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TELEVISION PROSPECT 175
life, and the questions formulated above are still open. They can all be asked, and no answers have been found, because television is still in the experimental stage. The composition of programmes seems to reveal little planning, little evidence of direction or purpose ; indeed, it often looks as though the television controllers had asked themselves, 'How can we possibly fill up all those columns in the Radio Times?' Yet I doubt whether there is confusion within the B.B.C. There is uncertainty, surely enough, some complacency, and a good deal of blind navigation ; but it is the groping uncertainty of people who know that they are on to a good thing, and that they are living in a period of conflicting and interacting ideas, out of which firm lines of technique, style, and form will one day develop. This juvenile period in the life of television is as certain to be chaotic, full of surprises and reverses, as was the pre19 14 era of cinema.
This is not to say that television must be left alone to grow up; for current criticism, though it exaggerates and dramatizes the situation, is an integral part of the development of the medium. Practice alone will not produce the best, neither will theory. At the present time, a valuable service is given by the serious critics in the press ; for television is faster in production than film, and producers who are suitably humble can perhaps learn more of their successes and failures from the critics than can their fellows in the commercial cinema, and so can repeat or modify their experiments. For television is still in the state of primitive anarchy ; there is no rule or law, whether in the theory of television's role in society, the nature and pattern of its programmes, or the detail of technique and mise-en-schie.
This is hardly the time then to attempt an 'aesthetic of television', even if such a thing exists. But it is opportune it never cannot be to examine what the medium can do, and to discuss what it should attempt. For television requires an informed, thinking audience; and the viewer