Loving Lou to the last laugh

"Impressions," TV Times, 5-11 November 1978

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On Monday nights, we doff our critical hat and prepare ourselves for a few hours of gleeful entertainment. After all, what else can beat that 8.30 P.M. slot for true escapist fare: Bionic Woman on 2, Future Cop on 7, Wonder Woman on 9? The sked sounds like the best of the Sunday comics.

But after 8:30 P.M., what else is there to see that extends your genial mood through the night? Well, there's Lou Grant in the city room of the Los Angeles Tribune.

We like Ed Asner. He looks, to us, a very sensible actor. Perhaps it's because of age. Age works like a very good, very effective put-down. When you're as old as Ed Asner and you still haven't made it as the new Olivier or the second Newman, then you know you never will. When you're as old as Asner and you find yourself still working the weekly grind on the small screen--like Telly Savalas, Jack Klugman, or Lorne Greene--then you learn to take yourself and your role with less seriousness and more camp. And camp, we find quite delightful.

Besides, who can hate somebody who looks like Asner? With that heavy paunch, a balding forehead, a face that looks like somebody's favorite mongrel's, and that bruising aggressiveness, he comes closest to our idea of a favorite uncle. Not the smooth, cultivated uncles with the no-touch air. Just the everyday loudmouth with the worldly-wise ways. Beats the first one, anytime.

Of course, it means we like Lou Grant, too. The other week's episode, "Hen House," pitted the city editor against the Sunday supplement editor in a classic bout between male chauvinist and dedicated feminist. A male chauvinist is a male chauvinist and a feminist is a feminist and rarely the twain do meet. But Ed Asner makes the attempt seem screamingly funny. She tried to change his position; he lost his.

We have no doubt that many men will agree with us--and many women will not--when we say that, at least in that episode, Ed Asner really put one over every other actor in the cast. His was a gem of a performance, a fountainhead of wild sarcasm, like a two-fisted brawler whose pursuit of journalism looked rather like prizefighting. In the role of prejudiced city editor loudly protecting his own kingdom against the cackling hens in what he called the Women's Section--already dignified to the status of Sunday supplement with the title "Today"--he rounds out the comic portrait of the male editor as an old tough.

It is, of course, Asner's achievement that while in principle, we must side with the woman editor of the Sunday magazine, our sympathy reached out to this misdirected man with the swift cutting tongue. Agitated, confused, later contrite, he comes out the best of the cast. Beside him, the woman editor appeared colorless, forgettable, uncharismatic, heavily playing a role, not living it.

And so what if the ending was contrived, dogmatic? Sure, we felt a little uncomfortable, watching that surrender scene in a kitchen. We know it did not do justice either to the woman's cause or the man's principles. But that is easily forgivable. After all, the whole episode is one cut-rate lark, a cross between The Andros Targets and The Goodbye Girl, with none of the sociological and emotional bite of either.

But the humor! We have not laughed as heartily in the past week as we did over that restaurant sequence, when Asner tried to finally meet the woman editor. Nor as loudly as when he scathingly remarked that perhaps the Sports Section had already been retitled "Tomorrow," or "Yesterday." We found ourselves giggling before the punchline and laughing after it.

So that stuff is all lightweight. But it is neither dull nor stupid. And Asner is an infectiously beamish performer. Which should make Lou Grant a show we can get accustomed to in the future, perhaps even anticipate with real fondness.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Memories of a pontiff

The death of Pope John Paul II and the election of Pope Benedict XVI were events covered live by all major US and European networks, including the 24-hour global news channels. I was in the United States when both events captured global attention and gathered leaders of governments and religions together in unusual solidarity with the Roman Catholic faithful--and unfaithful--all over the world.

As nonstop and sleepless I shifted from CNN to BBC to MSNBC to Fox to the local US networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) to catch whatever I could of the transition from John Paul to Benedict, coverage and analyses alike, I remembered I had written a piece in the late '70s about the time I was working for a local radio-television network, how I was affected by an earlier pontiff's visit to the Philippines and how I felt upon that pontiff's death.

Toward the end of that piece, I made mention of two people: my mother, a deeply spiritual woman who passed away a full decade after the death of Pope Paul VI; and Fr. Leonard Agcaoili, who for a few years was parish priest in my hometown and who was called to his eternal home a few years before my mother. In my memories, the two will always exemplify the religious temper of that time.


"Impressions," TV Times, 27 August-2 September 1978

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He always seemed to me a man distressed, torn between the weighty responsibilities of his office and the simple wishes of his warm and sympathetic heart. I could imagine him, wanting only to walk with the poor and the downtrodden through the dark alleys of bustling Milan, yet forced to don his purple robes and pace the gloomy corridors of a splendid palace in regal Rome, isolated from the mainstream of life and reality. That he was unable to reconcile the demands of power with the desires of his person must have been his true cross, his agony.

Not that he did not want the office, I think. The desire for power, ambition--both well up from the deep springs of the human heart, and even simple men hope for a measure of public recognition and a slice of orthodox authority. Paul VI must have traded his cardinal's red hat for the pope's gold miter with equal joy and fear. And his pontificate, in retrospect, appeared a mixture of both: joy and fear.

I was already in the broadcast industry when he came over to visit the country, the first Roman Catholic pontiff to do so in more than three centuries of Philippine Catholicism. As part of a documentary team tasked to prepare a series of six (or was it more? I cannot now remember) 30-minuters shown on one of the local television stations prior to the papal visit, I had to read up--for the first time since I left the deeply pious arches of convent school--heavily and deeply, on the papacy. Thus, I was drawn, imperceptibly at first but with growing passion later, into the controversies and conflicts--both theological and natural--that faced the papacy at Paul VI's time more than at any other time in the history of the Church. I knew his anguish and his torment, but felt he had become chained by the circles of conservatism that ringed the seat of Peter.

When I finally caught a glimpse of Paul VI through the thick crowds that surrounded him wherever he went during his Manila visit, I was moved as I probably never would be moved again--in just such a manner--in a lifetime. Young as I was at the time and caught as I was in a highly emotional environment, I immediately branded it as an intense spiritual experience, an "epiphany" such as James Joyce called such moments.

Looking back on all of it now, part of the intensity of my personal experience must have come from the hysteria of the occasion--the surging crowds, the heat, the currents of mass madness. Religion, after all, has been described by men before me, and not without reason, as the opium of the masses. But the other part of the experience must have emanated from the man himself. Such people are born who can steal the hearts of men and women at a glance, who can give a meeting, a moment, a minute, its persistent, throbbing pulsebeat. In politics, it is called charisma; in religion, holiness.

But whatever it really is, this man--Paul VI--had it. And despite the conflicts he could not resolve, the expectations he could not meet, the contemporary hopes he could not fulfill, his death was met with grief and mourning by the whole Church: because men have to believe in something, even if it is an opium; because parents have to build a foundation for their children, even if that foundation must be built on ritual and catechism; because this man Paul, even if flawed and less than integral, laid his life and his faith on each jagged controversy of his papacy.

