entertainment
i - .
v 5fc?5- p&upie; programs
just bait for commercials
Consider: television stations and networks do
not sell detergents or toothpaste or little cars
with rotary engines.
TV stations and networks sell you. Or rather
they promise to deliver your body at a certain
time to people who sell the aforementioned
items as well as fried chicken, deodorant or
time-released aspirin tablets. Remember this. It's
important. Tests may be given.
TV is able to hand you over to the
commercial interests by capturing you with their
varieties of bait, such as All in the Family, Let's
Make a Deal or the weekend pro golf tourney.
Landing you with that bait, TV sells you to
Lever Brothers, Pepsi or Preparation H.
Nielsen promise
In the TV game, it is this promise-of-delivery
system which makes a god of Mr. Nielsen and his
ratings. These ratings, 1,100 pieces of
slow-moving recording tape or 2,250 diaries
scattered, across the country, do not record
viewer satisfaction or response. They merely
indicate how well the bait is working and how
many bodies can be delivered at any specific
time.
ron wylie
eye of the beholder
If CBS, in conjunction with Nielsen's polling,
says it can hand over 40 per cent of the television
audience (44 million viewers) Mondays at 7:30
pjn. (EST) for All in the Family, then Crest and
MacDonalds don't buy time, they buy bodies.
And prime time rates vary according to Nielsen's
weekly and monthly charts.
Once they've got you, commercials do sell
you something.
Even the most inane ones, the ones with birds
flying into kitchens and hands coming up out of
the floor, sell their products. The ones with
women reaching orgasm because they've gotten
their husbands shirts clean, or the
recstablishment of domestic bliss through use of
mountain grown coffee get the job done.
It works
Advertising works. No matter how stupid it is
sometimes, advertising works.
Alka Seltzer, which traditionally uses some of
the best TV commercials, so captured the market
in the 1960s with its saturation advertising that
marketing personnel estimated that in order for
Alka Seltzer to sell more of its product,
Americans would have to start having more
headaches and upset stomachs.
Another way to see how well advertising
works is to notice what happens when a product
stops putting its spots over the airwaves. Where,
oh where are Pepsodent and Bon Ami these
days? - . i
TV advertising works even when the bodies
clustered around, the TV set know what it is the
marketing hotshots are trying to do to them.
And in the use of sex in advertising, Madison
Avenue is at its most obvious. But it still works.
Remember Joe Namath and "Let Noxzema
cream your face. . ."?"
TV for commercials
When seen as a means to deliver the masses to
a mass distributor, TV is not Saturday Night at
the Movies or even Face the Nation, The most
significant part of television broadcasting, the
reason for its existence, consists' of all those 30
and 60 second spots.
. The commercials are sold for a mass audience,
the greater the mass the more the advertising
rate. As such, the commercials dictate the
common denominator approach to television
programming. TV is selling bodies and to get the
greatest amount of bodies collected in any
specific time, the bait must appeal to the widest
possible spectrum of the population.
Commercials are also a greater reflection of
the culture as they run over the channels than
the bait used to set them up. They tell America
what's new, what's available, what's acceptable.
They create desire and they illustrate the
patterns and contents of the good life.
And in the marketplace of the TV medium,
commercials are nondiscriminatory; they offer
the fruits of the American culture to
all-educated, illiterate, prosperous and destitute
alike.
Gets you young
After some of tha ghetto riots of the 1960s, it
was suggested that this marketplace of the air
had helped create discontent among the poor by
constantly showing them things which the TV
said were desirable to possess, even when they
had no means to obtain them, short of violence.
And they get us young. Saturday mornings
during kidhood, Mattel and General Mills
condition us for that whole prime-time scene
that awaits us. Consider what an effective
societal trainer and consumer model we have in
the form of a Barbie doll.
It might be considered, inasmuch as TV is
selling us, that we could at least demand a little
more quality in the programming used as bait.
It is hardly the fault of the networks andor
the advertisers if the selections are so tasteless or
nauseous.
TV is playing a numbers game and if they can
sell you in lots of 44 million by presenting King
Lear or debates from the United Nations, they'll
jump at it.
The Hallmark Card Company, which for 20
years has periodically sponsored some of the best
moments on television, is an advertiser with class.
But mostly, the high ratings (the most bodies)
cluster around the limited imaginations of Lucille
Ball, Tony Orlando and Dawn, or the Partridge
Family. And so, the real moments in TV viewing,
the brief word from our sponsor, will continue to
support the kinds of bait which will attract the
greatest number. -
Jo
f ' B t
zzmen s reunion swee
Review by Dave Ware
Musical reunions are events fraught with peril.
When greats who were once allied get together
for a reprise of their partnership, it often
becomes- painfully obvious to the audience, as it
must to the musicians, that whatever the reasons
for the initial breakup, they have usually grown
no closer in the ensuing years.
Happily, tiii tendency does not always hold
true. There are certain musicians who seem to be
able to immediately mesh and sound as close
together as they had been before. When these
sort -of people meet, the result is a sweet triumph
of communication and harmony, and an
audience for such a hsppening knows that it has
been present at the re-creation of something
quite special.
Such a special occurrence took place the
evening of November 24th, 1974 in New York s
Carnegie Hall. Assembled were three of the
all-time jazz masters: -Chet Baker on trumpet,
Gerry Mulligan on baritone sax and Stan Getz on
tenor sax. Getz played as magnificently as ever,
but the real raison d'etre for the evening was the
reunion of Mulligan and Baker, one-half of the
famed Gerry Mulligan Quartet that established
the sound' of West Coast jazz some twenty years
a8In the years that followed the dissolution of
that monument of modern jazz, Mulligan ana
Baker went their separate ways. Mulligan fronted
thursday, april 10, 1975
veral small ensembles, at least one big band,
and in recent years collaborated with pianist
Dave Brubeck. Baker, since splitting with
Mulligan, encountered a series of drug busts in
almost every country he worked in. Only in the
past few years has he been able to shake the
habit and gradually rebuild his musical
reputation.
The evening produced a lot of memorable
music, with a fine exhibition by Baker and a
performance by Mulligan that critics hailed as.
being liis best in years. Now, CTI Records has
released two discs taken from that amazing night.
Entitled Carnegie Hall Concert (Vols. I and 2);
the records are well-recorded, finely mixed, and
impressively packaged. What's more, they do
justice to the masterful work of Mulligan, Baker
and their fine backup band.
Favorite tracks are hard to isolate when there
isn't a clinker in the lot, but standouts are "Line
for Lyons" on the first disc, and "There Can
Never Be Another You" on the second. The
latter selection features a shaky vocal,
uncredited, but oddly keeps the wistful tone of
the piece.
I am honestly at a loss of words to say in
connection with these exemplary discs except to
suggest that they feature two great musicians at
the height of their collaborative powers, and as
such, they deserve a hearing.
daily nebraskan
Efere at the University of Uebraska
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plus special guest The Charlie Daniels Band
in Concert Thursday, April 17 8:00
at Pershing Auditorium
Tickets $5.00 in advance and $6.00 day of concert.
Tickets available at Union South Desk, Dirt Cheap, Ben
Simons, Miller & Paine, The Daisy and Pershing Box Office.
A contemporary Production
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