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TELEVISION PROSPECT 185
grows more specialized, that the miner takes his bread for granted, and the miller his coal. Yet the truism conceals a potentially appalling situation ; for our culture encourages individualism, and our political and economic behaviour in the mass is inevitably conditioned by appeals directed to individual, not group, self-interest. Thus it is only too easy to assess events of whose details we know nothing, simply by the way they affect our own plans and desires. We are all terribly ill-informed about the world outside our homes and jobs : and at the same time we are called on to make momentous judgements and decisions about it.
Yet the very influences, industrial and social, which have atomized and complicated the once simpler business of social living, have also produced changes in our methods of communicating with one another which can, in their turn, directly affect our judgements and actions. It was hoped years ago that the commercial cinema would offer the means not only of reasonable escape but of reasonable information through the presentation of short factual films ; thus the isolation of the individual might be to some extent lessened. Yet the cash nexus that seals the lips and limits the freedom of the commerical cinema was too strong for the documentary; and documentary film-makers, without the stimulus of exhibition, have failed as a school to develop their style, and all too often are writing and filming in terms that were exciting in the thirties and are unevocative today.
Whether or not this predicament lasts, television could now take over and do better part of the social job that documentary film-makers set themselves, leaving to the film people the opportunity to work more imaginatively and less functionally. For the television set in hundreds of thousands of homes ought to be a tremendous influence to make us better informed about the fascinating detail of the complex, modern world. Radio has already accustomed us to the factual programme, and television is rapidly doing the same ;