Concessions made to Eurovision

THERE must have been brooding and anxious reflection at Westminster Cathedral over the Pontifical High Mass broadcast to eight countries in Europe and to Ireland over Eurovision on Sunday. The special problems in broadcasting this Mass called for just about every possible concession short of breaking the rubric.
But it is only by making special efforts for special occasions like these that success is ever likely to be achieved in religious television broadcasting.
It was in fact the first Mass
ever broadcast on Eurovision by n-v. It was offered by UNDA, the international Catholic Radio and television organisation, and accepted on behalf of ATV by Father John Bebb.
The principal technical problem was of confining the Mass to the one hour available on Eurovision.
It was solved partly by selecting the shorter and more modern Lennox Berkeley Mass the Gtoria, for example, takes only three minutes to the average seven, minutes. But more to an almost martial attitude to time-keeping.
Viewers joined the Mass at the Gloria, and the Archbishop cooperated to the point of intoning the Gloria at the moment transmission began. Ile also reduced the number of times his mitre was taken off and put back so that extra seconds could be saved.
The four minutes available in the time-schedule for the people's communion was rigidly adhered to. not only by having three priests as well as the Archbishop sfstributing Communion, hut also arranging that if the four minutes were up before all had received it, then the Archbishop would hand over the ciborium to a fourth priest while he carried on with the M ass.
It was a lesson in organisation for television that some people might object to, But 1 am sure we shall still see much more of it in the future.
THE BBC's Monday night detective series has been steadily ploughing through the corpus—and the corpus delicti — of every fictional detective author that can he squared by the BBC's copyright department. James Bond—if you can call him a detective — is of course a notable omission.
This week Douglas Wilmer donned a deer-stalker to be Sherlock Holmes in The Speckled Band.
Some of the series have been passable. But there can have been fewer more wasteful programmes in the history of television. And wasteful in that commodity that television has in shortest supply—. ideas, Television planners are like couturiers. They can never see further ahead than next season. In TV no one is at present looking further ahead than next autumn. So when some planner suggested how splendid it would be to have a detective series no one thought of next year, let alone five years hence, when the search for material will be even more frantic than it is now.
Some of the loose, inept productions of this series may well have sunk some entertaining sleuths of fiction to some TV Hades for dead characters from which they will not be able to emerge because the Corporation has already tried them and found them failing.
It is of course the fashion to decry the critic who says: "Where is the talent coming from to fill the new channels and the long years ahead?" To these comes the reply that dearth of talent is a myth. It increases with the demand, they say, as the flood of talent which supplied ITV ten years ago and which will supply BBC-2 will prove. Unfortunately this glib defence does not take into account the chief factor — that television in Britain as a mass media is only about eight years old. And already a fantastic amount of material— much of it excellent, some of it outstanding, has been gobbled up, never to be seen again.
The writing on thescreen can be more clearly read in America. There television has been a real mass media for longer—about 17 years. And there they have been reduced to what they consider to be sinking pretty tow — taking more British television programmes for American screens.
ABAND of worthies tried hard last week to have The Open Grave, a Capadian play. banned from our screens and only succeeded in winning acres of publicity for it.
The one thing an aspiring television producer hopes for in presenting a controversial play, ie that someone will question its suitability to be broadcast in a question to the PostmasterGeneral in the House of Commons. It rarely—if ever—causes the play to be banned. But it wins a couple of million viewers.
It turned out to be a harmless but neither new nor inspiring picture that the author Charles Israel likes to imagine would have faced Our Lord if he returned to a western civilisation in 194.
It was not an allegory of the Passion as some of its would-be censors apparently thought it would be. Comparisons were invited but they were to me quite unconvincing both in the reported life of the dead leader and in the ludicrous "disciples" who were left behind.
Like some other religious plays before it, the author took up a challenge quite beyond his ability to develop. But it was very cleverly publicised. The M.P.'s and others who fell into the trap must be kicking themselves now for their duplicity.