TV and Me: The PBS Oasis

 Television and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Latest in a series.

During the 1970s and especially the 80s and beyond, the vast wasteland of television increased in vastness and waste.  Jerry Springer springs to mind, along with Dynasty and Dallas, Inside Edition, shopping channels, Faux News, and various other forms of supermarket tabloid trash TV, paving the way for our current trash Internet anarchy.

 Television’s potential was being obliterated even from memory, but these dumbed-down shows with their psychotic grins exploiting violent versions of lowest denominator banality weren’t the whole story in those decades. There was, as principal example, PBS: the Public Broadcasting Service, officially founded in 1969.  Fighting off fierce political attack for much of the past 40 years or more, and not immune to the dumbing down and chicanery infecting television in general, nevertheless PBS remained a beacon of possibility.  For me as a viewer it was often an oasis in the Great Wasteland that provided me with the rescue of inspiring and expanding programs.

 As described in the previous post in this series, some of the shows that rescued me originated in other countries (principally the UK and Canada), and were presented to me via PBS stations.  Now this series on TV and me concludes with tributes to some deeply influential programs that PBS created or had a hand in creating.

Fred Rogers with Josie Carey WQED Pittsburgh early 1950s

 More generally, PBS was a persistent highlight of television.  The Pittsburgh public television station I first watched, WQED, was one of the first educational channels (eventually organized into NET or National Educational Television, one PBS precursor) and it was the very first to be community-sponsored in the country (which I guess meant corporations based in Pittsburgh as well as local viewers contributions.)  I was nearly 8 years old when it went on the air.  

Though our signal reception was iffy for the first years and most of the programming consisted of classes, I remember Josie Carey and her The Children’s Hour at 5 pm, just before Howdy Doody on WDTV.  Josie and Miss Francis on Ding Dong School were among my earliest teachers. (Not including Crusader Rabbit and Tom Terrific cartoons which I glimpsed mornings just before going to school.)  Backstage at Josie Carey’s show was puppeteer and organ accompanist Fred Rogers.  Her set would be modified for his show in the 1960s, and many of the same characters would appear.

 By the early 1970s, PBS news coverage would become trenchant and important.  PBS doggedly covered the various Watergate hearings, anchored by Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, with analysis by Elizabeth Drew and the very young Cokie Roberts.  The daily MacNeil/Lehrer Report was essential.

 But I was mostly in awe of a number of their themed documentary series. I didn’t have regular access to television when the Kenneth Clark Civilization series ran in 1969, so my first experience with this form was  The Ascent of Man, which was first shown in the US in early 1975, before I left Greensburg for Washington.  These two series apparently were designed as counterparts: Clark examined the evolution of art, and Jacob Bronowski in Ascent followed the evolution of science, though each went beyond these borders.  Both were produced by the BBC and Time-Life, under the tutelage of David Attenborough.  This was the first of several series like it that I avidly absorbed.

 Bronowski’ 13 episode series set the template for these programs: they were personal views (which was Bronowski’s subtitle) and they depicted scenes around the world as illustrations and enactments.  Each host (or in British TV parlance, presenter) was also the chief author.  Their prejudices as well as insights were inevitably part of their narratives. Some viewers now would flag race and gender (and species) biases, and some of what was said on all these programs has since been superseded by later science and discovery.  But to me at the time, these programs were astonishing in their comprehensiveness.  In areas I knew anything about, they went far beyond textbook summations and embedded information in contexts, then linked both in narrative if not causal relation.  At times watching these I could almost literally feel my brain neurons firing—I was galvanized (which literally means to be stimulated by electric current.)  

 Bronowski’s subject was no less than the human story, with subsets such as one of his scholarly fields, the history and nature of science as an heroic human activity.  The moment that remains in memory is at the end of the 11^th episode, in which this otherwise genial, brilliant but conventional older man in a suit and tie is at the edge of a pond at Auschwitz, where ashes of crematorium victims—millions of mostly Jews-- were summarily deposited. 

 He points out that it is not science that turns people into numbers: the Nazis did it here.  “It was done by arrogance.  It was done by dogma.  It was done by ignorance.  When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no tests in reality, this is how they behave.”

 Then he suddenly steps into the pond, with water up to his ankles.  After noting that many members of his family died here, he continues: “We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.  We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act.” And as he speaks his final sentence, he digs out a handful of mud and holds it up to the camera: “We have to touch people.”

 There are times when everything just stops, and the first time I saw this moment was one of those times.  It was so powerful that in my memory of it, he flings the mud at the camera (this scene is on YouTube, so I’ve seen this memory was erroneous.)  His words should echo in these times as well.