While I myself could not stay up for the live transmission of his funeral rites nor for its replay, hoping that network executives had chosen to replay the next morning instead of the next evening, I am certain that at least two people stayed up to watch the rites in their entirety, in the dark of night, alone.

One is old, nearing the end of her journey, finding strength to face the inevitable in prayer and faith. The other is middle-aged but sickly, a priest who had actively steered the Church's end of the Press Center at the Philamlife Building in Ermita during that papal visit, and who now, despite illness and physical weariness, continues to carry out his rigorous duties in a parish that experienced a renaissance of faith after he took over.

For the sake of these two people, and many others like them, I am glad the coverage of the funeral rites for Paul VI received its rightful share of time on local television.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

On Sesame Street, with Electric Company

On today's cable television services in the Philippines, there are at least 10 channels devoted to children. Practically all of them transmit foreign-produced cartoons, including the now very popular Japanese anime, even translated and voiced in Pilipino.

But in pre-cable, late-'70s Philippine television, there were no channels exclusively for cartoons or exclusively for children. Locally produced shows for children were few and far between.

Two award-winning US shows, however, stand out in the memories of Filipino children (and children-at-heart).


"Impressions," TV Times, 29 January-4 February 1978

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That tender feeling of suddenly becoming less than what one really is, of forcibly getting bumped off and made immobile while the whole world spins crazily out of reach, is not exactly a beautiful state of mind. But it can be the perfect setting for fantasy and imagination. And both compose the stuff on which the Children's Television Workshop feeds.

For are not flights--those flights often hardly touched by the prosaic and pressure-packed lives of elder minds and beaten hearts--the sole province of the child (and the childlike)? For one hour and 30 minutes of each day (not counting repeats), Sesame Street and The Electric Company offer a tempting threshold into a special world recommended for both young and old, perhaps more so for the last than the first.

I am not, of course, forgetting that in sheer technical ingenuity, creativity, and excellence, nothing on television today can beat both shows. A few years back, when I was still engaged in the production of public affairs programs for television, one of the men (in the production crew) came up with the brilliant idea of dubbing sequences from Sesame Street and putting them together as support footage for an episode on preschool education for one of our weeklies. Naturally, the idea was snubbed to death immediately after birth. But I can understand how the idea came about.

In local production experience, Sesame Street and The Electric Company are simply mind-boggling: perfect timing, flawless rhythm, ingenious special effects, beautiful color, inimitable syncopation. It is gloss and supergloss, seemingly straight out of the Hollywood mold but with a difference--weight, substance, what we call heavy meat for hungry minds.

Every idea is imaginatively expressed, ingeniously designed, creatively implemented. Flowers come to life, an imaginary helicopter ride becomes a great experience, bees almost sting, one wishes one could sing, and indeed one does. And while the two-year-old beside me watches with wide, entranced eyes, repeating words she could catch, her eyes looking up at me as I supplied those words she could not, I am child once again, exploring a world almost lost, half-forgotten, but now remembered, rediscovered.

The effects of the two shows on Filipino children of preschool and school age, I leave to academicians who test and synthesize, to theoreticians who evolve principles and philosophies. I shall not join the debate on whether locally produced versions of both shows would suit the Filipino child better, on whether both shows produce socially dislocated and educationally alienated children who must enter Filipino schools and learn that Bantay is no Big Bird, that Pepe and Pilar can hardly measure up to Bert and Ernie, that there is no version of the Cookie Monster in Filipino books and stories, only in Western minds. My little girl is growing up delightfully bilingual and so I am not bothered by guilt feelings about a national language, or the lack of it.

Without a doubt, when the tender feeling of being so out-of-it-all and so out-of-ourself vanishes, when I can again jump on to the feverish whirl of the rest of the world, I shall take up problematics and raise flags and causes once more, with even greater feeling. But for this one brief moment, allow me to be childlike again.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

TV news: a headline, a snippet

Would you believe that as late as the late '70s, we were still getting live coverage of global news only as short special events projects by local television stations? Today's Filipinos--even those already in their twenties--will probably find the information unbelievable, familiar as they are now with nonstop 24-hour news stations beaming live streams all over the world via cable.

But do watch these stations and you will note the surface treatment, the repetitive news and videos, the labored interviews by news anchors attempting to prove themselves instant experts in an inexpert industry. Television may have found some way of satisfying the world's hunger for continuing live global news, but that way is barely adequate and certainly superficial.


"Impressions," TV Times, 22-28 January 1978

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Many people--even some friends--scoffed at the sight of the brightly lit scenes. Indeed, there was a quality of theatricality to both stages: the dramatic landing at Lod Airport in Jerusalem, and the return Christmas visit near the Giza pyramids at Ismailia. The toothpaste smiles were much too wide, aimed obviously at the television cameras. The speeches were much too emphatic and practised, with the whole world very obviously the target audience. And the flashes of supposed spontaneity, described by television commentators in all major capitals, had a studied air about them, faint but nagging.

Admittedly, television helped bring about the dramatic event. Was it not first aired over the now legendary Walter Cronkite's evening newscast? But as television covered the most historic happening of last year's dying months, the gap between print and television became more apparent and regrettable.

While The New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the wire services, the news bureaus of major newspapers and magazines--yes, even Time and Newsweek--bled the story to death, releasing ream after ream of newsprint filled with continuing and sometimes contradicting analyses of every conceivable facet of the event, television could only give Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin no more than five minutes of each day's newscast. And each minute devoted by television to the Egyptian-Israeli handshake barely scratched the surface of the story.

I believe that the fault does not lie somewhere, or at some desk, in the television newsrooms. The fault, dear televiewers, lies right at the very soul of the television tube. Paraphrasing Pauline Kael, who reels with the big screen and dismisses the small one: Television as we have it isn't a thinking form; it's only a piece of headline and a few minutes of a cameo performance.

Yes, even for such a dramatic event as the heralded beginning of Arab-Israeli understanding and the start of a possible end to more than a quarter century of war. And yes again, even if the whole effort fails and Anwar Sadat turns out to be both fool and simpleton.

The British, who have developed the art of public affairs to a point where even the much-acclaimed Public Broadcasting System in the United States must count on BBC productions as staples in its programming fare, are less elegant in their criticism of television than Pauline Kael. As early as the '60s and up to this day, they fault TV for its trivialization of life.

One moment, the medium shows an actuality of starvation and poverty; the next moment, televiewers are persuaded to buy luxuries; and the next moment, it shows somebody being shot in cold blood in New York or Africa. "TV-summarized news can reduce events to unreal snippets less arresting than the ads and the thrillers," said an eminent British MP. "Brevity always limits depth," seconded a British television critic.

That television failed to discuss the Sadat-Begin efforts at diplomatic groundbreaking in the Middle East is not, however, the major reason for my friends' refusal to give any value to the story. There will always be skeptics and cynics among us, men and women who rate an event with less enthusiasm than the rest of the world.

