The Fourth Network

In most imaginations, the term educational television instantly produces a picture of a threadbare professor with terminal logorrhea, droning on and on and on. But educational TV has long since set higher standards than that, and no one is less interested in the dull professor than the people who are shaping the future of educational TV in the U.S.

There are 64 educational stations in the country. Many of them have had massive help from the Ford Foundation, which has spent an estimated $80 million in support of educational programs and facilities. This spring the Federal Government has finally begun to take action. Last month a bill was signed providing $32 million to be used for new ETV broadcasting facilities, and last week the Senate passed the all-channel receivers bill (TIME, Feb. 2), which requires manufacturers to equip new TV sets to receive not only the twelve channels in the very high frequencies but also 70 additional channels in the ultra-high frequencies.

This--long a favorite dream of FCC Chairman Newton Minow--should eventually relax the stranglehold of big-time commercial television, making room for dozens of new stations, most of them noncommercial. "If we don't expand television," says Minow, "soon we will have unnecessarily few people deciding what larger and larger numbers of people will be seeing. Without UHF we wouldn't get educational stations into more than a fraction of the communities that want and need them."

Deep & Lingering. Nearly all the educational stations now operating in the U.S. are affiliates of the Manhattan-based National Educational Television and Radio Center. The center produces shows and acts as a distributor for all the better work that is done in the field. During this past season, in fact, N.E.T. sent out some of the best programs that were seen on television of any kind.

Characteristically excellent were a couple of documentaries produced and directed by an Englishman named Denis Mitchell. In one, he took a deep, lingering look at a small town in Kentucky, neither interpreting nor judging, using no narration at all, but merely assembling a collection of vignettes--a pig being killed by rifle, a woman cooking on a wood stove, an old Negro in a Frank Lloyd Wright hat--that were enough to make any viewer feel that he had lived in that town for 35 years. The only voices belonged to the townspeople--talking about the practice of country law, about their debt to God, or about the colored people: "I like a nigger--if he knows he's a nigger. I like my mule, but when he forgets he's a mule, I don't like him any more." The South's race trouble emerged in its true perspective, as a vital but not all-consuming fact of Southern life.

Mitchell's other documentary was equally superb. He went into the homes of two men in Chicago--one a salesman, the other an artist who had lost an arm in the Spanish Civil War--and let them tell the stories of their lives. It was natural, intimate, replete with insight--the kind of thing that television is uniquely equipped to do but which is seldom attempted and almost never so artfully achieved. At the end, viewers might have thought that they had just finished reading two brilliant novels.

No Outlet. Work like Denis Mitchell's is the general aim of ETV producers, and not the exception, as it is on ABC, NBC and CBS. Not classroom television, N.E.T. programs range all over the spectrum of interest from the natural sciences to drama and jazz. And none of the 64 stations broadcasts a single commercial.

Educational TV does not always deserve an A-plus. There are still plenty of dull didactic hours on all its stations, and N.E.T. supplies only ten hours of new programming a week, partly acquired from the BBC and other foreign producers but generally produced by the network itself and its affiliates. Mainly, local stations have to fill their time independently, and much of it is devoted to yawning forums and tediously detailed state histories (Nicholas Nobody slept here). But some local programs are excellent, and these are picked up by N.E.T. for distribution to the whole network.

In its short history, educational TV has demonstrated how much can be done on relatively low budgets. Most local stations cost only about $250,000 a year to run. The center itself operates on an annual budget of $4,500,000. and most of its shows cost $7,000 to $25,000 to produce. It charges its affiliated stations only a modest fee annually for its services.

Big-name stars and variety shows are obviously beyond educational TV's reach, and will remain the exclusive province of the commercial networks. But last week the Fourth Network, as it likes to call itself, was offering everything from Ibsen's The Master Builder to a documentary on Japan: The Changing Years.

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