7 Days 22 December 1971ARTS

TV4 Whom?W HAT would you like to see

on a fourth television channel? More sport? All educa­tion? More commity-based pro­grammes? Nobody's quite sure yet which of the many alternatives would be the best solution for TV4. But what everybody does know is that they don't want TV4 allocated immediately and they don't want it allocated to the existing big five IT V companies.

“I would guess that there are no more than 300 people in the entire land, and that is probably an underestimation, who firmly believe that it is wise and desirable to set up ITV-2 at this time without a general enquiry . . writes Milton Shulman in the Evening Standard (December 8, 1971). Most people are agreed that TV4, our last remaining television channel until the ’80’s, is too important a national asset to be given away to the first pressure group that gets its foot inside the door. The workers who would man the fourth television channel have themselves said this: NUJ, ABS, FBU, NUT, NUS, SOGAT, ASMTS, Post Office Engineer­ing U nion and Radio Writers’ Associa­tion have all said ‘NO’ to the ITA’s attempts to get TV4.

The Problem?So where’s the problem? The

problem lies in the wording of the 1964 Television Act which gives the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications the complete power to allocate the fourth channel to whom ever he sees fit. He’s not answerable to Parliament or to the People.

Decisions DecisionsChristopher Chataway, the Minister

concerned, could well decide to allocate the fourth television channel in the next few days; he has previously said that he might make this decision in mid December. But he might wait. The only demands for a speedy decision on allocation come from the ITV com­panies themselves; they have spare studio facilities they could use and want to have their ITV2 in operation by mid 1973. Yet more profits.

But so far Chataway has carefully not committed himself in any way, but left all possible courses of action open.

Speaking at a debate on TV4 intro­duced by Philip Whitehead in the House of Commons last Wednesday, he firmly kept to his old line; that he would not agree to a public enquiry, but that the government, in making up its mind, was taking into consideration all the possible alternatives that had been published by

the TV4 Campaign and the ACTT and that all interested viewpoints were under review. But the Opposition benches remained unpersuaded by his reassurances, particularly as he had said that the Authority “had advanced a strong case,” after instancing his scepticism over the alternative proposals. He said it would be “difficult to envisage that it would be thought right(?) to televise all or most of parliamentary proceedings” ; that an educational channel would cause financial difficulties; that t he Dutch system of allocating time- to different groups had led “a lot o f people to conclude that this would not necessarily produce the most rewarding broad­casting. ” (Our Italics).

The CampaignThe TV4 Campaign was formed after

a one-day open conference was called on November 13 to discuss the urgent question of TV4. During the four weeks of its brief life, support for the Campaign has grown rapidly and the ensuing press coverage has been consistently sympathetic.

But there is still a Conservative government in power, just as there was in 1954 when the first bill authorising commercial television was rushed through Parliament. But this time the commercial lobby has less ammunition; this time ITV would not be providing competition but stifling it; and the ITV record over the last 17 years is far from laudable. And, as Shulman says, this time there are probably only a few hundred people in the country who actually want ITV2 at the moment, — hardly mass support.

As a matter of interestExpressing the will o f the people in

their opposition to the allocation of TV4 to the existing commercial TV companies are the following MP’s: Antony Wedgwood Benn, Philip Whitehead, John Golding, Michael English, Andrew Faulds and Sir Geoffrey de Freitas.. . And some individuals who have supported the TV4 Campaign: Lord Olivier, John Dexter, Arnold Wesker, Michael Blakemore, Tom Stoppard, Tony Garnett, Corin Redgrave, Jack Gold, Jeremy Sandford, Charles Wood, K. Tynan, Ken Russell, Ken Loach, D. Jones, David Mercer, Marghanita Laski, Prof. Misha Black, James Cameron.. . and many more. Petition form s and fu ther details about the T V 4 Campaign are available from the TV 4 Campaign C/O 30 Craven Street, London WC2.