But that television has failed to satisfy the more enthusiastic and the less cynical among us is surely the medium's failing. That failure, we hate to admit, seems irremediable--now and in the future.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

25 years, and nothing to show?

"Impressions," TV Times, 7-13 May 1978

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By the time this comes out, much would already have been said about the 4th PATAS Sinag Awards show. Certainly, it would already have been written that while the majority of the awards were acceptable enough, the show itself was not.

For one, it was much too long. We understand that the original estimate of the producers of the show was that it would last four hours. In actuality, it lasted five hours. Four hours of sitting through an awards night is misery enough. Five hours can be hell.

And while the show was too long, it was also neither compelling nor uplifting. It was too erratic, too hastily prepared, too haphazardly researched. The New Minstrels were good, but aren't they always? So were Roderick Paulate and Efren Montes, but these two young actors are concededly leagues above those other young stars, complete with leis and shrieking fans, the medium has chosen to play up.

Aside from these two numbers, the rest of the PATAS show can very well stand for the worst of the television industry's past 25 years. The microphones were defective, the split screens were painful to the eyes, the missed cues were painful to the ears, the long pauses without anything happening were embarrassing. And through it all, we wanted to bury our head in our pillows and never look up again at the small screen.

Is this what the industry can show after 25 years--these schizophrenic, egoistic, unprofessional five hours? In one breath, the industry admits the existence of a desert in its midst. In the next breath, it glorifies that very desert. Are we to infer that this desert is all we can view in the next 25 years?

Here the whole televiewing audience is supposed to be fed with a meal worthy of a king: the history of Philippine television from its birth in 1953 to the present. Unfortunately, hardly have we begun the meal when it begins to taste like a TV dinner--without seasoning, without taste. The presentation barely touches on the historic moments in the development of the industry, the problems it has had to solve, the problems it will continue to solve. Research, a little more careful and caring research, would have done it. And a more intelligent mind at work.

Besides, is an awards night the right place to whip up this meal? Instead of serving it like a salad to the main course, why was the presentation not separated from the awards, as a beautiful idea worth the best the industry can give and shown on the very day of the celebration? By then, perhaps, with somebody really riding herd over everybody else, with no awards to inset every now and then, the show tracing the 25-year history of the Philippine television industry could have been given full and glorious play in a show all its own.

As it was, history and awards were mixed together into a dinner that probably gave many of those who had to sit through it a big stomachache ... More polish, more rehearsals, technical proficiency, clockwork precision--all these could have made a better show worth any industry's 25 years. Truly a pity.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Tennis on Pinoy TV, pre-Federer

Watching the sublime Roger Federer, the very physical Rafael Nadal, the hardworking Nikolay Davydenko, the determined Kim Clijsters--LIVE!--is one of the two ultimate joys (the other one being baseball and the New York Yankees, but that's a very New York story that I will reserve for another post) of my televiewing life today.

All my crime procedural favorites--the CSIs and NCIS--are only a third priority for me (news, current affairs live coverages, and documentaries being second), compared to watching the ATP and WTA competitions at whatever time they may be fed to Manila, and often again and again on replays.

Yet, would you believe, there was a time when tennis hardly figured in the Philippine television calendar?



"Impressions," TV Times, 11-17 December 1977

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A welcome relief, wasn't it? After two past seasons of endless basketball and a third now going on, tennis on television was a great emotional equalizer. And well it should. Basketball has become rowdy, contentious, even coarse and vulgar. The adrenalin shoots up too much during the games. And for what? Is basketball itself still a sport? Or has the basketball court now become a gambler's paradise? I know I have become too suspicious of basketball goings-on to enjoy watching the games, except perhaps the championship matches. Besides, a surfeit of anything always disgusts rather than pleases.

It was not always like that. More than a decade ago, basketball seemed the true gentleman's sport. Were not the heroes of a whole generation of Filipinos nurtured mostly by legends of sportsmanship and skill on the hardcourt? And did not radio and television assist in creating such hardcourt legends, even as the two media also created heroes out of the sportscasters who covered the basketball games with just the right combination of love, knowledge, and brilliance?

But that was in the past. Today, there is simply too much basketball on television and in national life. Too much, also, of the same names, the same tactics, the same tricks, the same words, the same everything. There even seems to be no more real love of the game today as there used to be during the days of Caloy Loyzaga, player, and Willie Hernandez, sportscaster. It is only a feeling, but it is there just the same--as if a whole consciousness, a whole sensibility, had indeed died. And I cannot even summon up enough tears for the mourning.

So, tennis was a welcome alternative, even when many of the games were televised much too late for most tennis lovers--students, working people, senior citizens all--to fully enjoy. First, there was the PHILTA-DYSD series. Then, Smash '77. The result: We want more tennis on television!

The game itself, unlike basketball, is a perfect showcase for true excellence and expertise. And since, in tennis, a player has less variables to contend with, he has mostly himself to congratulate for a victory or to blame for a defeat. There are less excuses to give, less people to accuse. Besides, tennis is obviously a disciplined sport and the atmosphere on a tennis court less rowdy and more refined than the perspiration-bathed, unruly action on a basketball court.

Tennis players also appear more concentrated and dedicated to their sport than our local basketball pros. Who can deny the ambition of Navratilova, the power of Goolagong-Cawley when she is not going walkabout, the determination of Newcombe, the confidence of Nastase? The four were a joy to watch as they gave the full measure of their experience--and of themselves-- even to exhibition matches.

True, many would scoff at the playfulness of Nastase and ask how we can call his performance disciplined. But Nastase, unlike many of our basketball pros, draws a clear line between his game and his conning. Watching Nastase play, the audience, both on the court and on TV, knows when he is playing to them and when he is playing the ball. He may be a con artist with a natural instinct for media hype, but when he is serious, he gives his all to his game. Besides, like other real con artists, he always allows the audience in on his jokes. This is more than you can say for basketball pros, who always act as if their playing were a matter of life and death. In reality, who knows?

Contributing to the welcome advent of tennis on television was television itself. In the last two tennis coverages, the stars were the tennis players. Nobody else intruded with high-pitched, excited gibberish nor ecstatic nonsense. Some grammatical mistakes, of course. We still broadcast and cover tennis and basketball in a foreign tongue. Naturally and as expected, there were grammatical mistakes. But those mistakes by the sportscasters were minor, almost unnoticed in the low-key, serious approach of the coverage.

Not that I have become an instant tennis expert. In fact, the finer points of the game still escape me. But for once, television treated its audience to a beautiful opportunity to focus on a sport and the skill of sportsmen, without any bruising antics or damaging tactics. Now, isn't that welcome relief?

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Acting through the ages

This was written at the height of a promise that seemed at the time so apparent, so believable. Who could have foretold the tragedy to follow, the anguish to come? Now, despite the blessing of hindsight, we are still left with questions that hang heavy in the sullen air.

Perhaps a nation wanted so much to believe? Perhaps we positioned the blinders on our own eyes? Perhaps we thought everything could be done for us and we didn't need to lift a finger? Perhaps we even really wanted to claim our own Lee Kuan Yew?


