Monday, Aug. 29, 1955

The Invasion

England has not been successfully invaded since William the Conqueror rode over the luckless Saxons nine centuries ago, but the island's invulnerability is about to end. Next month commercial television will invade staunch Britain, surging onto the air waves that have long been the placid domain of the uncommercial, unexciting BBC.

Through several years of debate in the newspapers and the House of Commons, citizens--mainly a mixture of Laborites, churchmen and the more conservative Britons--have been fearfully prophesying the onslaught, forecasting an instant drop of cultural standards to the twelve-year-old level that they insist television has induced in the U.S. But other millions wait like a huge fifth column, eager for the day when they can switch their allegiance and their TV dials to multichannel reception and to something more stimulating than the toneless, grey gruel fed them by the BBC.

Admen's Heartburn. This week, amid the scaffolding of half-finished office buildings, in ancient music halls hastily made into studios and in smart Mayfair suites, feverish platoons of producers, directors, scriptwriters, camera crews, actors and admen are marshaling their forces for TV-day--Sept. 22. Commercial television, British-style, will not start out as a replica of the American brand. By government ruling, only six minutes of sales talk will be allowed each hour, and the plugs must be concentrated at the beginning and end of the hour, or during "natural breaks" in the program. No sponsor may pick his own show: his sales message must be rotated in different spots according to the convenience of the program companies who rent TV facilities from the government's watchdog Independent Television Authority. This has caused some heartburn among admen. Groaned one: "Suppose a cigaret commercial gets placed next to a discussion of lung cancer!"

There are other limitations. Commercial TV will broadcast 52 1/2 hours a week (compared to some 130 hours in the U.S.). The screen must be left blank on Sunday mornings so as not to compete with churchgoing; no Sunday afternoon shows may be aimed at children, because they might entice them away from Sunday school. At 6 every evening will occur the "toddler's truce," an hour of TV silence, so that parents can wring out their moppets and put them to bed. The program companies have made an unwritten agreement to limit U.S. imports to 25% of the week's programming. But arrangements have already been made to acquaint Britons with I Love Lucy (scheduled to compete with BBC's prize variety hour, The Ted Ray Show), Dragnet, Hopalong Cassidy, Ed Murrow's Person to Person, and Billy Graham. Last fortnight the contracts were signed for the import of Liberace, complete with candelabra and toothy smile. But many of the home-grown products will bear a resemblance to U.S. shows. Example: Sunday Night at the Palladium, featuring such stars as Gracie Fields and Johnnie Ray, will be a vaudeville hour on the lines of Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town. Basically, the commercial TVmen think the BBC incapable of offering them real competition.

Yelling Soapboxes. The only discernible nervousness lies in just how the British public will react to TV sales messages. Said one gingerly adman: "The problem is how to sell your product without infuriating the viewer. An Englishman doesn't want anyone telling him what to eat for breakfast. We have to approach him unawares." Another explains how this will be done: "Suppose you're advertising a detergent called Faz. The British way will be to have a sincere housewife, homely, ordinary, just like any British housewife. She begins by telling what a hard day she's had . . . When the viewer has begun to melt, she says, 'The only thing that saved my life is Faz. It's a wonderful way to wash things.' In an American commercial, you would have hit much sooner. You'd open with a chorus line of little soapboxes yelling 'Faz! Faz! Faz!' and go on from there. We would never stand for that."

Not only will British admen have to creep up on their victims, but there is a long list of advertising unmentionables. No TV ads may be accepted from "moneylenders, matrimonial agencies, fortunetellers, undertakers, bookmakers [who are legal in Britain], manufacturers of specifics for slimming, bust development, contraceptives, smoking cures or products for the treatment of alcoholics." On children's shows "no method of advertisement may be employed which takes advantage of the natural credulity or sense of loyalty of children."

Scurrying Laggards. Commercial TV's biggest advance headache comes from the fact that British TV sets have been made to receive only one channel, the BBC. So far, scarcely a sixth of London's 1,300,000 set owners have paid out the money (average price: $30) necessary to make the conversion. But commercial TVmen hope that word of mouth about the new shows will send the laggards scurrying to their TV repairmen, and I.T.A.'s Director-General Sir Robert Eraser also forecasts a tremendous rise in TV sets from the current 4,500,000 to 12 million. Although in the beginning there will be only three commercial TV stations--London, Manchester and Birmingham--Sir Robert contemplates an eventual 40. "TV is the greatest of all civilizing forces," says he. "So long as it is not actually wicked, it is a great force--even if it is fairly bad."

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