Swing: Q.E.D.

Though it is strictly a local television channel, station KQED had the imagination and daring to begin a 13-interview series with Longshoreman-Philosopher Eric Hoffer five years before CBS discovered him. This fall KQED became the first U.S. station since 1960 to shoot a documentary inside Castro's Cuba. Its special on Duke Ellington, Love You Madly, was so lively that it was later played at the Edinburgh and Venice film festivals. Then there was the channel's Where's Jim Crow?, a weekly segment rooting out covert discrimination in the area. And, for a change of pace, there is pro basketball, a talk show with Author Kenneth Rexroth, as well as William Buckley's Firing Line, a "how-to" series on such subjects as skin diving and sewing, live chamber concerts, and an engrossing experimental show that examines far-out topics--for example, the people who advertise for sex partners in the underground weeklies. That program is called Nothing Goes Over the Devil's Back That Don't Buckle Under His Belly.*

The channel sounds as if it might be an affiliate of the BBC. But it is an independent station and--even more unlikely--a public (or educational) channel based in San Francisco. Commercial stations in town pay it the ultimate compliment of running KQED's better film footage on their news shows. And though there are 149 other public channels in the U.S., KQED this year provided more than half of the programming pooled among them by the Educational Television Service.

Beatles' Sheets. KQED's major focus and strength, though, is local. It claims more than 440,000 viewers a week. Among them: Mayor John Shelly, Lawyer Melvin Belli, Shirley Temple Black, who is a member of KQED's board of directors, and 36,000 other Northern Californians, who devotedly donate a minimum $12.50 annual membership fee that provides more than a quarter of the $2,400,000 budget. Another $200,000 to $300,000 comes from a wild annual public sale that in the past has attracted Auctioneers Ronald Reagan, Willie Mays and Bishop James Pike to gavel down such items as a safari to Africa and neckties made from bed sheets on which the Beatles slept.

KQED is also subsidized in effect by its 130-member staff, many of whom could earn far more in commercial broadcasting. Top man is General Manager James Day, who dates back to the 1953 beginnings, when KQED was headquartered in the back seat of a station wagon. Today, the channel's offices are three splintering wooden warehouses near Skid Row. The studios are not even soundproof (fire engines offer contrapuntal competition).

But fancy facilities aren't as important as using them properly. Rather than trying to compete with the commercial networks, General Manager Day concentrates on "the events that don't always make headlines or are reported with a two-minute film clip sandwiched into a news show." This programming strategy is sufficient proof that ingenuity and talent can make a swinging chick out of that little old lady, Public TV.

* An expression picked up from a Negro farm worker. KQED'S producers claim to give the title no special meaning, although it stems from Rabelais ("What is got over the Devil's back is spent under the belly") and suggests that ill-gotten riches are always squandered.

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