"Impressions," TV Times, 14-20 May 1978

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The game, President Marcos has effectively shown, is oneupmanship. Not in all his local appearances, both personal and on television, has the president shown as much control of the situation, as much power and confidence, as in the series of presidential appearances covered by television in the three days of the Mondale visit. In the eloquence of his speeches, in the formality and dignity with which he carried out his ceremonial duties, in the controlled anger with which he palmed down the impertinence of foreign newsmen, there was always evident--as a friend said--every inch of a man to power born. Beside him, US Vice President Walter Mondale looked a pale American, devoid of the Marcos flair.

The president's expertise was never more evident than during the press conference he gave for foreign newsmen attached to the Mondale retinue. There was friction there, even outright conflict. And the president showed himself master of the situation and master of the tube. Here was no waffling, indecisive, cowering president. And here, we told ourselves, was a moment of high drama. It was awkward and forced in spots, electric, filled with the almost certain prospect of disaster.

Television fortunately caught the atmosphere with electronic sensitivity. As the cameras revealed glancing, oblique details in beautiful semi-extreme close-ups--a man's pursed lips, a woman's charmed smile, a meaningful exchange of looks, a technician's seeming unconcern, a swift pen recording everything, and through it all, the president's gravelly voice--one is left with a definite sense of having lived through a brief moment of glorious history. Which, perhaps, in our continuing search for a modus vivendi that would guide our relationship with the rest of the world, it really has been.

******

This seems to be the season of the old reliables, late-blooming though they may be, on local television.

There is dear old Ben Cartwright, formerly of the Ponderosa empire, hamming it up now and as seriously as ever, in the new crime/drama series, Griff. Those who still long for the pioneering roughness of Bonanza will find in Griff a brief palliative. Brief, because the show did not last long in the United States. And brief, too, because Griff is not made of the same stuff as Bonanza. It is, in fact, bound to get lost among all the other crime/drama series. Bonanza, if you remember, was an original. And not even Lorne Greene's nostalgic past as Ben Cartwright can make up for what Griff lacks in freshness.

If you prefer the medical dramas, there is Patrick McGoohan gruffing it up in the sick room and outside as Rafferty, supposedly the unconventional doctor. Now, we've got a soft spot for McGoohan. He reminds us of our old college professor, or at least, of how an old and venerable college professor should look. He also reminds us a little of David Janssen of Harry-O, another old reliable. And of Quincy, too, in Quincy, M.E.

A couple of decades after these men made racy copy and thrilled a considerable number of movie fans, how do they look? They probably make very little--much less the racy kind of--copy these days. But as heroes in a television series--white hair, bulging middles, stooped shoulders, florid skin--they give us a continuously renewed assurance that the world is fair and just and that aging men can also be heroes.

Sometimes, though, watching them go through stories that must have been written by much younger men, some collective memory whispers that all the motions, all the paces of their weekly grind, are too familiar, that we have experienced them and seen them before, and that the roles, or they themselves, have come a little too late.

By now, the gut feeling niggles and nibbles, whispering that these men should have reached other passages in their lives, should have graduated to other concerns. It grates a little, seeing aging men still frenziedly looking for clues to their inner selves in the sometimes warped and always wearying codes of television's egoistic subtribes.

But we are perhaps much too strict with them. Actors, the cliché goes, must remain actors, acting is in their blood, or some such stuff. And not all aging men can be a magnificently dramatic Sir Laurence Olivier, or even a permanently thirsty Richard Burton. Besides, Carol Burnett is aging a little, too. And we all love her, don't we?

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

FILM: Anatomy of a Kidnapping

"Impressions," TV Times, 9-15 July 1978

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Those who could hardly wait for the long and lunatic intensity of Tell Her I Love Her to end in order to hotfoot it out of the double premiere night of the French Film Festival at the Rizal Theater and into the saner comfort of car, bus, jeep, or foot missed a psychological thriller finely wrought for any audience.

Andre Cayatte's The Anatomy of a Kidnapping, the second premiere-night offering, is a French cinematic masterpiece that acutely and delicately reduces an awesome tragedy to human size through impeccable acting, sensitive direction, and unusually deft cinematic blocking that almost passes for none. And even as The Anatomy of a Kidnapping detonates a shattering explosion that tears apart the fragile ties binding a family together, it also provides a satisfyingly surprising ending, a neat moral reckoning, the only possible solution to a dilemma of hate and despair.

The story is simple enough and truly human: the 7-year-old daughter of an auto repair shop owner and his wife is kidnapped after school while waiting for her mother to fetch her from the house of her piano teacher. The kidnapper calls the family by telephone, demanding ransom. The father informs the police, who almost succeed in tracing the origin of the call. Frightened, the kidnapper backs off. This sends mother and father into a frenzy. What will happen to their daughter? Frantic, the mother goes on French television, begging the kidnapper to call her, promising that nobody else will learn of his demands.

Tension brought about by uncertainty and doubt follows as the family waits for the kidnapper's call. Instructions finally arrive in the form of an unstamped letter inserted among the family's mail the next day. The mother is to drive alone down a road and retrieve a package by a relay station. The package, as it turns out, contains a walkie-talkie, through which the kidnapper gives his final instructions to the mother.

What the mother finds after following the instructions is a blue garbage bag, tied, lying in the middle of a deserted village road in the dark of night. Inside the garbage bag is her daughter--dead. She loads her daughter's lifeless body into the front seat of her car and covers it with a blanket. Dazed, her eyes blurring with tears, her mind obsessed only with the thought that she must bring her dead daughter home, she drives back to the city through a one-way street and straight into an oncoming car. As the people mill about, the mother is recognized. The police come, tear her unwillingly from her dead daughter, and subject her to the initial grilling. A crime has been committed: it is the law.

The law is heartless. The mother falls unconscious, unable any longer to bear her grief. The daughter's body is sent to the morgue for autopsy. The law also turns out to be perceptive. The autopsy shows that the daughter was killed only 30 minutes after she was kidnapped. The police lieutenant informs the mother that the kidnapper did not even touch the ransom money, that the kidnapper was not interested in the money at all, that he only wanted to witness that moment when she opened the blue garbage bag and saw her dead daughter. Did she reject any suitors, spurn any lovers? Does she have any enemies?

The mother's mind, anesthetized by grief, begins to function as if at the push of a button. The kidnapper must have known that the maid, gone to visit her sick mother for the day, would be unable to fetch the child from school. He must have been able to drop the unstamped letter into the mailbox without being noticed by the large crowd that had gathered since the night before in front of their house. He must have been known personally--trusted, even--by her daughter or she would have shouted and caught the attention of people in the streets. Who was he?

The film's climax is emotionally bloody, the denouement filled with despair. The mother thumps the kidnapper's chest with all the strength she could muster, in utter helplessness, bewilderment, anguish. But physical violence is hardly enough. His crime transcends humanity and the law. His punishment, like his crime, must be a personal one: she drives herself and the kidnapper straight to their common death.

