Under the Spreading FCC

During a recent tour to raise funds for the Israeli government, the speaker offered a free box of candy or cigars to anyone in his audiences who had ever had a phone call from a TV rating service. "I took a gamble," said Comedian George Jessel, "but no one came forward."

This testimonial to the absurdity of TV ratings was given at a special FCC hearing in Manhattan. The commission was collecting the views of "a number of persons who are actively engaged in the creation, production, writing, casting, sale and licensing of programs." Their recommendations were not revolutionary--tighten licensing requirements, weed out the Madison Avenue orchids--but the testimony was considerably more entertaining than most TV fare.

Long-term Recall. The polysyllables of David Susskind, for example, pooled on the courtroom floor, spread to the walls and up to the ceiling, and held the committee spielbound for 210 minutes. In one triple metaphor, he summarized television drama as "celluloid sausage coming down the pike by the ream." Without referring to his own indifferent and unoriginal shows, Susskind estimated that TV as a whole had become "90% travesty, a gigantic comic strip, a huge ho-hum. I tremble for TV as a professional practitioner--as a father--as a citizen."

Trembling only slightly, Chief Counsel Ashbrook Bryant looked over the upper rims of his glasses into the robin's-egg eyes of the witness, and asked: "In plain words, what happened?"

It was Playwright Paddy Chayefsky, looking for all the world like a split-bearded king, who later in the day gave the best reply to Bryant's question. "There is a moral fiber that is not there today in TV," he said. "Heads of networks are individually decent, sensible and intelligent. But they pursue the wrong for the benefit of profit. Television doesn't represent ourselves to ourselves. It should not dedicate itself to the least common denominator. Every country which did that collapsed. That's my quibble with Communism. It aims everything at the least common denominator.''

Worthington Miner, who has had a hand in producing such TV milestones as Studio One and Play of the Week, told the committee that sponsors often insist on contracts specifying a minimum number of killings or shootings per program. He also went out of his way to serve as a sort of one-man Berlitz course in Madavenue lingo. Example: "longterm recall" is something vital that admen ascribe to viewers who remember a given show for more than, say, ten minutes. But Miner's outstanding contribution was one of those sponsor-interference anecdotes that spring from TV's most advanced disease. In this case, Westinghouse Electric once tried to force him to change the title of Rudyard Kipling's The Light that Failed.

Absent Edges. Omnibus Producer Robert Saudek presented a reasoned argument centered in the idea that the "networks must not go on, in the name of freedom, polluting air they do not own." His proposal: set up several nonprofit organizations, staffed by experts in various fields who would select programs; the networks would simply function as agents selling air time, but would have no control over shows. Writer-Producer Robert Alan (The Sacco-Vanzetti Story) Aurthur, whose rhetoric was particularly eloquent when he was describing the "cold, slitted eyes of advertising men," revealed that low-flying, low-quality ABC, the network that had "made money without spending it," has recently been exporting consultants to help NBC do the same.

The witness whose glib and facile testimony best summed up the miscellaneous failings of television was Playwright Gore Vidal, who began on the familiar subject of TV taboos: "You can't discuss divorce or suicide, but sadism and murder are O.K." Vidal was the only witness to extend his indictment to public affairs shows, TV's one semi-sacred cow. There are "no controversial commentators any more," he pointed out. "Now you have these homogenized newscasters, men with no edges." He concluded: "Advertisers should not have the power to control TV. Let's face it, commercials not only are the best quality things shown over TV because of the money spent on them, but they are the most immoral thing in the country. Americans have a genius to believe morality only deals with sex. But when kids, turned into walking pitchmen by commercials that mix jingles with nursery rhymes, find out commercials are untrue, which they usually are, they come to think anything that comes out of that box is baloney--even the President of the U.S."

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