ABSTRACT

Shoot the Prime Minister It is easy to make a simple case for the pleasures of television. The three programmes I most enjoyed last week were the Schubert recital which replaced Workshop (BBC-2), Heinz Sielmann's film of caribou, bear and beaver in the Canadian late autumn, Wild New World (BBC-l), and the repeat of Black Sound, Deep Song, the film on Lorca and Andalusia (BBC-2). Here in each case was fine professional work, on interests I already have and with resources not otherwise available to me. But of course I notice, not only that two of these were on BBC-2, which is increasingly operating as a kind of Third Programme, It but also that they all belong to an already structured world, of observation, imagination and performance, in which television functions as a superbly efficient and convenient transmitter. I think this case needs to be made from time to time: some of the least reviewed programmes are among the most valuable work we get. But I think also that this kind of selective viewing, within a known structure, falls short of the critical response which television demands: that scrutiny, of what is now characteristic in the use of the medium, which a correspondent describes as "an absolutely worthwhile commitment to the ephemeral". It is just because Schubert, Lorca and the natural history film inhabit their own still relatively secure cultural areas that the viewer turned critic must look also at what is, as yet, uncertain and undefined.