The Study of Mankind

The men with some of the best ideas in television often draw the worst time spots, the poorest budgets, the smallest audiences. That is what happened for more than two years to Robert Herridge, 38, producer of CBS's Camera Three. His 30-minute show has intellectual substance and imaginative flair, and has ranged from studies of Biblical man to verbal and pictorial experiments with Walt Whitman's poetry. But the program was confined to one local Manhattan station (WCBS), was televised on Saturdays at 2 p.m., reached a maximum audience of only 500,000, and had a production budget of $1,600 per show (about one-fifth the cost of an average three-minute commercial). Worse still, when it began an eight-part dramatization of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment last fall, it had to compete with the Army-Navy game.

Last week CBS put its stamp of quality on Camera Three by making it a network show. But the budget, more than doubled to $4,000, is still low, and the time spot (Sun. 11:30 a.m.) is as bad as ever. Nonetheless, Producer Herridge gave a good account of himself. His opening program was a dramatic enactment of Dostoevsky's short story, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. Well acted by Canadian John Drainie, it had what TV shows rarely have-an imaginative combination of literate vigor and moral point, plus a quality of probing wonder against which any televiewer could stretch his own mind.

With such shows, Camera Three has already captured the Peabody Award for the best educational program, the Ohio State Award for the top cultural show, and the Variety Showmanagement Award for "education with showmanship." It is the first local TV show to win all three.

Producer Herridge, a graduate of Northwestern (1939) and an ex-Air Force navigator, is a practicing poet and a frustrated novelist ("I think my trouble is that I read too much Thomas Wolfe too young"). His show is conceived as a TV illustration of Alexander Pope's line: "The proper study of mankind is man." The shows he is proudest of: an evocation of the love poems of Emily Dickinson, a ripsnorting Moby Dick, a song-and-dance recreation of The Ballad of John Brown. Camera Three is so far above the class of most commercial evening shows that with only a fraction of the money squandered on some of them it could probably outclass itself.

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