At the Movies:

Spiegel Spiels Epic BullshitN lCHOLAS AND Alexandra

" opened at the Odeon in London's Leicester Square on November 29, and within the first week had taken £19,650 net. Spiegel's epic will rate as this winter's number one holiday movie.

With its budget of £3 million, the film narrates the lives and times of the last Czar and Czarina of Imperial Russia, from the birth of their only son Alexis in 1904 to the early hours of July 17 1918, when the Romanoff dynasy was destroyed. It is based on the best-seller of the same name by Robert K. Massie, which the Daily Express serialised in the weeks leading up to the film’s opening.

Nicholas and Alexandra is epic spectacle at its most profitable, but the film is likely to have little pay-off where it really counts — in people’s heads. The reason is simple; it is just too dull and mediocre to work. In fact, the guardians of the status quo should seriously consider whether Sam Spiegel is any longer a man they can count on.

The intentions behind the film are clear enough. The Czar and Czarina are meant to personify the subjective factor in history: if only they had been more in touch with reality, if only they had known how to concede token democratic rights to a starving populace, then the Russian revolution need never have happened. And why was the Czar so inept at handling affairs of state? The answer is obvious — he was preoccupied with the fortunes of his haemophiliac son, sole male descendent of the Romanoffs. No haemophiliac, no revolution.

Such a trivialisation of history might have developed into a meaty piece of reactionary propaganda, if only it had been handled with intelligence. ButNicholas and Alexandra is long, boring and unconvincing.

More Means LessThe director, Franklin Schaffner, is

obsessed by the inner world of power. Outside this world, as for example in the anteroom of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, his camera gazes longingly at the closed doors leading into the inner sanctum. But what happens when the camera bursts through to the other side? Nothing. Whereas he might be setting off the public stiffness and formality of the Czar and Czarina with an intimate spontaneity, Schaffner produces a series of tableaux, ritualised gestures and sermons on the meaning of historical guilt. He has failed to understand that a huge screen and static camera belittle emotions rather than magnify them.

Again, Schaffner is confused in his use of camera positions. Whenever the masses are on the march, the camera is pointing at them — from the same standpoint as the guns. The people have been objectivised as “the enem y” — despite Schaffner’s romantic identifica­tion with them.

Even if Slamming Sam Spiegel has failed to produce the goods for theEstablishment this time, his efforts signal a new departure for Hollywood. Nicholas and Alexandra wears a proud facade of “progressive” British culture. Spiegel canvassed young left wing script writers and directors before ending up with Goldman and Schaffner (ex-US television, graduated to historical epics: The War Lord, Patton). Edward Bond threw in a few Bolshevik profiles. The cast are relatively unknown, and culled almost exclusively from Shakespearean drama. Sam himself is an old leftie, with Kazan’s On the W aterfront and Penn’s The Chase to his credit. He said at the London premiere of N & A : “What has been lost in movies is the search — the quivering impatience and the quivering hope — for quality”. Business prediction — very good indeed.

NICHOLAS TREADWELL’S CHRISTMAS ‘OPERATION’

70 Painters, Sculptors and Potters exhibiting in all three of Nick Treadwell's Galleries. In the main Gallery, 30 Painters and for those who like the Fantastic, the Funny, the Sensual and the Surrealist, this show must not be missed.Walk three minutes North from Oxford Street or take a tube to Baker Street and walk South. Everyone's welcome. These are, after all,

London's friendliest Galleries. Happy

Christmas and Hope to see you.26/28 & 36 Chiltern

Street, London W1 486 1414

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7 Days 22 December 1971 A R T S

for the IndustryR ock: A Great YearT HE DAY THE MUSIC

D IE D " is a line from

Am erican Pie by Don Maclean, just out as a single on United Artists. The song is a panorama of the last decade in the U.S., a M y Generation for the seventies, but that line sums up a lot of writing and commentary on rock music in the last year.

The main rock musicians had realised the same thing rather earlier, when the Beatles and Cream split up, and Dylan recorded Nashville Skyline with a bunch of country & western players. It was then, in 1969, that the attempt to sustain a self-sufficient, serious (not solemn) artistic form on the entertainment industry’s terms (the acceptance of superstar status with all its implications) caved in.