As Madame Girard, the confused, grief-stricken mother, Annie Girardot is superb, shrewdly measuring out her powerhouse talent as each scene required, pointedly underplaying most of them, but always successfully catching and projecting the loss, the hurt, the puzzlement, the pained innocence. Only at the final scene, the confrontation with the kidnapper, does she allow her hurt to reach its angry edge, her weakness to strengthen into action, her pained innocence to suffer a memorably brutal, final death.

It is an eerie purgatory that director Cayette chooses for Madame Girard and the kidnapper. But his is not a cruel hand. While his pacing is brisk and energetic, it is not unfeeling and dry. He squeezes each emotion and dwells on each scene with great sensitivity and understanding. He notices and underlines humanizing details: an anxious Madame Girard is thrown off by studio lights and camera directions in the cold and professional television station, a weary Monsieur Girard falls asleep as soon as his back touches the bed and Madame Girard lifts his feet from the cold floor, terror and anxiety take equal hold of Madame Girard as she fearfully and uncertainly approaches the blue garbage bag in the middle of the deserted road.

Through it all, Cayette succeeds in making the obvious moving, the clichés eloquent. And while he scours the depths of a family's anguish, in the end drawing from each parent his individual measure of human strength, he relates to all parents who, were fate equally inclined, could suffer from a similar cruelty.

The result is a film that seizes even as it softens us into an acceptance of the realities of life. Few Filipinos would have been able to escape its emotional grip, if only it had a bigger audience and wider exposure.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Love affair with late late movies

Before cable became our TV staple, there were only local channels. The practice then among local television stations was to load prime time with either local drama or comedy presentations, and the hours after the final newscasts, depending on the day of the week and your station of choice, with public affairs documentaries/talk shows or foreign and local movies.

Working people usually found those late, late movie hours difficult to catch. Yet, once caught, they were impossible to give up. Thus, this eulogy, in a sense, because with the advent of cable television came movies at all hours. Do I appreciate movies on the small screen just as much now that they're no longer so rare? I wonder.



"Impressions," TV Times, 28 May-3 June 1978

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It can be one of the longest love affairs--this thing between you and the late late movie on the small screen. When the night is finally quiet and the whole household is asleep, there is a definite satisfaction in taking up the things one can never seem to find time for during the day--needlepoint, a book, a lovely movie.

And the late late movies, as long as you don't watch them too regularly to get bogged down in replays, can be interesting, if not really lovely. I caught the final and touching 30 minutes of what I can only believe must have been a delicately fine film starring Robert Redford and Natalie Wood, produced by the admirable John Houseman. It tells the poignant story of two lovers caught in the grip of family and other loyalties, unable to escape, freed only by death. Set amid the realistic backdrop of a railroad stop already gone seedy and unused, the story is presented as the surprisingly wise reminiscences of Natalie Wood's young sister.

Here was a movie after my own heart, moving and eloquent but unblitzed and unself-conscious. A soft and sweet little movie without pretensions and with great sensitivity and real craftsmanship.

The next night, I made it again to the last 30 minutes of a film that details the pained search by an adopted child for her real parents. This movie's value lies not so much in its dramatic impact and creative integrity as in its faithful portrayal of those pauses and side notes in the major theme--those frustrations of adopted children who must scratch beneath the tenets of society, its laws and conventions, in order to find their real roots and touch, if only briefly, the lives of their real parents.

At the end, the movie does not go the way of a Filipino tearjerker. The young woman finds her real mother, but the meeting is difficult and disastrous: she is, as she was at birth, unwelcomed and unwanted. No grandiose discovery scenes, dripping with tears and long-repressed love. Only a tense, terse, uncomfortable meeting between two grown-up people with blood ties and nothing else to bind them. A bracing and broadening scene, harshly unmagical and unromantic.

At its end, I turned on to another channel and saw Peter Graves, his face lined and weather-beaten, in a modern Western with a gothic touch. Wolves, misty moors, and mysterious deaths blend surprisingly well--once the night gives way to early morning--with press conferences, national guardsmen, and sheriff's badges, all mixed with venomous smiles and long maniacal hunts.

There is, of course, a quality one misses when watching movies on television, especially the better films. I can imagine how overwhelming that final scene of the John Houseman production can be when seen on the big wide screen of the moviehouse. I can imagine the girl, Natalie Wood's young sister, dressed in her borrowed finery, walking regally away from the dirty, dusty railroad yard, her long yellow gown a grotesque protest against life in that brown, rusting, deathly still landscape, and all around, surrounding her with its pathos, the film's melancholy melody.

Pauline Kael, in her fantastic collection of film reviews, Reeling, described that missing quality as "visual beauty, the spatial sense, the fusion of image and sound--everything that makes movies an art form." She is, in one sense, correct. On television, a film, however beautiful, however well-crafted, is reduced to the scale of the small screen. Its dimensions, however awesome at the start, are diminished. Faces become small and less distinct; the emotions they portray become less compelling. Even anger loses its savage intensity on television.

But it is still possible, I believe, to catch a little of that visual beauty on the small screen of the television set. It will need, however, a truly good movie, a truly beautiful film, to be able to project that quality on television. On the big screen, one often gets swamped by the sheer size of what one is looking at.

On the other hand, perhaps television can then be taken as the more stringent test of the truly beautiful film. If it comes out beautiful even on TV, then it must really be beautiful.

And possibly, just possibly, you will still see it on your late late movie.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

When the medium fails

"Impressions," TV Times, 31 July-6 August 1977

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The tempting prospect of seeing Rolando Tinio's Santa Juana on television was so great I had to give up my Sunday afternoon siesta. That, for a working woman, is a big sacrifice. How many men and women who work from Monday to Saturday would give up that precious Sunday afternoon nap?

Well, I did. Which speaks not for the television coverage of the stage play, but for the play itself. Santa Juana was an eye-opener. It definitely impressed on me, as nothing had ever done before, the force and power of the national language. In Rolando Tinio's Pilipino translation, George Bernard Shaw's St. Joan was compelling, alive, vibrant with humor and wit, touching. The Pilipino which came out reverberating from the darkness of the dramatically lit stage exploded with the true vitality of a people's language.

Not for this translation the heavy purity of the purists nor the gray declensions of Taglish. Rolando Tinio's Santa Juana is characterized by an unusual feel for a language that can grow, broaden, and live, without having to swallow in full or in part the phrases and idioms of a foreign language. His translations--of songs, poems, and plays--breathe (I cannot imagine a more valid word), but not of what is polluted or polluting.

Of course, part of the play's force comes from the brilliance of the performers, who delineated English and French roles in Pilipino with savvy. The monochromatic costumes (part of the atmosphere of the presentation was achieved through the interplay of shadows created by sparse and effective lighting, the black-silver-purple color scheme, and the acting) allowed nothing extraneous to the action to color the viewer's response to the power of the acting.

And here, certainly, is first-rate stage acting. Ella Luansing, the only woman in that all-male cast and tackling the principal role, glittered with her forceful characterization and her resonant voice.

