Word: viewer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Pulse, Inc. uses the technique of the doorbell-ringing personal interview. Its interviewers, all married women (men might incite neighborhood gossip), visit a cross section of homes in 64 markets. When they establish that a family has watched TV that day or the day before, they jog the viewer's memory by displaying a program schedule for the period and asking what was seen before or after normal household activity, e.g., shopping, dishwashing, linked to particular hours of the day. Every tenth interview is checked by a letter to the family from Pulse. For the average half-hour nighttime...
However they may be improved, the rating systems and their tyranny over TV hold no hope for the viewer who believes that the verdict of democracy is fine for government but folly for television. The viewer is both the unwitting culprit and the ultimate victim of the tyranny. The ratings discourage worthy programs that might make a deeply favorable-but un-measurable-impression (including sales impact), but that do not attract measurably large numbers. They inspire imitations of high-rated programs, touching off cycles of the second-rate...
Some of TV's best shows are the bright little animated-cartoon commercials that charm the viewer into yielding to Madison Avenue's "soft sell." The best of them, such as the Harry and Bert beer ads, come from Hollywood's UPA Pictures, Inc., whose booming output has not only rescued it from the theater slump but spawned branch studios in Manhattan and London. Last week, acting on the obvious conclusion, CBS began showing UPA's cartoon artistry strictly for its own entertaining sake. Aglow with ingenuity as radiant as its Technicolor, the Boing-Boing Show...
...Showcase, created enough pleasure last week to pose a question: Why doesn't it happen more often? For roughly $200,000, the price of four half-hour variety shows, Impresario Sol Hurok put some of music's brightest stars into dazzling constellation. The camera let the viewer hover over the fingers of Guitarist Andres Segovia and Pianist Artur Rubinstein, linger in closeup on the intense face of Marian Anderson, share the lilt of Verdi's La Traviata with Victoria de los Angeles, stand amid the powerful climax of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, superbly acted and sung...
...parody of Bach to a mimic's spoof of Liberace ("Here is an opera Mozart composed for my mother"), keeping his timing uniformly impeccable in keyboard trills, one-line gags ("We have three children-one of each"), mugging, puns, audience squelchers, zany nonsequiturs and pure slapstick. The viewer's first impulse is to want to see Borge more often, but with TV's voracious way of chewing up and spewing out comedians and their material, the answer seems to be not more Borge, but more Borges...