Viewable Alternatives

By Richard Burgheim

Educational TV, once sobersided, is offering the brightest addition to this year's midseason schedule. Three programs from the Public Broadcasting Service are somewhat flawed but highly viewable alternatives to commercial TV's flavorless pap.

The Great American Dream Machine is the most ambitious series since they turned off the electricity at the old Public Broadcasting Laboratory in 1969. The show, produced by NET, combines elements of the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes and NBC's Laugh-In, with a useful admixture of iconoclasm. It goes those shows some better by eliminating the anchor men and hosts. Instead, items are bridged by enchanting graphics, nostalgic film and a very droll score.

In the four weekly shows so far, the content has been somewhat less compelling than the style. Most successful segments: a film essay on Americans' fixation with auto demolition derbies; savage slashes by Columnist Nicholas von Hoffman at pharmaceutical hucksterism and the futility of "law-and-order"; a muckraking shocker by Author Paul Jacobs on the allegedly slipshod safety standards of the Atomic Energy Commission; and a sketch on romance, True Confessions-style.

The series' most disappointing weekly feature is a satirical consumer report by Actor Marshall Efron. He has speared some appropriate targets, like nonnutritious foods and misleading labeling, but his humor and attack are much too forced and fevered. Another promising idea, Studs Terkel's talk show with real people instead of talk-show people, is mostly wind. Last week, though, Terkel's regular hardhat got off a gorgeous line about how his American dream was to own a bowling alley--with Arthur Schlesinger and Gore "Videll" (as he pronounced it) as pin boys.

The First Churchills, a lusty historical chronicle of Restoration England, is the BBC's successor to The Forsyte Saga. Donald Wilson is again the writer-producer and Susan Hampshire the star. She plays Sarah Churchill, who, she concluded after researching through some 25 books, was "the most important woman in England who hasn't been Queen." The hero, John Churchill (John Neville), an estimable court counselor and the military strategist behind the victory at Blenheim, became the first Duke of Marlborough. (The late Sir Winston was his direct descendant.) The performances are marked by uncommon grace and gusto, and the antique language is delivered with perfect aplomb. The outstanding supporting actor: either James Villiers, who plays Charles II, or the spaniel he constantly cuddles (a special breed that is to this day called the King Charles spaniel).

The involuted politics compressed into the twelve-part series fuddled British audiences, and even Alistair Cooke, who opens each episode with a primer for Yanks, seems a mite confused. Viewers are just as well off ignoring the incomprehensible Popish Plot and other games of succession to concentrate on the sexual politics and the wigs-off look at the life-style of the 17th and 18th century British court. It is perfectly clear, for instance, why Churchill came home from Continental wars so lovelorn that he dove into bed with Sarah without taking time to remove his spurs.

NET Playhouse, in its fifth and perhaps liveliest season, is TV's only surviving weekly theater series. This year's offerings have featured the ubiquitous Miss Hampshire in a glorious BBC revival of Oscar Wilde's The Ideal Husband, Helen Hayes in an engaging self-portrait, and Kim Stanley on a bill of one-acters by Tennessee Williams. Last week Playhouse launched a six-part retrospective of life and film in the 1930s. One aim of the series is to slash through the current sentimentalization of the Great Depression era. "Young people romanticize the '30s," says Arthur Miller. "In actuality, it was a terrible time." The opener was Miller's play A Memory of Two Mondays. It is a plotless, proletarian slice-of-life drama, but Jacqueline Babbin's production was a model of intelligent TV adaptation, and Paul Bogart directed a first-rate cast headed by Estelle Parsons, Jack Warden, and George Grizzard.

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