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TELEVISION PROSPECT 1 79
do without. The imprecise analogy of group hypnosis best explains the power which filmgoing can exercise on our lives, making us able to accept, momentarily at any rate, conventions of behaviour and simulacra of reality which in sober daylight we might reject. For in the cinema there is no daylight ; and it is only too easy, as the habit of filmgoing grows, to accept in common with the rest of the anonymous group standards of manner and morality which subtly work their way into the pattern of active behaviour.
But television viewing differs from film in all these particulars. It is in no sense as yet a group act, and if it becomes a ritual it will be observed at the family hearth. Televisors may well be installed one day in public halls, yet the novel fact is the intrusion of television into the home itself. Home viewing does not mean, as some claim, that television requires of us no more than a passive act ; this misconception is caused by the habit of listening to, or hearing, the radio while sewing or reading. But the radio set merely deserves undivided attention : the televisor demands it.
We need not be concerned with those who are in the first six months of their television life, and who find the new hypnotist in the home irresistible. Investigation reveals that this state does not last, and that sooner or later equilibrium is restored, the garden weeded and the stockings darned. Once television is accepted in the home, it requires of the viewer a deliberate act, different from filmgoing but no less positive. He no longer dissolves, in some sense, part of his individuality in the mass audience, but is essentially himself; television takes for its audience the natural man, relaxed in his home, or irritated by the presence of mother or tiresome aunt. It has not the questionable advantage of customers who all, for the period of the show at any rate, accept roughly the same conventions and standards and expect the same patterns of story and dialogue. For all the assumptions on which so many film plots rest, unquestioned in the