Thursday, December 28, 2006

No roses yet for a first episode



Frankly, this is a series I can no longer remember today. It couldn't have gone on for more than a season. I surmise that I must have stumbled on a very young Lorna Tolentino and a still-unformed Mark Gil. The two have certainly done a lot of growing up in the succeeding two decades and a half.


When I think of shows like what I believe this one aspired to be, I see in my mind's eye scenes from Ingmar Bergman films. Today's cineastes, on the other hand, may recall instead some of the black-and-white sequences in The Ring, or its even more eerie original, Ringu.


"Impressions," TV Times, 22-29 April 1979

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At their best, gothic plays can be thought-provoking existential parables; at their worst, they are hours of close-ups on nervous mortals toyed with by confident immortals. Rosas, in its first episode telecast Sunday before Easter, straddled the wide line between the two. A frank review would probably mean it was neither existential parable nor close-up hour but--as a friend pronounced right after--a weak episode of a promising series.

Now, that premiere episode, "Ang Duwelo sa Dilim."

A child-woman stands, caught in a medium shot, seemingly withdrawn into herself. It's a good beginning--especially since the child-woman is Lorna Tolentino, playing uncertainty, distress, and desperation beautifully. She is an understandably desirable love object for a duel--a sympathetic Lolita emoting her vulnerability with understanding, if not with passion.

The camera catches her lovingly, caressingly, in sensual close-ups that register, almost painfully, her melancholy, her secret seduction and enslavement. That she was lacking in passion during her only love scene and her final debasement is not strictly her fault. Perhaps she is still too young for the role, too inexperienced to delineate effectively the fever of madness and loss. In this sense, her characterization, while beautiful, is flawed, unable as it is to grow from weakness to madness. Her performance in a role that demands the portrayal of desperation, frustration, and passion falls a degree short of excellent. Life and time should take care of that.

The same, however, cannot be said of Mark Gil. As the devoted husband, the only living Suarez heir who is forced by love and circumstance to return to the haunted country house full of imperceptible ghosts and perceptible memories, he appears sadly inadequate, unable to command feeling. He puts on a mask of pensiveness, but it is clear that he is too unfledged for anger or bewilderment. It is as if he still has to perceive the theme of his life--an unacceptable situation in a role written for a tragic and certainly much more heroic character.

Unlike Lorna Tolentino, who has the seeds of great drama in her and must only wait for them to mature, Mark Gil will need a few seasons of hard work. Blessed with the face, he must now find the soul. In a role clearly meant for the likes of Tommy Abuel, with all of Abuel's acting experience and stage training, Mark Gil is obviously out of his depth.

What is more essentially wrong with "Ang Duwelo sa Dilim" is that it fails to maintain the mystery to the final scene. Director Maryo de los Reyes wastes too much light on corners that should be kept in shadow, and some of his set decorator's supposedly turn-of-the-century furnishings look more like pieces from furniture sales at summer bazaars. Location taping and the interesting play of light and shadow could have helped immensely to infuse the episode with old Spanish and gothic characteristics, both of which are necessary if the production is to evince overtones of legend-in-the-making.

Also lacking is rhythmic pacing and adroit editing. An hour of suspense and mystery usually moves according to a rhythm of its own. In television, this rhythm is influenced by sequential demands which either leave the editing punchy and crisp, or slow and anticlimactic. "Ang Duwelo sa Dilim," in many instances, breaks out of this rhythm and thus fails to make capital of it.

Also distressing is the unfolding of the facts of the story--the heroine's former illness, the cause of the duel between Don Paco and Juan Velasquez, the identity of the Spanish charmer. In an obvious attempt to get all the fact-telling finished as soon as possible, the whole effort was concentrated during the first half of the show, leaving the heroine's seduction and the duel to fill up the second half. While this is a clean way of unraveling a storyline, it does not boost the element of suspense nor reinforce that vital oscillation between illusion and reality necessary in a story of this genre.

Most regrettable is the duel/death scene. In the hands of a master, the scene could have filled the screen with brilliant anguish, making time present (Mark Gil) and time past (Juan Velasquez) mix until neither is what it was. Instead, the death scene was rushed, deprived of its energy by the lack of riveting close-ups, too tightly put together to allow for the release of nervous tension.

Indeed, there was never much of that tension in the death scene, or in previous ones.


-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Local satire: coming or going?



"Impressions,"
TV Times, 8-14 April 1979

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I never made it to a Juan Tamad movie. Not once. Generations were marvelling at its social impact in times past, but I always found myself, for some reason or other, barred from the experience. I regret it now, realizing that much of Juan Tamad's appeal lies not with Juan Tamad himself, but with the mood of the times and the cast of men's minds.

That is how I find today's Juan Tamad, the weekly television series that premiered on Channel 4 the other Sunday. The premiere episode was hardly a remarkable television event. It was slow (and don't say it is simply living up to its title: cute); many scenes were unnecessary; the cast--while experienced--was not brilliant. The camera was efficient but stolid, like an ox going about its ways with little wish to change them (again with a literal excuse? ghastly).

Only in the intro did the episode show some slice of imagination. Even then, as a friend posited, the basic line to that intro had already been heard in varying versions from varying sources. The juxtaposition of folk joke with myth is also, at its best, melodramatic, and at its worst, absurd.

But Juan Tamad's value in this day and age--and the basis for considering it as television satire--is that it provides, for the individual viewer, a private exercise in judgment. Each viewer, sitting in front of his television set, is free--in seclusion--to struggle with his own questions and arrive at his own conclusions. At the end of the episode, he is also free to measure for himself, without fear or pressure, how relevancet Juan Tamad's pronouncements are to his life and the society in which he moves.

Like some other efforts at satire, Juan Tamad, too, may lose steam early in its season. The saddest rut for satire to fall into is a corridor of mirrors where its producers cringe at their own reflection. Already, Juan Tamad, in its use of a Muslim setting and a comfortably distant and isolated ambiance, is deliberately softening its irreverence and imparting to the show that curiously flat quality of reminiscence, like a reenactment of events that happened a long time ago and are, therefore, already divorced from today.

