Where the Television Critic Comes In

Extract

Excuses that television is still only in the experimental stage are platitudinous but inevitable. Television criticism too is still forcedly exploratory, critics being of their nature parasites unable to advance beyond the medium which provides their material.

Television criticism hitherto stems from two sources: radio criticism and film criticism. To both the radio critic and the film critic television is, at present anyway, a more cumbersome, unwieldy, more realistic medium, more concerned with what it presents than how it presents it. Enjoying neither the incorporeal detachment of radio, nor the manoeuvrability of celluloid, it lacks the fluidity and flexibility of both radio and cinema. Until now, too, it falls far short of the purely visual achievements of the cinema, so that programmes of any visual appeal at all stand out in lonely splendour in the viewer’s memory: the Coronation of course (among its many other and more important achievements) was one, the St Denis High Mass another; but an otherwise often tedious and heavily criticized programme, Lime Grove’s Elizabethan evening, was also a pleasure to the eye as few TV programmes are.

Television in fact overlaps at many points with radio (not always to the disadvantage of ‘steam’ radio); at others it complements the cinema (by now it should be clear that each is going to need the other). More important for the critic is to determine where television differs from the other mechanised media of communication; what its own properties are..