Industry ManufacturesIn 1971, the rock music epitomized

by Sgt Pepper, B londe On Blonde and Wheels o f Fire has been made safe for big business, because the industry has learnt how to create its own rock superstars. For Grand Funk Railroad, Black Sabbath, Elton John and too

often James Taylor, Carole King and Joni Mitchell are all bit-players in their game, controlled by the means of production rather than controlling them.

This may seem too hard on the Taylor-King-Mitchell school, because they are at least determined to tell the autobiographical truth. But the autobiography of a superstar, however unwilling, can only strengthen the spectacle, as several songs on Joni’s Blue showed. Singing about sitting in Paris and feeling homesick for California is too close for comfort to the stories of the private lives o f the stars in Sunday newspapers.

The self-revelation mode can work if the subject is the singer as producer rather than consumer to “real person”. The best o f James Taylor’s recent compositions even reaches out to bring

the listener into the song as co-performer:I don’t know no love songsAnd I can’t sing the blues anymoreBut I can sing this songAnd you can sing this song when I’m gone

If the heritage of Dylanesque introspection still exists it’s in the work of Neil Young and Loudon Wainwright III. The latter first came to Britain this year, for a tour which began disastrously when he was booked to play at an Everly Brothers concert. Predictably, the C athy’s Clown fans didn’t go for his strange, witty and untidy songs, but his three albums (on Atlantic are beginning to find a more attentive audience.

Mish MashIt was always misleading to see rock

as an established musical form, rather than an unstable integration of elements culled from prior traditions — rock & roll, soul music, blues, folk-song, country music, standard ballads, music-hall, jazz. The pressures of the spectacle have forced many of the best musicians into opting for one of the elements to base a personal style on. Country music was used by the Byrds to great effect on their double album Untitled , and by newer groups like Brewer and Shipley. And an emphasis on performance (as opposed to recording) derived from James Brown and Otis Redding was important in Eric Clapton’s work with Delaney and Bonnie, and in the re-emergence of Rod Stewart with the Faces. Elsewhere, Jack Bruce is applying the jazzman’s notion of musical exploration to rock vocal and instrumental modes.

One thing nearly all these perfomers have in common is that their work appears mainly in album form, and 1971 has been another year in which very little o f what was good was

B.F. I. RumpusAn n u a l g e n e r a l m e e t ­

i n g of the British Film Institute 1970. An exhibition of the arrogance and complacency of "decision makers". The BFI Members Action Committee's attempt to challenge the estab­lished power of the Institute's governing body in the name of members and are defeated amid jeers and derision from a hostile meeting.

Annual General Meeting of the British Film Institute 1971. The smiling masks fell from the faces of the governors as they repeatedly failed to answer members’ protests against their policy. The members voted, by an overwhelming majority, to dismiss the whole governing body.

What had happened? The Action Committee started as a heterogeneous but isolated group of critics and film makers who were concerned about the BFI’s indifference to the low level of film culture in this country. The crucial

difference between their stand and previous protest groups was their insistence that only the democratization of decision making could possibly alter the nature of the BFI to any extent.

They organized their campaign around the only right that the members have, the right to dismiss the board of governors at the AGM. This right, uncovered by legal research, was unknown to members and, it seems, governors before the Action Committee unearthed it. In 1970, when the first dismissals were proposed, the governors, men like John Davis, head of the Rank Organization, Asa Briggs, Vice- Chancellor of Sussex University, Lord Lloyd of Hampstead, and other heavyweights from the film and TV industries, showed themselves barely tolerant of the inconvenience put them by the band of upstarts. In 1971 they got a rude shock.

