High definition
On an April night in 1955 I was one of two dozen people who stuffed themselves into a small Toronto living room to watch a small television set for two hours. We were there partly because we knew history was being made: Hamlet was being broadcast live on the first English-language station in Canada. We were crowded together because in 1955 most people had no TV set of their own.
A rookie director, David Greene, was directing a company of the best actors from the small semi-pro Canadian theatre world. Lloyd Bochner played Hamlet, Kate Reid was Ophelia, Robert Christie was Polonius and Katharine Blake was Gertrude. Was it great? No, perhaps not, but it was Hamlet. This was in the CBC’s expansive, we-can-doanything period. Was CBC television elitist in those early years, as MPs in Ottawa often charged? It was offensively highbrow, they reckoned, as well as expensive — $30,000 in production costs for Hamlet alone. The CBC was dedicated to diversity, but cultural diversity rather than the racial diversity that’s routinely sought these days.
Its goal was to encompass all levels of interest, from hockey to a ballet performance of Swan Lake and a complete version of Mozart’s opera, The Marriage Of Figaro — for an entire evening, two and a half hours. Eric Koch, a CBC executive for many years, said that CBC people felt they were serving not just the country but a standard of knowledge, taste and principle. Those not interested found it boring. Apprentice, wannabe elitists like me found it thrilling.
I thought of those years, and particularly of Hamlet, when I was reading the other day yet another garland of praise for the television of today. Undoubtedly, TV drama is the best it has ever been. There’s more substance in the scripts, more talent in the actors, more audacity in the directors. Since The Wire began its 60-episode run on HBO in 2002, everything has changed. Agreed.
But along with that happy news, critics and other commentators often imply that the earliest phase of television drama was lightweight and boring; a “vast wasteland,” as a U.S. government official once famously called it. In truth, there was much more of interest in those years than anyone now acknowledges.
At the same time that the CBC was adapting Shakespeare and Mozart, the product of quite different ambitions was flowing in from the U.S. American TV dramatists reasoned that dramas watched mainly in homes might well concentrate on domestic issues. Paddy Chayefsky emerged as the great exponent of this impulse. He developed a kitchen-sink style of realism with intimate settings, the characters drawn from his Jewish upbringing in the Bronx.
A sentimental, slice-of-life TV drama, Marty, about a lonely butcher finding love, appeared first on The Philco Television Playhouse and was later adapted as a movie that won Chayefsky an Academy Award for his script. He was the most admired and imitated writer of his TV generation. His tone set the style that made TV drama a talked-about form of personal theatre.
Those were one-off plays, eagerly awaited by good-sized audiences. But even episodic weekly programs could also rise to a distinguished level. Reginald Rose’s series, The Defenders, was an excellent example. Each week two defence lawyers, a veteran played by E.G. Marshall and his junior associate by Robert Reed, worked their way through an engrossing plot, almost always with a social message built into the narrative. It could easily have become predictable, but Rose (he wrote the long-enduring Twelve Angry Men for Studio One) proved capable of keeping the idea fresh and emotionally vibrant. A nine-episode DVD of the first season has recently been issued.
From another source, Britain, attractive and memorable television appeared, reaching Canadians through American public television. The great event for many people was The Forsyte Saga, based on novels by the popular English writer, John Galsworthy. The Forsytes are a successful family, something like the one that produced Galsworthy himself. A few generations from farmer ancestors, they aren’t allowed to forget that they are “new money.”
Judging by the amount of conversation it generated, and the many articles written about it, this 1967 series was the most popular TV from Britain until Downton Abbey. It made stars of Eric Porter as Soames Forsyte, Kenneth More as Young Jolyon and Nyree Dawn Porter as Irene. Its 26 episodes, shown again and again, turned out to be addictive for viewers all over the world and were the first British series sold to the Soviet Union. The Jewel in the Crown, a Granada Television series about the dying days of British rule in India, based on Paul Scott’s the Raj Quartet, turned out to be another highly attractive import. It still looks good when bingewatched in the DVD version.
People used to hesitate before calling TV an art, but it shares an important characteristic with painting and fiction: the work of today always means more when you understand where it came from.