Ew column Some semblance of programmes scrambles through

An American soldier blinded in Vietnam.

'THE RULING ideas of an epoch are essentially the ideas of the ruling class of that epoch.

(Marx.) Television purveys those ideas and at the same time reveals the crisis which lies behind them.

In the same week that thousands of its workers were on strike, the BBC just managed to keep up its output of the half-truths, fictions and versions of the facts necessary for the continuation of British capitalism.

Its news coverage of its own dispute was partial and misleading in its selections and omissions. The tone of hearty objectivity never wavered for a moment but it did sound very hollow.

Viewers should not forget that the same men who threaten workers and send them home for accepting union instructions also decide what shall be broadcast, what filmed, what ignored.

We must also remember that Lord Hill, the chairman of the Board of Governors at the BBC, was a Wilson appointment and, in turn, was responsible for the present management structure in the Corporation which accepted the totally inadequate financial provisions made for the future of broadcasting by Wilson's government.

The solidarity and determination of television workers, however, is a very important development in the growing crisis.

They have shown a little of their strength.

It will not be long before they will have to show more.

Much output was lost last week and more will be affected by the present overtime ban, but non-union labour, willing management and some scabs scrambled a semblance of programmes on the air.

In future struggles it will be necessary to make such stoppages complete.

THE CONTRADICTIONS and destructiveness of capitalism also showed very clearly in last week's edition of 'Man Alive'.

The series often displays the worst features of bourgeois television in using the issues it covers to make exciting programmes.

This report on Alaska, however, tried to steer a • middle course. What came through loud and clear was that alongside the enormous fortunes being made in that state by the oil companies and land speculators, builders and transport moguls, there is the ruthless dispossession of the native Indian and Eskimo peoples.

Whilst literally billions of pounds pour away in profits to American, British and other huge companies, whilst teams of industrial spies survey rival concerns for 24 hours a day, whilst adventurers rent houses for £200 a month, the Eskimos are living in squalid shanty towns with sewage flooding their streets and drinking water and without the simplest facilities for the education of their children.

Reduced to inventing dances for the tourists the only alternative is to abandon everything of their real traditions and culture and to enter the labour.

And for the influx of labour from America and elsewhere, there is intense exploitation, big wages and only booze and equally exploited women to spend them on.

One truck driver who made about 24s. an hour in the main part of the United States, was now earning nearly £200 a But not for nothing.

The working conditions he described, the cold, the danger, the pig-sty accommodation on the job-eight men sleeping in a room 12 feet by eight feet —all bore witness to a rate of surplus value proportionally well above any earnings.

The interviews with millionaires and multi-millionaires, all quite unaffected, of course, only enhanced the sickening aspect of international capital's plundering.

As the programme billing in the 'Radio Times' said :

'Rich, exciting Alaska brings together the investors and the industrial spies, the topless dancers and the roustabouts, the revivalist preachers and what are coyly called the ladies of the night. "Man Alive" meets them all.' ANOTHER desperate cry last week came from the BBC's Wednesday Play spot. Over the last 18 months the drama output of the BBC has consistently hit all-time lows.

With none of the biting talent left, with all the people While science provides the means forms of napalm.

FORCED off the air during the Wednesday strike, '24 Hours' on Thursday ran an American report on the wounded from Vietnam; so far over 400,000 Americans killed and 500,000 maimed.

This report looked at some of the maimed; young men crippled, limbless and paralyzed. At the same time it was an insight into the bitter effects of one of the contradictions of imperialism.

These men with parts of their bodies blown off or useless were shown under the most intensive care of the most sophisticated American medicine.

Plastic surgeons strugging responsible for programmes like 'Cathy Come Home' Lump, In Iwo Minds, Some cump, in lwo minas.

Women' and 'The Big Flame' gone, the level of dramatic achievement has been very poor.

Mostly sedate or pretentious, there has recently hardly been one play revealing any seriousness of purpose let alone real understanding.

The only exceptions have been the occasional appearance of a new David Mercer work.

All this is witness to the crisis amongst the people charged to instruct, inform and entertain us.

David to develop their techniques whilst other scientists battle to improve the adhesiveness of napalm to human skin; designers of prosthetic limbs advancing the delicacy and range of artificial hands, arms, and legs next to explosives experts increasing the destructiveness of fragmentation bombs.

We watched a man receive the Bronze and Silver Stars for gallantry and then halt his way on crutches off the platform. Some of these victims of this imperialist war clearly went willingly. Most seemed confused, uncertain and sometimes bitter.

I like to think I did it for a cause,' said one. 'I don't see why we're there ... it's senseless, said another. I don't understand what I made Mostly middle-class professionals, they find themselves in deeper and deeper confusion. Uncertain on the one side about just what their masters want and constantly confused on the other by their inability to judge what audiences want, they very much reflect the difficulties of this group of people in society.

Caught in the crossfire of the class war they will have to choose sides sooner or later.

Just now their work shows the indecision and the breakup of the old ways of coping.

'The Mark-Two Wife' was a fable about middle-class manners.

A deeply unhappy woman in her early forties, certain that her husband is about to leave her for someone younger, precipitates an emotional crisis in a party of stultified climbers and careerists.

Their own self-deceptions, lies and accommodations are all threatened by the woman's frank desperation and it is only a reluctant retired general and his wife who deal at all sympathetically with her or show any insight.

A sexually aggressive Eastern European—who later turns out to be the impotent pet of his very English wife!-deepens everyone's anxieties and it is clear that without the general's good lady all would have ended in dissolution and chaos.

Just what we should take from all this, apart from often compelling glimpses into the moods and thwarted feelings of the characters, will depend on where we stand in the first place.

G.I.s home from Vietnam, this sacrifice for.' Mostly conscripted into the army, often from farms and small towns, these were the voices and faces of deeply hurt but deluded men.

One boy in his early twenties with a stump instead of an arm said he just wanted to go back to college and become a teacher.

Another one-time 6 feet 2 inches tall, football player now legless, said he didn't know at whom to point his bitterness. He then unconsciously drew the connection between the Second World War and the Vietnam war, saying the only difference was that in the former 'they had a little start on us by bombing Pearl Harbour' And throughout, the terrible contradiction of the reporter 9.10 10.00 10.30