NO passion in the world," H.G. Wells once observed, "is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft." Wells might have been guilty of some hyperbole, but many writers, including some of ours, share his suspicion of editors' passions and pencils. Christopher Porterfield, in planning the cover story on TV Producers Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear, skirted the problem. One of the sections he presides over as a senior editor is Show Business & TV. He assigned himself to write the story, then served as his own editor. No one could quarrel with his credentials in either role. Since childhood he has been a committed fan and sometime practitioner of the performing arts. "When I was a moviegoing youth," he recalls, "I think I would have been willing to die for Ingrid Bergman." At Yale, Porterfield composed, arranged and conducted the music for his own jazz groups. His fickle affections, meanwhile, shifted from Bergman to the Broadway stars who appeared in New Haven tryouts. He and his roommate, Dick Cavett, frequently got backstage at the Shubert Theater to stargaze at close range. "In those days," says Porterfield, "I regarded performers with a mixture of fascination and awe. Since then I've become more fascinated and less awed."

Loss of awe is part of a journalist's apprenticeship, which Porterfield served as a reporter for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. He joined TIME in 1963 and eventually settled in New York as our music critic. In that job, he wrote the offbeat and upbeat Christmas cover story of 1968, with Bach as the central figure and the composer's durability as the theme. He then served for two years as a cultural correspondent based in London. There he first saw two British television programs, Till Death Us Do Part and Steptoe and Son, programs that later became the models for Yorkin and Lear's All in the Family and Sanford and Son.

"I'm intrigued by TV's enormous power and potential," Porterfield says, "but I can't help regarding it warily, as a kind of curious box droning away over there in the corner of the room." Though Yorkin and Lear's programs are not great art, there is no denying their success. "Whatever it takes to attract the greatest number of viewers each week, Yorkin and Lear have it. They are the best in their field, and we wanted to tell our readers who they are and how they operate. In the telling, I might have hoped for a better writer. But I couldn't have found a more tender, sympathetic editor."

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