In 1979 another British series made it to PBS: Connections, created and hosted by James Burke (in his various leisure suits), explored interconnected events and technological innovations that led to major changes in societies. As host, Burke was as unconventional as his history, speaking plainly and with humor, without the scholarly gravitas of Clark and Bronowski, or any other documentary host to that point. 

 This series (and its followup, The Day the Universe Changed in 1986) asserted historical causalities that went beyond the generalizations and simplicities of the explanations we learned in school.  Crucial battles may not have been won just because of a brilliant leader, but because of a technological advantage, like the stirrup. Such was Burke’s influence that this kind of thinking has since become much more frequent.

 Burke made several more programs on the Connections theme but I believe their most important culmination came in perhaps his least known, three-part series, After the Warming in 1990.  In the guise of a citizen of the year 2050, Burke looks back at global efforts to address the climate crisis, and the changes resulting in the society of that time.  This early acceptance of the threats posed by global warming is still fascinating, especially in how it does--and mostly does not--match up with efforts so far.   Within this framework, Burke examines the determining role of climate and its changes in history and ordinary life, much as his Connections series did.  Lack of this perspective—of how important climate really is—remains a crucial and perhaps fatal ignorance.  This is essential information for our world, but unfortunately few people have ever seen these programs (though they are available free on YouTube.)   They are particularly interesting in light of what has and hasn’t happened since they were made.     

 The apex of this era came in 1980 with Cosmos.  In 1973 or so, I was managing editor of the arts at the Boston Phoenix, and interested in expanding our second section cover beyond the usual arts stories.  Celia Gilbert, our poetry editor, told me about a scientist friend of her scientist husband who was frustrated because the non-academic pieces he wrote weren’t getting published, and she asked if I would look at one of his manuscripts for the Phoenix.  I said I sure would.  But it never came. I therefore lost the chance to discover Carl Sagan.

 Carl Sagan’s first experience in the combination of science and show biz was at the age of four, when he was taken to the famous 1939 New York Worlds Fair, the World of Tomorrow.  As a scientist he believed in communicating to a general public the nuts and bolts of current science as well as the wonder scientific exploration engendered. 

 His early efforts culminated in the PBS series Cosmos, which he presented and co-authored with his wife Ann Druyan and Steven Soter.  This 13 part series was produced and directed by Adrian Malone (among others), who had produced The Ascent of Man, and again its subtitle was “A Personal Voyage.” Sagan used the irresistible vehicle of the ultimate starship to explore the cosmos, and human history in relationship to it.  It was the most popular of these programs, and one of the most watched PBS programs of all time.

 I remember it most for the vast timeline surrounding the present, not only of the universe but of humanity,  and its persistent, passionate emphasis on the fragility of human life and knowledge, eventually centered on the threat of nuclear self-destruction. In common with all these series, there was a lot of human history as context (the segment about the burning of the library at Alexandria was particularly potent.)  Again, it was enlarging: mind and soul-expanding.

 Probably just before Cosmos first aired, Jonathan Miller’s British-made series on medicine, The Body in Question, made it to America.  I may have seen some episodes then but remember it also from seeing at least some of it in later years.  Miller was always a stimulating and entertaining voice, and this series reflects his often contrarian view of events and their meaning.  I especially remember the program on the medical fad in France for “mesmerism” or hypnotism, one of many chapters in medical history the medical establishment would like to forgot.

 I did see every eye-opening episode of The Shock of the New, an 8-part series on the history of modern art by art critic Robert Hughes, seen in the US in 1981.  Hughes came from Australia, and at this time was based in New York as art critic for Time Magazine. He was not conventionally photogenic, yet his sun-lined face with its perpetual scowl demanded attention.  With his preposterous 70s hair humidified into strange shapes, and his eyes continuously moving across the camera from right to left and back again like a searchlight, he spoke plainly and yet eloquently.  His judgments were constant and definite.  He spoke from locations (beginning with the base of the Eiffel Tower), and the art of showing painting on TV had advanced so it was an experience in itself.  I learned a lot, including from his presentation on modern architecture, which proved immediately useful to me as I worked on my shopping mall book. 

 Probably the least remembered of these 1980 series was playwright Ronald Harwood’s history of western theatre called All The World’s A Stage. Its 13 episodes aired in the UK in 1984 and in the US probably a year later.  It, too, was a personal view, and was shot on appropriate locations. But its singular contribution was not only to tell what productions looked like in various times and places, but to show them—and not just in photos and diagrams, but with real sets and real actor speaking the words as they had more or less been spoken, sometimes presenting an entire scene or part of a scene.  Though I had a theatre history course in college, this series (which I taped) proved invaluable, especially when I began to write regularly about theatrical productions.  This series deserves more respect and renown than it apparently received. 

