ABSTRACT
The high-point in the sexual war between television and the press came in the affair of a famous British anthropologist’s British Broadcasting Corporation series on The Human Animal, the third instalment of which featured the “Biology of Love”. The task was to defend civilization’s investment in the written word. The verdict from Ms. Libby Purves was a sniffy, a lofty warning not to “rely on prime-time television and a pop biologist to illuminate the central mysteries of human love.” Praise the innovations of miniaturized technology, but let the mini-camera be kept in its proper place. Revel in the chromatics of late-night television, but hold the black-on-white brickbats in readiness for the morning-after’s editorial assault. Several illustrations, the first being from the German which uses S-words so freely and ubiquitously that a paper like Der Spiegel is hard put to find synonyms and pleonasms in order to give a bit of verbal variety to the weekly stories.