Members of the BFI were encouraged by the Action Committee to exercise their rights in the inevitable postal vote. Any BFI members who want to know the Action Committee’s case should write to them at 150 Elgin Avenue, London W9. It is not often that anybody gets a chance to carry discontent with a public body as far as getting rid of its governing body.

directed at the hit parade. Only two of the many hit singles were musically as well as financially outstanding. Rod Stewart’s recent Maggie May, which does for the seventies what Chuck Berry’s classic records did for the fifties, and Neil Diamond’s I Am. I Said. Previously Diamond had churned out a series of unpretentious rhythmic pop hits, but his record achieved a synthesis of personal statement and the precision and economy of expression of the pop craftsman. It is something hit parade artists manage only once or twice in a career, and Diamond’s last record Stones tries for the same effect but topples over into pretentiousness.

The Mind Numbing KingThat synthesis is something

Johnathan King will never get. This was

the year he achieved his ambition of becoming the Rupert Murdoch of pop music by producing a series of mind-numbing hits, the latest of whichis Johnny Reggae.

The British folk tradition provided some of the most satisfying and least noticed music of the year. Two graduates from Fairport Convention, Ian Matthews and Sandy Denny made solo albums, Shirley Collins recorded with amplified accompaniment for the first time, and Ralph McTell’s YouWell-Meaning Brought Me Here contained his most sensitive and most politically effective work so far. On the other hand, the hippies’ hippie Roy Harper dissappeared even further into his own head.

What of rock and politics in 1971? Grand Funk’s new record contains People Lets Stop The War and Save The Land and the Moody Blues had a song which collected together all those words ending in -ion (pollution, revolution, you know them all). But theirs is “false-consciousness” rock, where music and politics collapse into each other, just as music and emotional crises do in sentimental ballads. And as with the ballads, the listener is left to wallow in the feelings evoked, not to think about the issues raised.

But the recent work of John Lennon and the Jefferson Airplane suggest authentic ways in which rock can become revolutionary: by providing sustaining images or anthems for a revolutionary movement, and by contesting the bourgeois domination of its own field, in both the production and distribution of music.

Cultural RevolutionariesThe Airplane’s Blows Against The

■Empire album moves from simple statements of resistance and solidarity to a fable of liberation concerned with the hi-jacking of the first American starship by a bunch of cultural revolutionaries. Interwoven with these movement and mythic themes is an autobiographical one concerned with Grace Slick’s unborn child and her determination that the State won’t have her. The bringing together of the collective, individual and symbolic recalls Eisenstein’s methods.

If that album is aimed more towards the revolutionaries, Lennon’s two solo albums attack preconceptions formed by music produced within the industry of what love or socially-concerned songs can be or should be. The lyrics are a return to the clarity and simplicity of early Beatles’ songs, but without the

tricksiness and, miraculously, without the superficiality. The music is a return to the rhythms and riffs of the fifties but not in a spirit of conservation or “revival”. Lennon has rediscovered them, and the excitement and wonder of that disvovery shines through the records.

It Starts HereThe politically-concerned music of

the seventies has its starting-point here, and not with Bob Dylan’s recent George Jackson, which is a political song of the sixties, both in sound and in sentiment. Change the title to Medgar Evers (a black civil-rights organiser shot by the Klan in the early “non-violent” sixties) and it could have been written in the days when SDS members read Gandhi not Lenin.

Authentically political music may also have to align itself with the first few steps taken by musicians to loosen the grip of the entertainment industry over the space between them and their audience. A Musicians Liberation Front,

still in its infancy, is already being taken seriously by the Musicians Union, while Edgar Broughton’s attempt to play a series of free concerts during the summer was taken seriously by the police, who arrested him twice.

My Record of the YearI’ve left to last my own favourite

song of 1971 because it’s proof that if the rock movement of the sixties is over, to be replaced by a more fragmented and complex situation, the impulse that produced Satisfaction and Penny Lane is alive and well on Tyneside. Lindisfarne’s Fog On The Tyne (the title track from their most recent album) is a cheerful raucous reaction to being on the dole: “The fog on the Tyne is all mine, all mine”. If this was Melody Maker I’d call it my Record Of The Year and urge you to buy it for Cristmas.

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