Tape or live heroes?

The backbone of competitive television is the dramatic series. Study the TAM ratings (and the BBC equivalent if you can manage to microfilm it during an under-cover visit to Television Centre!) and you will find this to be incontestable.

Such ‘hero figures’ as Lockhart, Crane, Maigret, Dixon, Cork, Steed, Barlow, Burke, Kildare, Casey, Perry Mason and the Prestons have large and devoted audiences of their own. The first seven on the list are ‘tape heroes’, the remainder belong on film. The members of the former group are exclusively British, the latter dyed-in-the-wool Americans. The distinction is important and to be borne in mind.

Popular taste in ‘hero figures’ tends to change as time goes by. Not so many years ago cowboys and sheriffs had a virtual monopoly of the field: today their place has largely been taken by doctors, lawyers and increasingly eccentric minions of the law.

The reason for the popularity of dramatic series is perhaps too obvious to mention here. Their programmes, 60 minutes weekly, are ‘escapist’ and ‘action packed’. Familiarity with them breeds loyalty to the hero, to his personal methods and mannerisms, an advantage not shared by the hero of the single separate play.

From the beginning our Independent Television. following perhaps the American lead, spiced its programme pattern generously with dramatic series. Some years later the BBC ‘got the message’ – with striking results in the competitive battle.

A large proportion of series on both channels here are still American in origin. The same picture can be found in many other territories: the flowery waterways of the Far East resound nightly to the ever-successful pleading of Perry Mason and the burst of gunfire from the Sherman ranch.

The reasons for this are very easily explained. The American series, recorded exclusively on film with cinematic technique, offers fast, often spectacular entertainment, appealing to the eye as well as to the ear. Here is escapism par excellence – for the Tired Business Man and the Exhausted Coolie alike. Settings are native to a continent with scenery ranging from the Puerto Rican slums of New York to the steaming swamps of the Everglades, from Alaskan snow to the Painted Desert, a continent whose inhabitants still indulge in the sort of violent crimes and adventures that would be quite out of the question in our own sceptred isle.

There is also the little matter of costume. For a century and a half we British have been a small, crowded, orderly people condemned, as far as the male at least is concerned, to a more or less standard style of dress, i.e. the three-piece suit topped by a bowler, a boater, homberg or a cloth cap. We have Highland dress alone to match against the feathers and wampum, holsters and ten-gallon hats, and the furs of the frozen North.

Picture and story values apart, however, the outstanding advantage of the American series is its easy availability and comparative cheapness in the overseas market. The production of a television film of any real quality is an expensive business. The £20,000 [£330,000 in today’s money allowing for inflation – Ed] that it costs in this country cannot easily be recouped – not, that is, unless the producer achieves that rarest of successes, a sale to the U.S.A. As against this it is usually possible to acquire the British rights in a top-class American film for a few thousand pounds. Such films have already recovered their costs in the home market and Britain forms part of the international Tom Tiddler’s ground from which their producers are picking up so much gold.

It is no good pretending that we can do without filmed series. We need them, not only for their quality and availability, but in order that organisations with ever-strained studio facilities can occasionally ‘call it a day’ and leave the job to the chap in charge of telecine! One can imagine the harassed controller of BBC 2 sometimes wishing that his quota of foreign film material might be a little larger.

So much for the filmed series. We may admire it, we certainly make use of it, but it is really none of our business over here. We are first and foremost ‘television men’ working in television studios upon live production with electronic cameras and the skill and techniques that have grown up with them. The film is not ‘true television’, it is merely a form of ‘home movies’, no different in essence from the old feature films that we occasionally take off the shelves. The only ‘true’ television is live television which, as far as drama and light entertainment are concerned, has virtually disappeared from the transatlantic screen. It is a challenge to writer, director, actor and cameraman among many others to work more excitingly, more immediately and less expensively than the film maker. Of the 20 top-rating drama series broadcast weekly in this country are produced ‘live’, most of them continuously on VTR, two of them ‘live direct’, that is to say that they reach the audience as they are being performed.

Like others no doubt the writer has had the satisfying experience of showing British drama shows to visiting American pundits who simply could not believe that what they were seeing was ‘live’ (at the thought that it might be ‘live direct’ their imaginations boggled as they re-filled their glasses!).

Let us hope that we may be allowed to keep it this way. ‘Live’ drama may not, in general, have the gloss of its filmed counterpart: by way of compensation, however, it has an impact and an urgency that are peculiarly its own. Should it ever be entirely replaced by film there would vanish a hundred special skills which have made it an exciting entertainment form (even an art form) of its own. The planning and realisation of weekly drama series constitutes the toughest job in all ‘true’ television production. Tough because it implies the operation of an ‘assembly line’ from which is to be produced, with a maximum of six days rehearsal, a weekly drama of 60 minutes duration (as compared with the occasional 75-minute play which on the average can claim a rehearsal period of at least 14 days). Tough because from the point of view of the script editor and his team of writers it demands an incessant creativity without the freedom to branch away from a story formula and a set of characters.

And finally tough because if it should cease to figure in the Top Twenty it will be considered to have been a more or less regrettable ‘flop’. The series, once launched and established, runs the risk of being regarded as a valuable old ‘work horse’ never to be ‘put out to grass’. It receives little continuing publicity or critical interest from the Press. The boffins who distribute the budget tend to take it for granted: a request for additional finance may be received with a sense of outrage comparable to that experienced by Mr Bumble when Oliver Twist had the impertinence to ask for more.

Any such parsimony in the provision of money or facilities is not only from the policy point of view short-sighted, it further constitutes an injustice to the devoted production team involved. From the team’s point of view to be looked upon as a ‘backbone’ is a doubtful distinction. Who bothers about a backbone until it slips a disc?