But if the translations were as gripping and the acting as glittering as I say they were, what made the television coverage of Santa Juana such a ho-hum effort? Chiefly, there intrudes the realization that the coverage was not conceived by its television producers as a stage play presented for television, but only as a stage play covered by television.

When I first heard from a friend of Rolando Tinio's that Santa Juana was going to be presented on television, I had hoped that the stage play was going to be presented for television. That is, acted out on stage but filmed or taped especially for television. I expected that aside from the demands of stage, the demands of television would also be met. Cameras would be placed right on stage and would follow the performers as they moved about. A variety of camera angles would be predetermined, and cutting from one camera angle to another would be fast and crisp. The extreme close-up--television's most effective angle for a dramatic presentation of Santa Juana's intensity--would be used with audacity, and used frequently. The intimacy and immediacy of television would be retained, bolstered by the power and force of the stage.

What I got that afternoon hardly speaks for television as a medium for transmitting noteworthy but exclusive stage plays, open only to those who can afford financially and physically to be present, to a greater audience. The sound was bad, the camera shots were stereotyped and much too aloof from the action, and the tape used was very audibly a much-used one.

When will the gods of government television ever realize the potential--and feel the satisfaction--of bringing into our home screens a really good television presentation of a really good stage play? And please, not on a Sunday afternoon.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Made in the USA

Before the advent of cable television in the Philippines, all local networks dedicated their prime-time broadcasting hours to a mix of local and US-network productions. Here are some of the US canned shows that made it to the Philippines in the late '70s.


"Impressions," TV Times, 17-23 September 1978

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All that American-cult stuff invading my consciousness from 8 p.m. upwards most nights is making me tired before my time. And the way the young ones are lapping it all up without seeming to reach satiety at some point or other makes me feel old, old, old. Can they really take hours and hours of the same stuff, night in and night out, without wanting to give it up sometime?

It is not solely the local networks' fault, of course. We seem to think there is only one source of television programs that can captivate the majority of the Filipino youth: American networks. And American networks are not exactly known for variety. Each year, as American television goes through its rites of spring, when the year's new offerings are previewed and the lucky ones are chosen, the acclaim is often self-serving. How can you truly congratulate an industry that does not care about the merits of a show, only about its ratings?

But that is now much-too-trodden ground. American television--whatever the critics say--is totally insensitive to them. It is especially so now that Fred Silverman--the uncontested programming czar who, up to 1975, decided the shows that received airtime over CBS; whose contract as president of the entertainment division of ABC ran out only last June 8; and who, the day after, moved to a million-dollar job as president of NBC--is deciding the majority of shows the American television audience will see for at least another year.

CBS still runs Silverman shows, including M*A*S*H, which is arriving on local television very soon. ABC's new season, which has already started, is composed of Silverman-approved or -generated shows, including Charlie's Angels. NBC, now feeling the alleged Silverman "golden" touch, will be bringing in such shows as Lifeline and Sword of Justice.

All those Fred Silverman shows on the American television menu may be good for Americans, but it can spell nausea for the Philippine television audience--that is, those of a definite generation or generations, of course. I don't know how the young feel about it, but I can admire the technical excellence of Donny & Marie only for a short period of time. Say, a month or so. Afterwards, I have to get away from all that gloss and slickness or suffer mental indigestion. Of the crime dramas, after a few months, I cannot anymore recall where I saw what: Was it on CHiPs, or on Dog and Cat, or on Starsky & Hutch? A steady diet of policemen, detectives, and their ilk after 8 p.m. can make forgettable and indeterminate heroes of generally commendable performers such as Raymond Burr, Lorne Greene, Robert Blake, and James Garner.

True, the young audience--admittedly a sizable audience, perhaps the most sizable and the easiest to catch--may still be loving The Six Million Dollar Man after all these years. But a great many of those over 30--and a significant segment of those over 25--are, I would hazard, getting a little tired of all that juvenile stuff. We may wish to be reminded once in a while of our youth, but we will hardly want to relive its callowness every night.

It is to save us from the disposable stuff churned out by the American networks that--on local prime time--we must hail the coverage of a Pope's funeral rites, a documentary on the Middle East, a series on the Wimbledon games, and dramatic serials like Roots and Holocaust as major events in our continuing observance of the medium. For a while, BBC docudramas came to enthrall an adult Filipino audience, however small. But just as swiftly as they came, they disappeared. We wish there were more of them.

Of the regular output of Fred Silverman and company that we see on local television these days, we can only mention two with affection: Quincy, M.E. and Kojak: Quincy, M.E., because the show provides a view of crime detection that, for all its sordidness, is just a little more scientific; Kojak because, despite its blood and gore, it is a true original. The whole ambiance, the entire spirit of Kojak, puts it in a class of its own. Beside the characterization by Telly Savalas of the role of Lt. Theo Kojak, Starsky and Hutch--to use an odious comparison, but certainly an appropriate one--look like a couple of bumbling neighborhood punks vis-a-vis the godfather.

And if you were over 30, or even a sober over-25, would you not prefer the suaveness of the godfather to the brashness of punks? Sometimes, I am even tempted to turn off the small screen, turn on my bedside lamp, and take the second half of Honourable Schoolboy in one uninterrupted sitting. But I also want to prove that a more mature viewer has as much say in what should go into television as a younger viewer.

And that can make you even more tired and old before your time.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

FILM: Anno Domini 1573

"Impressions," TV Times, 3-9 December 1978

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Tight schedules forced us to miss the European film festival. But we made it to the opening night of the Yugoslavian film festival. On show was Anno Domini 1573, a haunting and corrosive indictment of feudalism, a tragic but deeply human view of revolution, and a compassionate and hopeful foretelling of the liberation of the human spirit.

One leaves the theater strangely transported, emotionally silenced. Each year brings an autumn and a spring. Wars start and end. Man continues to fight against injustice and exploitation. Man lives. It is a haunting, but reassuring, film.

Anno Domini 1573 is historical--a rendering on film of the uprising of the peasants of Croatia against their landlords in 1573 as seen through the eyes of the young boy Petrek, who was born into an impoverished family living under the whip of the landlord Tahy. The film follows Petrek as he wanders through the rural landscape teeming with sadism (the boy's introduction to the traumatic evil of serfdom is the death of his father, who was made the human prey of hunting dogs), rape (his sister, like other virgins in the village, is brought to the landlord's castle), murder (he walks through bare fields sprinkled with gallows from which hang human corpses), inequality (the peasants fight with crudely-fashioned scythes, the nobles and their soldiers with swords and guns), irony (nobles and serfs pray the same prayers and invoke the same saints).

The young boy goes through his early days of apprenticeship to an independent knight and experiences cowardice in the face of defeat. Later, as his knight perishes in a battle with armored soldiers, he finds his model and mentor in the person of the chosen leader of the uprising--the charismatic Matija Gubec, under whose orders the serfs of the land will fight unto final defeat and whose name will become synonymous far and wide with heroism and revolution.

