ABSTRACT

Between Us and Chaos I got back from prison in time for the "television police. While we were being introduced to the new Alsatian, and given a few brisk sketches of who was boss around here, I found myself settling reluctantly to what is now the domestic police routine. At the admittedly limited level of casual recognition, the police in Softly, Softly are indeed much like the police I normally meet: sensible, restrained, rather resigned; a kind of organised and very conventional common sense. TV scriptwriters, in series like Softly, Softly and The Troubleshooters and Special Branch, seem extraordinarily pre-occupied by questions of authority: who exactly takes the decisions and gives the orders. Since the world they know best is presumably that of the television authorities, it is tempting to suppose that we are getting a series of objective correlatives of Television Centre. But I doubt that. Modern management, which is now the characteristic form of authority, seems to me rather different, in tone and style, from these snapping egos taking responsibility, taking over, glaring and rasping at each other. I haven't experienced any institution, including the army, which could survive the cold snubbings and chronically overt power declarations which our televised institutions seem to thrive on. Of course I may have been lucky. But I think it is probably a case of inexperienced and rather isolated men having fantasies of how they would run things, and decorating them with what I expect they would call themes of dramatic conflict: the journalist's eyeballsto-eyeballs. More experience of a kind seems to go into the British police series than into their American counterparts, but as far as I can see it is the British series which most regularly act out the crisis

of authority and command. Ironside, for example, is a sugar daddy compared with the growling, insecure, status-conscious lot at Thamesford.