It could also, sooner or later, refrain from making immediately perceptible comments on the more questionable aspects of contemporary life. In which case and at which time, I suppose, it would either lapse into obscurantism or obscurity. The first is an obvious mechanism; the second has been, to paraphrase Belgian playwright Michel de Ghelderode, "the law since the time of Don Quixote."

What would I wish for a local attempt at satire like Juan Tamad? First, that it should acquire technical polish. There is no substitute for this. Second, that it should strive at striking roots in the intellectual and social milieu at the same time that it aspires for those fantastic flights of comic delight, without both of which satire has no reason to be. And third, that it should tighten up, speed up the action, gain timing, and realize that length can and should be sacrificed whenever it softens impact.

May I also suggest that perhaps the roles in Juan Tamad should be reexamined? Some of the characters appear quite extraneous to the purpose and the plot, their roles almost like afterthoughts that can be added or cancelled on a week-to-week basis and do not have to be made part of the regular cast.

And why not let younger, more adept performers flesh out some of the roles in succeeding episodes? I have nothing but respect for experience and age, but both qualities do not always make for spontaneity, contemporaneity, dynamism, freshness--qualities I expect from satire.

Or is the show trying to make precisely the point that we have become a nation of the old and the jaded?


-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Reality, art, and television



We
did get British shows in the late '70s. Don't think it was all canned Americana back then. But their short tube life proves there was just no audience sizable enough to watch them and no advertising support regular enough to keep them on the local small screen.

Two points on statements in my column piece below:

1. The small screen can--and does--offer the next best thing to reality and art, now that cable providers have succeeded in beaming to our television sets such a welcome multiplicity of cultures and coverages. In the late '70s and early '80s, even local newscasts and live public affairs specials were severely limited in length and scope by financial and political restrictions. Still, keep in mind that scripted television shows, including documentaries, only approximate reality even if they now belong to a legitimate and accepted artistic category.

2. DVDs and cable, as well as big-size television screens, can now bring to our homes the massive and spectacular library of films from all over the world, in glorious color and stunning sound. To me, however, their impact gets diluted when viewed on television.

I would rather that Ingmar Bergman's films remain as emotion-filled images in my mind's eye than watch them lose their power on a small screen.



"Impressions," TV Times, 1-7 April 1979

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The New Avengers does not make waves. It's too hoity-toity British, often implausible, and lacks the violence and savagery of American crime series. Not that one is necessarily superior to the other, just that one is a class apart from the other.

That candid and comic acidity about crime, so evident in the series, is thoroughly and uniquely British, blending humor and horror and showing the world just how amusing all the feigned grittiness of American crime shows can be.

Episodes of The New Avengers are at once matter-of-factly violent and self-deprecatingly funny. They also display a dramatic irony that gives them their vitality and poetry. The irony marries laughter and crime, comic action and tragic design, life and death in appreciable doses. A friend dies, but from his death, the new avengers find the clues that will solve the crime. Purdey's pajama bottoms keep falling just as she is trying to get lost among the shop-window mannequins, but when revealed, she finds the perfect springboard for a fantastic kick. Steed and Gambit encounter nothing but sleeping people on the streets as they are pursued by criminals, but among the sleeping figures, they find the perfect cover for their wide-awake selves.

It may be asking too much of a crime series, but I am gratified by the almost automatic juxtaposition of dulcet tragedy and saline comedy in The New Avengers. It acts as a welcome blotter, soaking up the heaviness, the viciousness, the violence, and keeping them from staining our nights.

In the effort, though, it again opens the medium to a long-standing criticism--that television provides nothing more than placebo entertainment. Or to a lamentable one--that it distorts reality while passing it through the lens of fantasy. But anybody who, in the first place, makes the mistake of believing that the small screen can offer him the next best thing to reality or art is already functioning under a delusion that no television show, however brutal or forceful, can feed.

Once in a while, television can be truthful. Once in a while, it can offer something akin to art. But not always, not regularly. The New Avengers, neither reality nor art, is at least fanciful delight.

******

If anybody wants proof that a bigger and more excruciating attempt at reality and art is out there, untouched and untouchable by television, then Interiors is it. The Woody Allen film--too big to transmit to the small screen--is a pulsing, heartrending, throbbing reality you may never see on television. You can watch it on a Betamax tape, of course, but even on one, it will have been diminished in size and distempered by circumstance.

Interiors is film as art, even more Bergmanesques in some scenes than Bergman's, filled with women's faces and women's fears, overpowering and anguished. In a remarkable departure from previous Woody Allen films, Interiors is angst-ridden and inward-looking, delving into the inner self, exposing the brittle and breaking center.

Yet, film as art--like Interiors--for all its aesthetic beauty, is something we should not expect to see on a television schedule, much less on the small screen itself. The many diverse, varied, interesting people who say they enjoy Three's Company (which I don't) and Lou Grant (which I do) may not watch Interiors on television, even if it were simulcast on all channels (which it never will be, of course). Somehow, art and television do not mix.

It is not television's fault, nor film's. Each one has its own integrity, its own responsibility, its own audience, its own value. Its own limitations, too.

To realize this is to learn the first lesson in the art of appreciating both.


-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Drama needs respect

"Impressions," TV Times, 18-24 March 1979


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The beginning was interesting enough: a rhythmic choreography of alternate scenes, leaping from one to the other in quick sequence to evoke the intensity and turmoil of a family crisis. But as we warmed up to the exercise, the editing began to lose pace and rhythm, the scenes started to gain in length and slow down in action, the tension thinning out and eventually evaporating into the heavy air of pedagogy. And the sad thing is that it did not have to do so.

Anak, in its episode the other week, with Renato Robles, Alicia Alonzo, Tina Loy, Didi Nakar, and Joey Sison (?) in the cast, started out quite well. Why did it have to deteriorate into a shopworn message film without even any artistic pretensions (except in the beginning), roughly overacted and creeping with bigotry?

The most obvious reason is that the whole exercise started, not--as should be the case with a free dramatic effort--with a story or a situation, however convoluted, confused, or contemporary, but only with a lesson somebody wanted to teach. And lessons, necessary though they may be in the context of national development, do not often make for good art, even less for good drama. When drama is asked to flesh out a lesson or a perception, moral or social or political, it becomes forced, contrived, heavy. It loses dramatic integrity and becomes an artistic failure, obvious and transparent. Its whole existence becomes thoroughly questionable.

