ABSTRACT
As We See Others It didn't seem a good week to begin television reviewing. The late July programmes looked like the summary of television which Ioverhear from my older Cambridge acquaintances who haven't got sets: hours of sport, Westerns, old films, repeats. I watched a fair amount, but I didn't see any new programme that deserved extensive review. The Vanished City (BBC-1) had looked interesting: London before the Industrial Revolution, on engravings and on film, with accompanying 18th-century music and verse. Some of this was pleasant, but very little illuminating. The fashion for mood programmes, sucking in words, music and images to what is called at the conference the flow, has had its successes, but the technique cannot reasonably include the disguised thesis: here, a familiar nostalgia for the 18th century and an implication of the ugliness of modernity. It wasn't only that in the stylish filming this visual contrast wasn't made out; there was also the verse, telling some of the truth the visual images didn't catch, though read in an "impressive" poetry-reading monotone; and the delightful music, which washed over the riverside works and the fine glass towers as persuasively, in mood, as over the Georgian squares and terraces. Mood, indeed, manages all, as the commercials keep reminding us; the connections of imagination and argument require a different discipline.
