Television is the best medium yet discovered for selling goods. That is the opinion of practical men in the United States, the home of commercial television, and it can be backed up by an array of facts and figures showing how the enormous sums of money spent on television advertising justify themselves in the eyes of those whose business it is to sell mass-produced goods.

The same factors that enable television to sell goods enables it also to sell ideas, provided that, like the goods, they are suitable for a mass public. Television is probably not the best medium for spreading original ideas, any more than it is the best medium for selling first editions or vintage port or thoroughbred sires or any other commodity that can be bought only by the few. But for the sort of vague general ideas that make up most people’s everyday thinking, for the habits of thought and standards of value that influence the ordinary man’s life, television has advantages over and above the other forms of mass-communication—print, cinema, radio—and it has access to people who are rarely touched by the still older influence of platform, stage, and pulpit.

Not so long ago, most people in civilized countries viewed the world through the medium of the popular newspaper and the cheap book. Later, this medium was largely displaced by the radio and the films. Now television is showing its power to replace them all as the universal oracle, the social law-giver, the norm-setter, the mirror in which you can see life as it ought to be and as you come to think it is.

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..

As newly discovered television ‘stars’ blaze into incandescence, or at least into headlines, and as one parlour game succeeds another, radio programmes begin to sound a defensive note. The strong emotions which are revealed when the House of Commons debates the future of television colour most discussions by the professionally engaged of the claims of sound broadcasting in a world which is rapidly switching from loud-speaker to screen. In the Autumn 1953 number of the B.B.C. Quarterly Louis MacNeice made ‘A Plea for Sound’. The word ‘plea’, with its overtones of advocacy and partisanship, suggests some of the passion which this controversy can provoke. And one of the unfortunate results is that the opposing sides in this pointless warfare have resorted to that most tedious of stratagems which forbids the praise of X without the condemnation of Y. Not that I think Mr MacNeice guilty of this. ‘Television, obviously’, he says, ‘is an exciting and fertile medium in which many fine things can be done that sound could never attempt. The point is that sound can do many fine things that will never be possible in television. We should all therefore hope both that television may develop to the utmost and that sound broadcasting may survive.’ In which future directions are these fine things likely to be found?

Imagine a future in which sound and television are equally available to most people, in which several alternative television programmes are transmitted for the greater part of the day, and in which the present technical limitations of television have been to a considerable extent overcome.

During the past year, the B.B.C. has broadcast about fifty religious television programmes. Of these, twelve were major ‘outside broadcasts’ from churches, and the rest were from the studio. Catholics contributed six programmes: Pontifical High Mass from Leeds Cathedral; the Easter Vigil from Clifton Cathedral; Evening Service with Benediction from St James’, Spanish Place; the Westminster Passion Play Behold the Man and Talks from the studio by Bishop Fulton Sheen and Mr Frank Sheed. Before last year we had contributed Solemn Mass from St Denis, Paris, and some half-a-dozen other programmes, including an Evening Service from St Chad’s, Birmingham, Stations of the Cross, the Christmas Crib and an illustrated Talk. All these broadcasts have been largely experimental. Comments and the reaction of viewers have been most carefully observed, and we are by no means yet clear in our minds as to the best way in which Television can serve the Catholic Apostolate.

B.B.C. policy in religious television is identical with that in sound broadcasting which has been publicly stated more than once. Perhaps the clearest statement was made by the then Director General, Sir William Haley, in a speech to the British Council of Churches in November 1948. Dealing with the question whether the B.B.C. was neutral where Christian values were concerned, he said: ‘Of course it is not. There are many demands of impartiality laid upon the Corporation, but this is not one of them. We are citizens of a Christian country, and the B.B.C.— an institution set up by the State—bases its policy upon a positive attitude towards the Christian values.

The publicists for television like to regard the medium as a threat to films, and though the film-makers—or, rather, the distributors—pretend that it is, the connection between the two forms of visual presentation is so close that it is impossible to separate them as completely as either of their advocates would, apparently, like.

For a long time to come television programmes are going to have to depend on some kind of film presentation. There are a large number of newly-formed companies whose sole purpose is to make films for television consumption. Those so far viewed by the critics do not inspire confidence that any significant advance in the art of cinema need be expected. They are patently made as time-fillers and reflect the current lack of policy and sense of ill-at-ease to be seen among the producers of television programmes in this country.

It should have dawned by now upon the minds of both sellers and buyers of television programmes, that whatever the actual merits or demerits of films or telecasts at the present moment, ultimately they will have to differ considerably from each other and also, ultimately, they will have to be good of their kind if the customers are to be expected to continue their patronage of either kind of diversion.

It is interesting to note that, despite the frantic efforts of the film-world to try out various forms of wide-screen and panoramic and three-dimensional films during the past year in order to provide a counter-attraction to television, the films so far shown nave not been highly rated by the critics.

Unda is not the latest of the initial-words that reflect the multitude of international organizations that have come into being to serve the hopes and fears of the post-war world. It is simply the Latin word for ‘wave’ and is the convenient name for the co-ordinating body for Catholic radio and television throughout the world, with its headquarters at Fribourg in Switzerland. Last February, the television section of unda organized the first international Conference for Catholic television in Paris. It was attended by representatives from most western European countries, as well as Canada, the United States and Cuba, together with observers from UNESCO and the Council of Europe.

In a first gathering, with terms of reference so necessarily wide, the work of the Conference was largely exploratory, but it was soon evident that in many countries the potentialities of so powerful a medium of mass communication as television were already acutely realized by the Church. Indeed the Conference was prefaced by the ordinary Sunday morning religious programme from the French television studios, and the delegates were able to see for themselves how the French Dominicans (to whose charge the programme has been committed) have met the demand for Catholic worship and instruction through the new medium. It was a touching detail that the infant son of the producer of religious television features should have been baptized in the studio before the Mass began—perhaps a symbol of how actual is the inspiration of French religious television, now in its sixth year of active production.

The French television service, in collaboration with UNESCO, is at present carrying out an experiment in the form of transmissions intended for rural viewers gathered for collective viewing, or ‘Tele-Clubs’. The general purpose of this experiment is to discover, on the basis of concrete evidence, to what extent it is possible to put a completely new instrument like television at the service of popular education, and to make use of it for the material and spiritual progress and the international understanding that UNESCO wants to help its memberstates to promote among their peoples.