational station) and secondly KYW transmits about 19 hours a day, of which about five hours are made by the station. To compare this with Rediffusion is fairly startling. Rediffusion produces on average between 12-13 hours of programmes a week, whereas KYW produces over 35. If you wonder how a station, with 100 people in the programme department, can produce three times as much material as Rediffusion, the answer is partly that they do not have to make plays, series or major documentaries, which are provided for them by NBC. Instead they concentrate on providing local news (three half-hour programmes a day); an hour-and-a-half light entertainment show every weekday afternoon (which is so good it is sold to 135 stations throughout the States); interviews and documentaries on local issues; and about four hours of children’s programmes at the weekend. It gives a better idea of the station if I mention a few stories and programmes I have watched being made or actually tried to help in the making.

When I arrived in Philadelphia there apparently had been rioting between negro and white children for several days in South Philadelphia High School. What too many people forgot was that the so-called rioters were only a minute fraction of the school and that on several days parents kept their children at home not as a protest but to avoid the alleged race riots. As one teacher sadly remarked – why didn’t anyone say the worst fights in the school were between the Irish and the Italians? I felt it greatly to the credit of the reporter concerned and to KYW that they filmed a mixed choir at the school and ended up a news programme with it, saying that some other things were happening at South Philadelphia High School. Not a news story as such perhaps, but the kind of comment a TV station should make over here. And the importance of intelligent, balanced news programmes is emphasised by a recent survey which found that 64 per cent of Americans used TV as their major source of news. Westinghouse Broadcasting, and in this instance KYW, is particularly anxious to cover local affairs in depth. A good example of this is the KYW plan to show 12 programmes within 11 days (varying in length from two hours to five minutes) all on the subject of why a surprisingly large proportion of the school children in Philadelphia never complete their education; why some children are marked for failure on the day they enter kindergarten. This scheme is certainly a brave and worthy one, particularly considering the limited resources available to the one man responsible for organising the whole thing.

Compared to the networks and to many of their competitors, Westinghouse’s overall policy is surprisingly high-minded. While they are undoubtedly at least as profit (and loss) conscious as most firms, they also seem to have other standards which guide management. One example of this is that Donald McGannon, the president, has recently told the networks that Westinghouse will not show feature films if there is the increase in commercials which NBC threatened. McGannon also sent a list of recommended changes on the length and placing of commercials. By British standards, none of the recommendations were excessive but I have so far seen no reply from NBC or the other two networks: maybe they are using their adding machines.

The great disappointment of American television is the rarity of any surprises, any deviation from the routine. Daytime programmes on Monday, will run at the same time on Tuesday and throughout the week, and in fact throughout the greater part of the year. In the evening too there is a lack of variety. Having just looked at the plans of the networks for the coming autumn for example, out of the 85 programmes provided by NBC, CBS and ABC between 7.30-11 p.m., only about three or four are what the ITA would term ‘serious’. About a dozen of the 85 will be light entertainment; there will be six big movies in a week. All the rest will be series, with occasional big documentaries or plays thrown in. This leaves a lot of series, and is one reason Hollywood and the independent film makers are feeling happy. Another reason Hollywood is happy, is the popularity of its old movies. If you think British television has reached saturation point, beware. Last week on Philadelphia’s TV screens, the viewer was offered 117 movies …

If I seem critical of the main networks it is not because I think they are unable to make good programmes. The half-hour world news programmes done by NBC and by CBS early every evening are first rate: there are occasionally magnificent documentaries; some of the talk shows have produced sparkling discussions; and as we know well in England, the Westerns and the adventure/crime series are usually extremely competent. My main lament is, that with all this talent available there is not more variety in the programme schedules. And it seems that the Federal Communications Commission, who should so obviously be the body to inject some commonsense into the scheduling are unable to do so. In fact, the newest member of the FCC stated at a meeting which I attended that the Commission did not have any regulatory powers over the big networks -it only gives licences out to individual stations. This ludicrous position has been reached because over a long period of years the FCC has seldom dared actually to tell any station or network to do anything (or not do anything) in case it is accused of being undemocratic, of interfering with that greatest of all American sacred cows, free enterprise. The fact that ex-Governor Wallace [George Corley Wallace Jr 1919–1998, racist governor of Alabama 1963-1967, 1971-1979 and 1983-1987 – Ed], an avowed segregationalist, can draw such surprisingly large support is because he says the central government is interfering in everyone’s affairs. And it is this type of feeling that has made the FCC so wary in the past.

The situation in American TV now is that President Johnson has persuaded the majority of thinking, speaking men that money should be allocated for a ‘Public Television’ service, and hearings have been going on (shown on the educational channel here in Philadelphia) to see exactly how this should be accomplished. Almost unbelievably everyone agrees, in public at least, to the proposition that there shall be a channel devoted to the things which the commercial channels have never provided. The exact details of financing, of who exactly provides programmes, and how the stations will be linked together are still being debated but will presumably be settled. What seems to be one of the major issues has not been discussed. If the networks are as bad as almost everyone testified at the Senate hearing, then, as well as creating an extra channel, which it is quite possible that only a minority will watch, is it not just as important to encourage the three existing networks to diversify their talents over the schedules? It does seem, that in the public stampede to welcome a new channel, the fact that the net works and individual stations, such as KYW, have produced some remarkable programmes is getting overlooked. With what, by British standards, would be very minor regulatory powers, the FCC could so easily make some of these programmes more widely available, and make the diet for the ordinary viewer so much more interesting.