The cinema : 1952 (1952)

TELEVISION PROSPECT 183 IV All the questions that we have touched on affect the future of television in various ways. To begin with, they all influence the style and technique of presentation, and in this field there is still much to be discovered. Obviously the best of material can be ruined and sometimes is by listless use of television's resources, and the finest dialogue is enhanced by a well-composed visual. But at levels higher than grammar, unsolved and fascinating questions abound. Granted the primal illusion of the cathode tube, what other grades of illusion are there? How far, in outside broadcasts, can the material be selected and polished? When can studio reconstruction, in feature programmes, replace outside broadcast without destroying the sense of imaginative reality? Where is the critical difference between a feature on juvenile crime, where nearly every courtroom and home is built in the studio, and another on metal-workers, relayed direct from a London factory? And, in the latter instance, what qualities of illusion are blended when, as was actually the case, direct transmission and film sequences are combined? These questions are far from academic, for the producer's or writer's answers to them will control his approach to his job ; since he is bound to work in terms of what he thinks his audience will expect. Yet such problems demand perhaps more time and experience than we have had. For it no longer seems the simple case that the types of illusion are sharply divided, between the studio play at the extreme, through the studio feature, the visit to factory or farm, the variety turn and the interview, down to the outside broadcast of race or match. The apparently separate qualities of these, with the separate responses that they seem to require, can be successfully combined. Yet from this very attempt at