Gubec is caught in the end with the remains of his ragtag army, placed on a throne amid much ceremony, laughed at and pelted with eggs and insults, crowned with red-hot iron shaped in the form of a cow muzzle. He dies. But in his final message to the boy Petrek, he signals the philosophy of the true revolutionary leader: "Alone, by yourself, looking neither to right nor left, but always ahead--straight ahead!"

And Petrek, in the final autumn of the hapless year 1573, his left eye lost in the war now covered with a patch, walks through fields littered with bodies hanging from the gallows, singing the only song he knows, the song of the insurrection, walking straight ahead, to continue life and fight.

The film, written and directed by Vatroslav Mimica, a Yugoslav director noted for his intensely political and personal films, is simply made, a pure narrative that counts solely on its plot for dramatic impact. The acting is subdued but effective, hardly agitated yet agitating. Even the actor who portrays Gubec, the charismatic leader, is cool, self-contained, disciplined. And the young boy Petrek turns in a performance that is obviously deliberate and controlled.

As it follows its story smoothly, the film progresses, moved by its own internal rhythm. One sits through it, hardly cognizant of time, of the length of scenes and sequences, utterly taken up by the interplay of action, story, characters.

One cringes at the blood and gore. But in war, especially medieval war, both are inescapable. Bodies are severed, faces are slashed, heads and limbs roll onto barren ground, blood fertilizes the dry soil. The violence is there, but it is neither a cinematic tool nor an external force. And the camera does not linger on the blood and the violence with malevolent pleasure, but shows it as a matter of fact and history, part of the action and the revolution.

At film's end, as we walk out of the theater into the cold night already redolent with the approaching chill of Christmas, we feel with unmistakable clarity the inevitability of it all--of the revolution, of death, of life. Anno Domini 1573 was made in Yugoslavia. But Asia, too, has known similar anguish. As an Iranian rebel said, "Under such circumstances, the situation becomes so oppressive that religious and underground radicalism becomes the only outlet."

We understand it, because of Anno Domini 1573, and believe it.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Please, let go

"Impressions," TV Times, 3-9 September 1978

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Philippine television has been around for at least 25 years--a quarter of a century, our world-watching friend, board director of a local television company, reminds us--and in those 25 years, we would like to think that it has grown and developed and would continue to grow and develop.

So why, on certain days, when we turn on the television set, are we beset with a punishing sense of deja vu, as if we had seen all these before and yet not left them behind after a decade or so?

One Wednesday night, we happened to watch Operation Petticoat and seemed to recall, from the shadowy depths of memory, a much earlier canned series on local television--we must have been children then yet, for we cannot even remember the title--with men in similar uniform, in a similar crowded locale, and in similarly funny situations.

On Channel 4 prime time, it is almost like going back to a long-gone era. They are still playing the same brand of basketball, with roughly the same star names, although for a change, everybody has gone professional. And they are still showing old, old series and old, old movies. But all that may change every soon, we understand.

On our Friday deadline, who was scheduled to come out with her musical special (Oh no, not again!) but Julie Andrews, who must have sung to all of Hollywood Hills as far back as we can remember. And what can you say about Tarzan and Combat, both of which have been around for much longer than we would really like? Or Lorne Greene who, even with his best investigative technique in Griff, brings back faint memories of the more-beloved Bonanza? And Tang Tarang Tang, which changed only its title but retained the same family situation and the same family members bar one?

But this, you wouldn't believe! The other week, we saw Nida Blanca play it coy while being courted by Luis Gonzales in Mana Mana 'Yan on a Thursday night, dance it cool with Lita Gutierrez on the Nida-Lita Show on a Saturday night, and labor over the credits on her cue card on Sunday night's Penthouse Seven. Through them all, it was the same old Nida, doing the old routines and the old gimmicks, belting out the old acting style, even the old talking style.

We have nothing against nostalgia, but we wish some of our local performers would know when to let a good memory go. Age should teach us all the wisdom to know when to move on to much better and more solid performances, and how. And to do both, not only with spirit but also with grace.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Friends, wars, wheels

"Impressions," TV Times, 10-16 September 1978

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When a friendship is illuminated by a film of depth, intensity, and perception, it becomes the perdurable stuff of human existence. It assumes the true touchstones of the classic: inevitability and immutability. One cannot imagine it happening any other way, and one cannot imagine a time when it was not.

The friendship between American playwright Lillian Hellman and her friend, Julia, is one such friendship. Its mood is like poetry on a rainy night; yet, it is as lasting as the tides. Its texture is like a dream across the ocean waves: nocturnal, echoing, haunting. And at its center is the only thing on earth that can defy time and change: the heart.

We cannot let Julia move on, unappreciated by many Filipino moviegoers, as evidenced by the almost empty moviehouse where we watched the film, without putting on record how this quiet movie touched us and how we would like to keep it close to our hearts, to hug it with all the childlike affection and wonder still in us on nights when we are most alone and most ourselves.

******

Fort Santiago, except for a few anemic performances and a few inconsistencies in the development of character and the flow of storyline, is generally an admirable effort on the part of local television to present something other than tired sitcoms and tiring soap operas. The episode that starred Leila Hermosa in the role of a guerrilla widow, for example, was well-constructed.

The acting, however, was another story--an area where a good casting director who really knows his craft and uses his head could do a lot to propel Philippine television forward. A good casting director would have known that Leila Hermosa simply does not possess (yet?) enough depth and life for the role she was made to tackle. Nor do the talents who portrayed the roles of Hermosa's husband, the guerrilla hero, and their daughter.

Besides, for all her classic features, Leila Hermosa looked too heavy to effectively embody a grieving ruin of beauty. In our mind, the role was meant for somebody transparent, one through whom we could see and touch a precious past. Leila Hermosa was as solid as a mountain of pasta.

Despite these flaws and the obvious need for tighter editing of some portions of the episode, however, Fort Santiago is singular enough because it puts a little more time and energy into the details of production, escaping the tight and limiting confines of static studio sets in order to play around with more exciting and more realistic locations. This places the series a few notches above other local drama efforts.

******

During our time, we had one word to describe it: mush. These days, the word is still being used. And why not? What word best portrays the sickly sentimentality, the saturated and saturating sponginess of it all, but--mush?

Mushy it certainly is, when Rock Hudson is made to crown a solid performance as Adam Trenton in "Wheels" with a final sequence filled with nothing more than cloying romance. Bestsellers serials are not remarkable for high drama and impressive satire, or for searing reality and unnerving tension. But they are, admittedly, provocative entertainment--precisely the reason why the series is called Bestsellers.

The stories are often transformed visually to the small screen with enough mastery of technique and theatrics to keep us glued to the series, week after week, until the final sequence. How sad, then, when a character like Adam Trenton, whose whole life had been a true and unremitting search for perfection and growth in his career, must in the end be made to mouth lines made only for young boys on the throes of first love.