 By the mid-1980s, public television budgets had been reduced, due in large part to politically motivated cuts in funding by the federal government and some state governments, and the pinch was felt in productions. Something similar also happened in Thatcher’s UK. So the era of these ambitious multi-episode programs was largely over.

 While PBS still produced quality programs, they seldom were of this particular type: the elaborated vision of a single author.  These were television’s version of another vanished form: the long story presented by the New Yorker in full, in one issue or more often in several parts, written by John Hershey (Hiroshima) and Rachel Carson (Silent Spring), Frances Fitzgerald (Fire in The Lake) and Jonathan Schell (The Fate of the Earth), John McPhee and Janet Malcolm.  

I can remember one more such series just as the form was disappearing, eventually to be replaced by (for example) the Ken Burns histories.  It was called Millennium: Tribal Wisdom in the Modern World, funded largely by the natural cosmetics company The Body Shop, which gets lavish mention in the series, and once again produced by Adrian Malone.  

This series arrived in the US at the perfect moment: when Native American writers and activists were transforming the 500^th anniversary of Columbus into a classroom on Native history and the especially relevant traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples in a time of ecological crisis.

 It was created and narrated by David-Marbury-Lewis, an anthropologist who’d lived much of his life among Indigenous peoples in remote places. He also founded the organization Cultural Survival, which still exists. Ranging across Africa, Asia, Australia, South and North America, this series centered on vignettes of actual people in the present, which were created after producers took “care to ask them for the stories and incidents that they think are significant, and to elicit their commentaries on them.” 

 The vignettes tend to dramatize common human experiences but within contexts very different from the overdeveloped world. The themes of connectedness and ecological responsibility as crucial to physical and cultural survival have only become more critical since this series aired, and seemingly was forgotten. They are likely to become even more essential as the climate crisis begins to dominate.

 All of the aforementioned series seen on PBS also produced books based on them, and I got many of them.  Generally they expanded on ideas and information presented on TV, and became lasting references. I’ve read and consulted them many times over the years, so the influence of these programs on my life and my work have been considerable.   

Alastair Cooke, the long-time host of Masterpiece

Along the way I appreciated many of the ongoing PBS umbrella series.  Several brought over plays from the UK (playwright Tom Stoppard used to joke that these plays appeared there on such television programs as Play of the Month, but when they came to America they were Masterpiece Theatre and Great Performances.) There were American productions as well, providing me with most of the professional theatrical experiences I had, with much better than my usual rush seats in New York.  Great Performances was also one of the umbrella shows for dance and music of various kinds. 

These were also venues for dramatizations of classic (and not so classic) literature over several episodes, with the capability of more generously treating the characters, subplots and subtleties of a classic novel (a Dickens, an Austen) than a two hour movie would. The big hit in that era was the original Upstairs Downstairs.

  One of the first instances of this that I recall was the miniseries version of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.  This portrait of a woeful working class young man with aspirations to education and higher things who was diverted and ultimately destroyed by a tragic marriage, scared me to death in my early 20s. 

 Other PBS umbrella programs presented various biographies, histories, exposes, political analyses. PBS excelled in biography (often done by independent filmmakers) and explanatory journalism.  Their nature documentaries mostly suffered from the drawbacks of the genre: emphasis on conflict, action, pretty pictures, superficial narrative.  I learned less from these than other types of programs, though there were exceptions.

 Their explanatory programs on science could be breathtaking. In perhaps the early 80s or even the late 70s I vividly recall seeing a program (perhaps a Nova or a stand-alone) that went back and forth between new scientific discoveries in physics of the very large (black holes, etc.) and the very small (quarks, etc.)  The program described relativity and quantum physics, the four fundamental forces (gravity, the electromagnetic force and the strong force and the weak force within the atom) and the struggle to find the “grand unified theory” of how they all interrelate. 

 The climax of the program was the revelation of the one scientist who might yet put it all together. He was Stephen Hawking, then unknown to the general public (years before his bestselling book), or at least to me.  Most of what this program covered was new to me, and as I struggled to keep it all straight and deal with my increasing wonder, I was confronted with my first glimpse of a man twisted by disease (ALS) who might hold the answer.  This was before Hawking got his voice synthesizer, so I heard only the strange sounds he could make, comprehensible (the program said) only to a few.  It was an amazing moment.

 This program was a vivid introduction that allowed me to read further and more widely in related areas with some confidence, which eventually led to reviewing some new books covering some of these subjects for the general reader.  

These were just some of the ways that PBS was a meaningful part of my life.  This relationship continued beyond the 1980s and 90s, into the new century.  In my next post I isolate on one figure whose PBS shows were especially important to me over those decades: Bill Moyers.  This TV and Me series concludes next time.