We are not saying that a dramatist should be free of all causes. Walter Goodman of The New York Times, in a very perceptive piece on politics and art, writes: "There are times--war, revolution, some dramatic crisis--that turn all citizens' attentions to public affairs, and many artists find themselves so caught up in a cause or a regime that they want to write or paint or sing about it." But, he hastens to add, whatever force and imagination such works gain come less from their subject matter and more from their intrinsic "artistic" qualities.

Some of PETA's Fort Santiago plays reek of social causes and political biases, pounded down with a heavy hammer. But their dramatists still go through the pretense of cloaking the exercise with the mantle of art. Or, at least, what they believe is art. There is a moral lesson behind each Shakespearean play, but it takes students of the Bard a whole semester or more to unravel the artistic folds of his medieval genius.

The episode of Anak that we watched, sadly, was not even fighting for some deeply felt social cause or some piercing cry for national identity. It was preaching against young marriages: the young mother gets saddled with more babies than she can handle, the young husband is caught between his wife and his mother, the young wife ceases to enjoy the uncomplicated life of student and pampered daughter, the young father must carry out financial responsibilities for which he is not prepared.

So, they say, this is what the television audience needs: this is drama for a specific audience. This, they add, is what it is to fulfill the primary responsibility of a communications medium. This is development communication, or what it should be. The man in the street, the teenager glued to the set--this is what they need.

We do not and cannot agree. But even if we were to accept the above, and carry it further, then we would at least ask that the episode's producers stop pretending that such is drama. Let us not demean and insult the dramatic form by using it to serve a didactic purpose. They can instead make a documentary, or put up a variety show with short skits meant to teach the audience whatever they want to teach them. A documentary can even turn out to be artistic, given enough care and attention.

But not drama. We have too much respect for the genre not to register our protest at its abuse.


-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Final irony

"Impressions," TV Times, 11-17 February 1979

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For the first time in many a television season, I watched a local drama with unabated interest and solemn respect. Here, at last, is a story of the eternal and the immutable, played out with care, understanding, perception. Yes, affection. No stereotypes here, acting out hackneyed roles, following tired patterns. Here, people, living life as best they could, reacting like real human beings and, at the end, capturing the stark reality of the human condition.

I caught only the concluding part of Mga Kuwento ng Pag-ibig's three-part episode titled "Banyuhay." But although I did not see the preceding two parts, I was still enriched by the conclusion's unique perception of the human heart. That conclusion, standing alone, had love, humanity, rage, raw adult emotion, an ardent desire to illuminate adult relationships, and the compulsion to spew up the truth in accents of lyrical irony.

I will not dissect the interwoven human relationships in the story. I will not--though it is clear--write that the relationship between husband and wife was sufficiently doomed to be truly tragic. I will not say that they were both haunted to the very end--though really they were--by that "long-delayed but always-expected something that we live for." Indeed, however much I underscore both realities, they come across as totally immaterial. The story, propelled as implacably as the tides, moved purposefully by time, marches rhythmically to its only end.

Perhaps the story is also commendable precisely because it is a story of passion that moved inevitably from life to death. The wife is throttled by her illusions, the husband is felled by blind affection, the other woman is subjugated by her passions, the other man is swallowed by the quicksand of vindictiveness. And the concerned friend to all is powerless to liberate them from the impending tragedy.

The spirited work by a splendid cast is certainly worthy of mention. In their hands, their characters assume life, savagery, pulsing reality. Ronaldo Valdez, as the husband, gives depth to a personality that is free as well as chained, possessed by creature passions but bound by the constraints of conscience and society. He is prickly, mocking, cynical, his own most ambiguous creation.

The women delineate their roles just as deftly. Charo Santos, the wife, is in characteristic style, but she imbues this role with revealingly fresh glimpses into previously unseen strength and steel. She is the wife who will not be defeated nor distracted, who will fight, always shrewdly, even cruelly, for what she wants.

In Armida Siguion-Reyna, there is both garrulity and gallantry: A contemptuous observer of the human situation whose lips sneer while her heart prays, she must have gone through it all before at least once in her lifetime and, now that she can afford to be honest, sees in truth the only salvation for all.

For Laurice Guillen, scriptwriter Oscar Miranda reserves the best and truest lines. She is the mistress, but she is, above all, woman and person. When she fights her last battle for the love of her man, pleading, threatening, begging, she shows what every woman who had loved well if not wisely becomes, at least once in her life: a woman driven to the edge. We once must have voiced her words out loud to somebody, or quietly to ourselves, as we all attempted to find some meaning to the exercise, or failing that, some chilling end to it all.

And yet, the quality that struck me most in that concluding part of "Banyuhay" was really the care that went into its conceptualization and production. How many writers would put enough thought to the "triangle" formula, give it new twists and credible protagonists, utilize the flashback technique beautifully, invest the whole story with insight and irony? How many directors would handle such a splendid array of performers with truly amazing sensitivity (failing only, in the concluding part, in the case of Zandro Zamora)?

To me, the final irony is still the most telling. Wanting so desperately to be pronounced alive while he lay seemingly in coma, the husband hears the truth for the first time--the revelation that his daughter is not his, that his wife and her lover had plotted to kill him--making him shed his last tear and pray, even more desperately, to be pronounced dead.


-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Friday, December 15, 2006

On a new year: promises, promises

"Impressions," TV Times, 14-20 January 1979


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Putting aside everything that had given a special glow to the holidays--the live hotel shows and the dying leaves of a real pine tree, the needlepoint and the books, the holiday cards and the colorful gift wrappers--I settled down to the little tasks that will help me organize a new year of work. Deftly, I shrugged off the holiday hangover and sat down, on the Thursday night before we went to press for this issue, to face the small screen and begin another year of viewing and recording the flitting images from an electronic box.

Firecracker ban or not, I was told, the new year would explode with a loud bang. And why not? So many new shows on tap, both local and canned, I was promised. Some of the best just-one-season-late comedies on the US small screen, some of the most promising shows to emerge from the drawing boards of the local industry's most creative minds.

