When the Holme Moss station starts on Friday the North will have its first look at the programmes coming from Alexandra Palace and it is likely that the television producers and planners may have to look again at some of their output in the light of this huge new audience.
It is not necessary to labour the difference between North and South to the point of imagining a contrast between a cloth-capped barbarian who only relishes funny turns and a civilised viewer who only enjoys the highbrow acts. But there will be in the North a critical and independent attitude to television programmes, and probably a considerable distaste for airy-fairy trifles with a disguised educative purpose. Indeed anybody anywhere ought to dislike those.
There is no reason to think the North will not appreciate plays and ballet and most of what television does already, but the audiences will certainly want as much as possible of outside events, and especially sport, from their own region. It has often been suggested that the timing of evening programmes will not suit people who normally get home, eat, go to bed, and rise earlier than Southerners. This seems an insuperable problem, but surely those who are really fond of television can bear to stop up till about 10 30 to see the programme through, and surely also they can bear to wait till eight o’clock for the start. They could always put the outmoded sound radio on to fill the gap.
Is it by coincidence or intention that the sound broadcasting service and the television service seem to do the same thing so often at the same time? Are they trying to tread on one another’s toes, or keep up stimulating competition, or are they just copying one another? For those who either listen or look it may be all right, but for those who do both it is sometimes annoying.
Not long ago there were simultaneous outbursts of Trollope, and now the “over-sixties” are being feted in both the Light Programme and on television. Such programmes are of more social than artistic significance, but in so far as the B.B.C. does its good turn by putting them on we should not perhaps complain if they are only moderately entertaining. The Children’s Hour serial of “Puck of Pook’s Hill” is very well done and “Old Men at Pevensey” was particularly good; John Wyse and Stanley van Beers stood out from a capable cast. Georgie Wood is not the ideal Puck, for he rather overplays the part and makes it more quaint and fussy than Kipling’s stories suggest.