Another Bestsellers offering, "The Money Changers," ended in exactly the same way: mushy. Here was a man who had won his long and often insulting battle with the worst types--the true types, a friend interjects--in the world of big business, and his final scene must be a balcony scene only two details removed from Romeo and Juliet. We never did like balcony scenes: they are much too artificial and scripted. The balcony scene in "The Money Changers" was also weak, a disappointing ending to a series that had expertly built up the action, and our expectations, from week to week.

We remember another serial, Holocaust, which could easily have been made to end with a lot of mush. Fortunately, it did not. The ending of Holocaust was not very powerful, true. But it was not melodramatic and sentimental. In fact, it was an ending that was unfailingly honest to the spirit of its tragedy and to the continuity of human life and aspirations.

We had hoped "Wheels" would--up to the final scene and within the limited framework of its plot and subject matter--be equally true to the spirit of its controlling theme. Unfortunately, it sank in the mire of mush.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Tapping the chords of nostalgia

"Impressions," TV Times, 16-22 April 1978

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Who says nostalgia is irrelevant?

In the deep silence of night, when we hear the lovely kundimans of our countryside, do we not feel as if we are at last in touch with the very essence of being a Filipino? Bombarded as we are by jeprox lyrics and Pinoy rock, when the quiet of a peaceful evening is softly broken by disembodied melodies from a lone guitar, are we not brought back to a time and place that must have etched grooves on the collective memory of race and people?

Don't get us wrong. That jeprox music we hear on the air strikes a responsive chord somewhere in our here and now. But here and now is not history, and we shall remain lovers of history.

Of course, history cannot but transform, as time transforms. The music we now claim as truly flowing from the very depths of the Filipino "soul" may not have been really Filipino at the time they were composed and sung, but pale copies of a foreign experience. They, too, may have been part of a searching people's misdirected energies. But this question, we leave to those whose expertise is music.

Ours is feeling. And when we listen to Aawitan Kita, we know the feeling is there, rich and intense, a harking back to the memorable images in our memory bank: of sparkling rivers and little nipa huts and fishing boats standing lonely on a clear white beach, of a setting sun on a blood-red sea, of cloudless skies and cool clear waters rushing from the mountainsides down to the rich green ricefields below. Are these not the timeless images of our Philippine countryside?

If somebody should say that these images are treacly and artificial, too smooth and too much like a postcard, so what? What does it matter also if Armida Siguion-Reyna, in her lovely balintawak, looks too expensive and too citified to have worked in some ricefield all her life? What does it matter if Carina Afable, singing alone out in the open fields, wobbles as she walks down a rice paddy? What if the whole show sometimes reminds you of a Bayanihan suite?

Realism, after all, is not the stuff of romantic nostalgia. Besides, don't they all look good, as if Fernando Amorsolo himself had chosen to paint them on his own canvases in memorable colors from his own palette?

And like Amorsolo, Aawitan Kita is evidently a product meant to enrich a painstaking, cumbersome medium. The show counts on good--sometimes even lyrical--camera shots and angles, with special attention paid to little details: colors, costumes, props. When they roast lechon on Aawitan Kita, it is not paper lechon. Nor are exterior shots simulated using stiff studio sets. Location shooting is done on location, possibly in the best location the producer can find.

It is in one technical aspect that Aawitan Kita seems to do no better than other musicals: lip-syncing. This problem is essential. An excellent song can be completely destroyed by sound that does not match the singer's lip movements. The way we see it, there are only two possible solutions to the problem. One solution is expensive and time-consuming. The other requires real musical talent from singers who should sing and perform while the cameras are rolling. Or, if our singers still insist on taping their songs first before performing in front of the cameras, can we at least ask that they rehearse and synchronize their lip movements with great care and that the directors retake whenever there is need?

Of course, Armida Siguion-Reyna is considered one of the more demanding local producers. We would have wanted her episode on Aawitan Kita to tell a little more about the life and works of Fernando Amorsolo, but on a weekly basis, perhaps a fully researched and culturally rich presentation of such scope and magnitude is too much to expect.

Which is why we have always felt that people working on the more creative aspects of television production should not be expected to produce a one-hour show week in and week out. Much is lost when people have to meet a weekly deadline: thoroughness, a definite meticulousness, a comprehensive presentation of concept.

In the end, what is obviously left to the viewer is nostalgia.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Right show, wrong panel

"Impressions," TV Times, 5-11 March 1978

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I must admit I had to virtually tape my eyelids open to keep them from closing. This is not a reflection on the TV show, just on its timeslot. More viewers would have been attracted to Xerox Science Report had it not been shunted to man the last sentry before the late-late movies. The time is simply not kind to working women who, at 10.30 p.m., barely manage to close the night with grace.

So there we were, our eyelids seemingly laden with a hundred burdens. Tina Monzon-Palma comes on with a hello-face. We wince a little. It has been a long day and our hello can never sound as chirpy as hers. As matter-of-factly as possible, she introduces her panelists for the night: a fire chief, a fire protection engineer, a student.

The subject, she says in so many words and in light tones that cannot quite overcome the studied terseness of the script, is fire control. She mentions one of the most devastating high-rise fires in recent memory. My disembodied mind refuses to bite: my memory must have gone on leave.

She pauses. For a while, the pause hangs thick and heavy in the air. Suddenly, there is this voice and this film sequence. Not Towering Inferno, though a little like it. But without the glorious color, without the dramatic close-ups, and thankfully, also without the imposed illusions and pretensions. Just the simple story of a fire in a high-rise building, how it spread, how the loss of so many lives could have been prevented, how--in theory-- fires can be prevented and/or stopped. A fire drill. Firemen storming what was supposed to be a building in flames. People being herded like sheep into cul-de-sacs of safety. Sophisticated control casters that look like computer rooms. And men and women calmly going through the paces of firefighting. After all, it is only a fire drill.

Back to the local panel. Tina starts asking questions. The fire chief is polite but reserved: nothing fiery in him, to be sure. That coolness is enough to douse all your hopes for a spirited discussion. The fire protection engineer tries to make up with his technical expertise and reassuring mien. He is restricted by the atmosphere, and probably by the need to translate his jargon into layman's language for a television audience. But it is clear he knows his business. The student (is he dazzled or jaded?) comes up with two questions in the best of his not-quite-Filipino accent.

The whole television show takes only a half hour, minus a few minutes. Of course, watching the panelists, one gets a faint feeling they are going through what seems to them much longer than a half hour. Perhaps this is one of the less relaxed episodes of Xerox Science Report. Or are we just imagining those nervous half-breaths when you can almost feel Tina Monzon-Palma plumbing the depths for the next question, the next comment? And we can sympathize with her as she willfully and gamely pushed the minutes along, all the while getting very little help from her panel.

A satisfying interview/discussion on television is the result of a lucky convergence of interviewer and guests, a meeting of minds. In that particular episode, sadly, luck was a lot shy. Which is not to say that the whole concept misfired. The purpose behind Xerox Science Report remains noteworthy. The determination of its producers remains even more admirable. Sometimes there's very much less to say about other programs.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column