Love Experts. Star Games. Three for the Road. Sandy's Cousin. Eddie Capra Mysteries. Lifeline. W.E.B. Jeffersons. Star Trek. Return of The Saint. Kaz. Paper Chase. Mary Hartmnan, Mary Hartman. Bonkers. The Next Step Beyond. 2-Night. Good Times. Laverne & Shirley. Quark. Three's Company.

The list of Philippine television's new canned properties (most of them from the US) for 1979 sounds interesting, if not impressive, quality-wise, or so say foreign critics. But why must I take the word of foreign critics? Shouldn't I find out for myself?

So, on the Thursday night before our first Friday deadline for 1979, I sit down purposefully before the small screen after a two-week holiday from it. And what do you know? There, in front of me, moving with equally purposeful calm (and, I imagine, chuckling to themselves all the while) are very familiar figures, some of whom failed to reserve appropriate slots in the week's network-released schedules: Lt. Columbo, still disconcerting, still provoking his suspects to confess; Steve McGarrett, continuing to ham it up in sunny Hawaii; the Bradford family, proving that eight can take in more; the James Last star guests, newies in an oldie.

That made me feel a little schizophrenic and definitely nostalgic. Like writing 1978 on my checks when the banks will only read 1979. Like still wanting to see Space:1999 and Kojak and Streets of San Francisco although they may already have been bumped off from the new year's schedules. Like wishing they would instead bump off Steve Austin and his nth "Sharks" replay (or give the sharks more exposure; aren't they adorable?), plus the old Charlie's Angels season (which is good only for the show's fanatics, and so many others out there really are not).

Will next week's schedule from the local programmers, probably caught up in some form of extended wish fulfillment, be more realistic?

******

What takes much of the polish off local newscasts is a very obvious on-the-switch unpreparedness. A newscaster is placed on camera before he knows it. Or he is allowed to mouth his lines while his microphone is not properly patched. Or a headline or title slide swims onscreen for much longer than necessary because some technical apparatus is not working or some technical hands are not ready.

It shows up a newscast as unprofessional, makes a newscaster look silly, and turns off viewers. And on a new year, too.

******

Watching Andy Williams perform at the Folk Arts Theater stage is hardly catching the Andy Williams magic. The place is simply too huge, too impersonal, to distill a charisma that projects best on the television screen or within the cozier atmosphere of, at most, a hotel ballroom. As big a crowd as the Folk Arts Theater collected for each night of Andy Williams is just too big.

Yet, even in that crowd, with the communications system from the nearby Philippine Plaza interfering every now and then, or with the soft whispers among friends swelling into distinct murmurings, Andy Williams turned in a performance that can stand as a signal lesson in real showmanship. Here is a singer totally in love with his song, completely relaxed, truly sensitive to his music. Age and the years have not diminished his versatility nor marred his style, only mellowed both.

He knew exactly how best to interpret a song: softening here, swelling there. His performance was melody-drenched, emotional yet serene. With his well-loved golden burnished voice, he clearly and exquisitely sang through the plaintive and the whimsical to the grand and the rhythmic. Where young local singers would bellow with great impetuosity and noise, trying too hard and too tensely, he sang confidently, master of his repertoire, master of his songs.


-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Waiting for quality in '79

"Impressions," TV Times, 7-13 January 1979

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The new year has come, an exhilarating television year by early indications. There is a very conscious mood of competition now--definitely, for more advertising money and better program ratings. There is also a distinct preoccupation with prestige: reputation is now a very tangible influence, making its way felt in the manner networks program their properties and make new acquisitions. I will not be surprised if, within this year, Philippine television begins to churn out shows I only think about in connection with a distant future.

True, there are more US shows coming in than I want to see. But unavoidable as the trend seems to be, I like to think that the local shows are only waiting in the wings, waiting for time that will surely come. And while those local shows are germinating, Filipino televiewers can--this year--have a wider feel of US television on a broader range of stations. It may not make us go crazy over US shows, which have lately been nothing more than a pastiche of sex, comedy, sex-comedy, comedy-sex, and whatever other combinations of the words you can produce, but it will at least make us realize what we woefully lack in our TV diet.

Primarily, I am excited about the entry into the local small screen of Lifeline, the highly-touted NBC docudrama, perhaps the farthest US television can get from the sex-comedy formula. And Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman should be good viewing on the level of social satire--showing up Soap for what it is not--although sex may be just as persistent in it as in any other current US sitcom.

By the way, most of those sitcoms are also coming, if not in the first week of the new year, then within 1979. These include: Laverne & Shirley, which features two female beer-factory workers living in Milwaukee in the '50s; Three's Company, which details the experiences of two women roommates sharing a flat with a single man; and Who's Watching the Kids, a series about Las Vegas showgirls.

The more reputable among the new imports, Paper Chase and Kaz, have been given good reviews by popular US magazines. Unfortunately, the life span of these shows depends on their ratings, hardly an indication or a reflection of how good they really are.

On the local mill, the shows for the new year are still in flux. There's Sandy's Cousin, the local answer to the foreign sex comedy. The rigors of press time prevent us from giving an early assessment of just how well Filipinos play the US game. We will certainly take time off in the future to watch the show. That is, if it survives its first critical weeks on air.

What we really hope will get off the blueprint stage soon and jump into the local small screen are locally produced miniseries. There is something about dramatic miniseries (Remember Roots, Holocaust, Eleanor and Franklin, Notorious Woman, and Edward VII?) that gives television a definite historical value and makes it a very attractive and popular link between the past and the present, between the people who made history and the people who are making it now. While obviously made more palatable for modern viewers, these miniseries succeed in provoking interest and encouraging deeper study into their subjects and their times.

And perhaps the local networks will also see their way to cancelling many of the local shows that have outlived their appeal and overextended their welcome. These shows may still rate, but they do nothing to help improve the quality of the small screen. And improvement is precisely why television comes up with new lineups every season.

A developing industry in a developing country cannot afford to deal with the devil of economics alone. It must also tackle its role and responsibilities toward the general improvement and uplift of human life. This may already be a cliché in a society that has learned to use such phrases like a sword over people's heads. But we have never meant it more than now--about Philippine television--this year.


-- NBT


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No title in original published column

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Philippine TV in '78: in the middle




"Impressions,"
TV Times, 31 December 1978-6 January 1979

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I marvelled at the technical ingenuity of Sesame Street and The Electric Company, gloried in the early Frank Sinatra specials, suffered through the tiring storylines and plots of The Sixth Sense.

Fort Santiago was a brave and imaginative effort to move into the realm of history and make the past more human, more realistic, to those who did not know it. So was The Andros Targets (and, in a lesser degree, Kingston: Confidential): brave, realistically exploring the grim underbelly of a system, brutally exposing the tin gods in government, religion, and elsewhere. For a while, Pete Matipid enchanted with its utter absurdity, until Chiquito became a little too tacky. And sadly, Washington: Behind Closed Doors was a little too late and a little too lean: the real goings-on were more powerful by far.

Then, the Palanca Memorial Awards Theater came, and I rejoiced, if only too briefly, touched by the hope that I would soon get from television the kind of stories I think the medium should retell--stories of anguish and existence, deeply personal and human, told with dignity and pride. Also brief was The Xerox Science Report, a series of 30-minuters with good intentions, if not always good results.

Quincy, M.E. was diverting, a crime series for a hero with a hangdog look, working out of his laboratory. And very entertaining was Rosetti & Ryan, pure lightness and lark. Also, the Adventures of Wonder Woman, tripping in its new season with just enough ironic delight and fantasy.

Unfortunately, the Bionic Woman and The Six Million Dollar Man were not pleading fantasy: they were setting up so many bogeys so seriously I could almost hear "The Star-Spangled Banner" in the background. And the old guys--Lorne Greene in Griff, Patrick McGoohan in Rafferty, David Jannsen in Harry-O, and Jack Klugman in Quincy,M.E.--were hugging airtime so much for a few months that I could almost feel pity for these aging men who must still look frenziedly for clues to themselves in the wearying tread of the television mill, however uniformly good they all were.

But I loved the 30-minuters: That's My Mama, Second City Television, Special Edition, That's Hollywood, Sugar Time, The Charlie Chaplin Comedy Hour, M*A*S*H.

There were the family shows, too--The Waltons, Family, Little House on the Prairie, Eight is Enough, The Fitzpatricks--bringing to local screens the coffeemaker warmth of American family life, effectively proving that family dramas do not have to drip continuously with sentiment and sugar, that real family life is a happy mix of laughter and tears, anger and affection, and that what is needed most in life is high spirits, not tear ducts.

Of Son of my Son and other local comedies, I was perhaps a litle less enthusiastic. Because the Filipino people had never elevated comedy to an art form, only melodrama. And while local comedies are sometimes accidentally slow and awkward, local dramas are intentionally slow: we must nurse every heartache, prolong every pain, probe every hurt, and cry to the very end.

On the opposite end, Lou Grant was laughter welling from deep inside, from funny bones I never thought existed, exercising all the laugh lines that had lain dormant through slapstick and gimmicks. It is pure, this laughter that Lou Grant elicits. And I would not exchange it for all the tired old jokes dished out by comedians still struggling with their punchlines long after the curtains should have gone down on the best of their worst.

And what else can I say about Kojak except that up to now I watch it with great appreciation and often intense admiration and gratitude for the lucky congruence of storyline, dialogue, and performer that made it one of the true and really successful creations of the small screen?

There were other memorable television events I must mention: one special telecast of Face the Nation, the coverage of a unique changing of the guards in the Seat of St. Peter, the death of two talents who could have continued to enrich the local screen--Pugo and Aurelio Estanislao. And of Holocaust, I find myself, as before, groping for adequate words.

So did the year go, on "Impressions." There are many who fault me for criticizing too much. There are others who privately tell me I should criticize more. Looking back over past columns and past issues, I think I have struck a quite-happy middle. Because Philippine television, in 1978, has been happy enough to stay there.

In 1979, the story may--will, I hope--change.


-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Sunday, December 10, 2006

A few good hours, maybe

"Impressions," TV Times, 28 January-3 February 1979

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Again, and not just for the second time since the start of the year, I find myself sadly stymied. After being greeted by such glorious promise, I get thrown again into the dumps of discontent. The new year, trumpeted with so much noise as a watershed year for Philippine television, will bring back more of the old stuff. It is not good news for tired eyes.

I still expect some good hours, of course. Phyllis is totally disarming comedy, with the charm, spirit, and easy-does-it amiability of light farce. Blansky's Beauties, coming right after Phyllis, is a little like plopping down to earth after ricocheting among the skyscrapers--the comedy is a little too heavy--but it is still good enough for a half hour of eyestrain. I caught one episode of Love Experts and would certainly like to catch more. And I certainly promise friend and fellow columnist Julie Y. Daza a fair (and fearless!) review of her Star Games some week soon.

But of the serious stuff--the kind that I can write ecstatically about, the ones that challenge because, at times, the pen finds itself less fanciful than the screen--what? Very little, certainly. Not here yet, definitely.

The other week, I made sure to catch Alamat. The title itself promised fare more important than any sex comedy, local or foreign, and touched a sensitive nerve deep within: Had I not campaigned, unsuccessfully it always seemed to me, for shows that would bridge the gap between the past and the present, especially for a young generation that cannot possibly know itself until it knows its past?

Not that Aurora Salve and George Estregan, in that alamat about the sampaguita, are especially equipped to make our past clearer to us. Nor is Alamat history. But within its own limited sphere, Alamat can provide precious glimpses into the wealth--and absurdity--of our cultural heritage. Indeed, with the same painstaking and careful work that went into the production of Fort Santiago, Alamat could be a worthwhile addition to our television fare. That is, except for a few misses in that episode I watched.

For one, the casting. The maiden Guita should be fragile, pure, innocent. The sampaguita is such--fragile and delicate, almost unnoticed in the parade of more showy blooms, but hardy and steady, its roots firmly grasping the dry earth. Aurora Salve, however, is invulnerable and too blooming thick by half. She may have a firm grasp of the acting task, but there is more petulance than poetry in her steely eye and heavy stance.

George Estregan, on the other hand, suffers not only from a name that is more Germanic than Spanish (Frederick, in Spanish, should be Federico), but also from that brooding reverie that goes very well with the image of George Estregan the actor, but not with wounded Spanish pride nor genteel Spanish hauteur. And those Spanish soldiers had none of the height, the haughtiness, nor the visage of true Castilian types. Or should not a legend work with the more mundane stuff of types, prejudices, images?

The cinematography, though, is worth noting--competent, at times even inspired. The mood comes across beautifully in many instances, caught by the camera lens, mist before my eyes, seemingly motionless, like all true legends of the heart. But at other instances, I am a little uncomfortable, disturbed by the reckless and too-quick jump-cutting, by cinematic techniques that do not blend with the timeless and the poetic.

Fortunately, the use of a simple plot--much like that of a short short story--balances the effort at cinematic complexity. And the use of the ermitanyo character, while a device as old as Lola Basyang, ensures the attention of children who can never resist a story told by the old. The device also suffuses the show with the patina of the imperishable and the interminable.

All in all, Alamat is a project worth pursuing. A minor matter--at least, for me: Need the music be jarring and loud, as in the early sequence when Estregan was found, wounded, by the natives? I suppose that music was chosen to illuminate both the uncertainty of Estregan's condition and the strangeness of the tribal approach. Unfortunately, it came out a little distracting for the purpose.


-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Thursday, December 7, 2006

TV on a rainy night, back then



It is true: There was a time when televiewers' choices were extremely limited. Prime time was for one thing or the other, and only those two: canned shows or local ones.

It was not possible to get news, and sports, and a documentary, and current affairs coverage. No chance of sneaking in a Bollywood movie. Or a French drama with subtitles. No prospect at all of BBC crime dramas or Japanese anime. Not in just one time slot, anyway.


Remember?


"Impressions," TV Times, 20-26 August 1978

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On many a rainy night, I find it positively depressing--this responsibility to watch, and write about, prime-time television. One searches for some good thing to say, some beautiful phrase to put together, some profound emotion to summon from the depths of the soul, about some two-bit plastic bauble displayed on the screen by a battery of talents as if it were the queen's own royal gems.

It is not even the violence angle: violence on the small screen does not traumatize, it only turns you off. That is, once you have safely reached the age when you can look at somebody else's fantasies with more amusement than engagement.

It is neither the crime-does-not pay-reward-to-the good-woe-to-the-evil storylines: one takes it all in proper cool. Reality can be downright contrary, and we shape our lives according to the totality of our experience, irrespective of many things we see on television and the many "moral lessons" they are supposed to teach us.

On such a rainy night, when--like me--you almost feel like chopping your television set into small pieces and grounding each piece to powder with the sharp heels of your favorite sandals, try sprightly cynicism instead.

Then, you may be able to see Police Woman for what it really is: not another cops-and-robbers series competing with Kojak for local color and feisty acting, nor with Starsky and Hutch for insensitivity and gore, but just a vehicle for a once-fabulous old jade who is drinking her final toast to the young life before she settles down to acting and dressing her real age. What other reason can there be for a series like Police Woman except to satisfy Angie Dickinson, or those who like Angie Dickinson? Unless it is to play up to the feminist audience, in which case I, as a liberated woman, would hazard that a police woman's job as it is portrayed in the series is hardly the crowning point of womanhood's long struggle to establish itself.

And with enough cynicism, you can also join in the sheer fun of Logan's Run and be charmed to the tips of your true woman's bones by the delightful Rem, even as you close your eyes to the tiring, over-agitated Logan and Jessica. There is a certain gleeful absurdity in the series that makes even your "What will they think of next?" seem like an honest query.

Like Star Trek, Logan's Run catches travelers through life--a winsome threesome driving against the stream of a mechanical society devoid of emotions and passions. Are we not all travelers in our hearts--with feet walking from one point in time to another, eyes looking out for shattered-mirror images of ourselves, minds reaching out for a distillation of essence and existence?

But then, I am losing my cynicism, infusing a show with far more seriousness than it deserves. The truth is that, as long as one does not look too closely for the pockmarks on the face--the fact that all the searching for that elusive something that the three protagonists in Logan's Run still have not stumbled on can be pretty boring for the viewer; the realization that, as in the other week's episode, the good seemed more oppressively evil than the evil and the castouts (the bad ones) more humanly discerning; the feeling that each episode is going to be even more absurd than the first--Logan's Run can be an adventure tale of the first order. Perhaps it lacks the fantastic dimensions of Star Trek and the astounding color and brilliance of Space:1999. But as sci-fi lightweight, it is enjoyable enough. It provokes no intense emotions of rejection or dejection. That, within the black-or-white world of program quality on television, is an acceptable gray.

As for the family programs, one can have too much of them. And this season is such--too much. A daily dose of the one-hour family shows--The Waltons, Family, Little House on the Prairie, Eight is Enough--can kill you with blandness or destroy your innate appetite for a bitter, tragic, powerful, invigorating drama every now and then. So if you are of my generation, I recommend you go slow on them--not too much, not too often.

But the standing rule on a rainy night--or any night, really, of watching prime-time television--is still to remember that the screen in front of you is only a small screen, too sadly constricting to reproduce life, too mindlessly slick to distill it. Do not give this small screen the seriousness only life deserves.

Unless it is life you see there, on the screen, just as it happens, when it happens. Or a strong likeness of it. On such rare occasions, you can splurge on your emotions.


-- NBT
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No title in original published column

Wednesday, December 6, 2006

My old wish list



A decade ago, I made a conscious pledge: I will not return to writing about television.

Not with the kind of shows being churned out by the surviving local channels. It had become obvious that the local networks, two decades after being freed, were bent only on outrunning each other in the race to the entertainment gutter and journalistic ghetto. Their eyes appeared exclusively focused on lining pockets strained during the years of martial rule.


And the kinds of shows that they released in pursuit of their objectives were clearly not meant to stimulate analysis and critical thought. I have never seen how low television programs can go until today. Even newscasts show reporters/newsreaders shouting out the news like entertainment reporters in the United States, news reporters and cameramen lingering on scenes that evince the lowest and most undignified habits of benighted people, and subjects of stories voluntarily acting their crudest and most vicious or looking their stupidest and most witless, all because they happen to be in front of a television camera.

Happily, the advent of cable television provided a whole entrancing world view of what the small screen could potentially provide over time: Not the best all the time, but good ones many times. And from a multitude of sources.

To be honest, I don't even watch local channels anymore. When you think of how much there is to see and learn from all over the world, watching shows put up by a handful of local channels intent only on fighting for mass ratings becomes indefensible.



"Impressions," TV Times, 24-30 December 1978

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Someday--I often told myself as I met deadline after deadline in a year that had brought me close to the threshold of great experience and the depths of great frustration--someday, I shall see what I have always dreamed of seeing. And I shall stop writing. I shall encounter, on small screens in bedrooms and living rooms where what passes for life after six in most households lights up with the push of an electronic button, the reality of a medium fully attuned to its power, an industry completely cognizant of its responsibilities to its public.

A friend laughs at me when I tell him of this vague someday. It is, he tells me all the time, a someday that will never come, because like all other things except you, that small screen in front of us is a business. Yet, my vague someday remains in my heart even as I write, sometimes with growing astringency, sometimes with powerless rage.

Perhaps because it is hard to forget an affection which was there long before those who are now in the industry ever thought of that small screen as a means of livelihood. And because, into a dimly-lighted living room long, long ago, a beloved old man brought home the first small screen ever to be seen in a neighborhood only then beginning to wake up to the wonders of electronics.

So this week, in a season of eternal hope, I remember my vague someday. I wish the industry that brings to us the flickering images from this small screen would share my dream of that day, because if it does not, then surely there is nothing to justify my being here, doing the things I do 52 weeks of every year, putting my sweat into every week and risking my name on every line, agonizing.

What do I wish for the industry this blessed season? The best minds and the best skills still to come from a generation of new recruits, unfettered by excuses, unlimited by time, unhampered by disillusionment. And from those already in the industry, a new burst of energy and dedication, giving life to new and different local dramatic programs, fresh comedy shows, more current-affairs formats (and not at ungodly hours, either). Less dependence on popular American television shows, more faith in local programs that are well-planned and well-executed, and which do not extend long after interest in them has waned.

And yes, newer movies for the late-movies slot. More miniseries like Roots and Holocaust, which help to explain the past to the present, engrossingly. Less preoccupation with romantic love as the subject of local dramas, for certainly, there must be other serious concerns that make the world go round. And, if we must have the American canned comedies, then more of the caliber of Lou Grant and M*A*S*H,please. Oh, and more British Broadcasting Co. dramatizations, more international documentaries.

And certainly, men with vision, men with a theory regarding the home screen, managing the networks. Because we believe that such men--whoever and whatever they may be, however they may think of those who write about television and whatever complaints they may have about "the critics"--can bring our own dream of that vague someday closer to reality. For surely, they hold a vision of the medium, a theory of television, that comes closest to our own. We can feel it; we know it.

Besides, what good can Philippine television get, at this time in its development, from a local Fred Silverman who would load prime time with his own perception of the mass pulse? Or from men and women without a theory of television whatsoever, who would only use the industry to satisfy their quicksilver whims and caprices?

To everybody, a happy season.


-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Soap in excess



"Impressions,"
TV Times, 15-21 October 1978

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That much-ballyhooed premiere night of Tuesday Adult Comedy Hour passed us by, unwatched because there was a two-and-a-half-year-old little girl beside us who had already told us off many times, in her slightly aggrieved tone, that she had been watching too much kissing the nights past. So off the channel selector went to less adult fare.

But the week after, having missed the standard M*A*S*H intro, we plopped back onto our pillows and settled on a disarming comedy that elicited a considerable number of quite hearty and booming laughs from us. In many places, the humor is pungent and sharp, spilling over well off-center. The teleplay is an unusually confident one, fast-paced and bracing. The performers are definitely talented and winning, except for the nurse to whom Alan Alda had taken a shine. She looks too much the dumb-blonde, cheerleader type only television can perpetuate in an age of new and liberated women with more brains than boobs. And that aged running joke about communists on the operating table threatens to send the flighty war comedy into a nosedive, now that Vietnam has placed the POW boot securely on the other's foot.

Occasionally, the dialogue also quickens with fragments of attempted myth-shattering, the tone of merry irreverence unavoidably aimed against the pompousness of the army's image of itself. At times, too, the supreme self-confidence of the teleplay gives in to a faint moment of doubt, as if the show could not quite make up its mind whether to play for heartbreak or humor. Such a moment, when you catch it, is an infinitely precious one, offering an agile but still comprehensible glimpse of war as a horror-fantasy that tries man's true measure of humanity.

At such a time, however fast the laughs may come, we feel a poignant kinship with men who, like the essential clown, manifest both the sublime and the ridiculous in the comedy of human life. Luckily for those whose only wish is an uncomplicated half hour of laughs, such moments came infrequently in the episode we watched. In fact, only once.

Soap, though, is something else. Comedy, it is not; parody, it is. The sex jokes smack of malice, the double entendres are transparent, the naked humor is often silly, and everybody seems to have taken up sex so seriously it has now become the family business. Everybody, that is, including the faceless narrator who must, from his introductory lines, make it known to the viewers that the whole tale is of two families who are so hung up on sex.

I will not add that whoever watched it with true contempt must be so hung up on sex himself, because it can also be true that whoever watches it with real enjoyment must have already outgrown all his sexual hang-ups. But I believe that if one were to harp only on sex in a weekly series, as if it were the only interesting thing about two families, the viewer would reach a point of satiety when one sex situation becomes just like all other sex situations. Besides, would not the weekly laundering of sex take all the secret fun out of it?

We must applaud the first-rate cast, though. We especially like Billy Crystal, who takes on the role of the homosexual Campbell with charming panache. Even in M*A*S*H, the homosexual soldier is a knock-out. Why is it that when American-type queens are written out of their closets, they manage to acquire a lot of sharpness and wholeness? Is it because they then become less pretentious about their pretensions? Or is it because, in the grand tradition of all comic characters, they are the only ones who probably believe passionately in their own folly?

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Monday, December 4, 2006

A little awkward comedy



"Impressions,"
TV Times, 25 February-3 March 1979

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A sex comedy, it is not. At least, not yet. The other week, there were hardly any laughs, hardly any sex. And why did we find ourselves squirming inside, more out of pity than hilarity?

The truth is that Sandy's Cousin is a local show like many local shows--ambivalent, uncertain, and a little awkward. Its humor springs more from sad promise than happy feat. As such, it is slightly sly and definitely dry.

Even the characters give less than lusty performances, quite unorthodox in a sex comedy such as it is understood in the industry. Ronald Bregendahl may try to look like somebody straight from the province, but his characterization suffers precisely because of that. He comes across, in an unfortunate sense, as a more or less inadequate bystander. In the other week's episode where, as Jimmy, he figured in a final scene with Max the homosexual, Bregendahl was tepid, unassertive. It is true that in classical Greek and Roman comedies, heroes and heroines were rarely very interesting people: their potential as truly interesting characters were supposed to be born at the end of the plays. But whether this form should apply to a television comedy is open to question.

The Sandy of the title--technically the heroine--is Sandy Andolong, a new face in local television. Again, as in the classical sense, the role is played down, self-deprecatingly. Normally, this would be a wise move for a newcomer to the screen, small or big. Unfortunately, Sandy Andolong hardly projects as potentially sympathetic, much less potentially interesting. In many of the scenes in the other week's episode that we watched, she was sullen, unenthusiastic, clench-lipped, deadpan. Now, others may say she is actually shy, uninitiated, quiet. Whatever she should really be in the show, we leave to the director and the writer to thresh out. But the character should certainly not be rather wan and above it all.

The same, we cannot write about Max Batungbacal, very ably played by Manny Castañeda. His portrayal of a homosexual, a pebble of truth crushed by the inexorable wheels of fate and society, is both absurd and touching. Integrity, the realization and acceptance of what he really is, a faithfulness to his own identity, provide Castañeda's performance with substance and strength. Of all the performers in Sandy's Cousin, he alone offers the genuine sincerity that is the basic touchstone of true comedy, classical or contemporary.

Still, for all his prodigious energies, Manny Castañeda cannot make a hit all by himself. He keeps the show amusing, but the plot ho-hums along, hardly funny, even infuriating. Sandy, being supposedly committed to honesty, may be the heroine, but it does not take too much sensitivity to realize that all the others seem much more forthright: she goes out on a date with a man she does not like, lets him into her place, suffers his initial advances. All very well, if we consider that the arbitrary twist of plot is an important ingredient in classical comedy.

But in that case, where is my happy ending? Sandy hardly looks happy, Max surely feels used and abused, Michael is despicable, Jimmy is pensive, and I am nauseated. Individual illusions remain, as do obsession, hypocrisy, disguise, everything that's fake. The society they all want continues to be smothered by the society it should dislodge.

And if we are not supposed to look at Sandy's Cousin in terms of classical comedy, how then is the dialogue, that touchstone of comedy in the contemporary farcical sense? Well, it seems especially written to indicate that [words like] "acheng" and "tiyopeng-tiyope" are supposed to be hilarious, a belief I do not share. There is also solemn talk at the end about the sterility of illusions, but the real issue appears to be a comedy's failure to make its verbal fireworks amount to a lot of laughs and even just a little bit of satire.


-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Friday, December 1, 2006

Good for only a season



"Impressions," TV Times, 24-30 September 1978


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Most nights, there is nothing I look forward to watching on television. Nothing really worthwhile, you know, in the way a generation would consider it. And many out there would doubtless purse their lips and sigh: Well, there she goes again.

But it is true, and I have the weekly television schedule in front of me to prove it. There really isn't anything I--again, of a generation, which is perhaps my escape clause--would impatiently wait for, counting the long days of the week to its scheduled airing time.

Oh, yes, there was one, two weeks ago: "Recommendation for Mercy" on True Story Specials. But that was two weeks--or three?--ago. And up to now, I still have to watch the episode on the small screen. I do not dare wait with similar anxiety for "It's Good to be Alive" because anxiety, when held too long, wears out too thin. After a long wait, I may even forget what I am waiting for.

For a whole hour, a friend doted on Return to Fantasy Island, enjoying the lightness and sheer fun of one episode. Even now, whenever he manages to catch the series--which is rarely, thank you--he finds it all so engagingly campy. But if he watched the show week after week, he might not feel so delighted by the grossness and predictability--too pat, too easy. Did you expect something more?

I am taking a vacation from the prime-time programming of one of the local channels--except for its sports series--for one simple reason: the American entertainment menu, to me, is digestible only for a season, and preferably a short one. After a spell, the stuff becomes altogether wearying, a point many young televiewers will doubtless contest.

But each one to his generation: when I was 15, I could not get away from the television set, either. What preserved my sanity was the fact that American television of the time had greater variety. Or was it only in my mind, and only in retrospect? That, by the way, should be a good subject for research and study.

Come to think of it, there are still a few programs I shall not mind watching this week. And hurrah! both of them are of local origin: Fort Santiago and Mga Kuwento ng Pag-ibig. I like Fort Santiago because, as I wrote before, it is about time local television mined the rich deposits that history has left on many a Filipino soul. And how better to stir the hearts of those too young to feel the tug of their historical heritage but through television? The British Broadcasting Co. has pioneered in this effort, and thoroughly excels in it.

It is only the prospect of Hilda Koronel's return to television, even if only in a guest role, that can make me watch Mga Kuwento ng Pag-ibig. Past episodes of the series were not remarkable. Like many a Filipino melodrama, they often swam unerringly through murky sentiment toward extreme bathos. Hilda Koronel should be able to give the two-part "Kabiyak ng Puso" a little tightness, a lot of grace, and imposing perfection. Some performers always come out as playing at acting. Hilda Koronel lives her role.

By the way, I caught only the final sequence of one Kaluskos Musmos episode. When I was a child, I would have been told immediately to stand at the corner of the classroom, or write a sentence a hundred times, if I ever shook the "Rico J. Tree" impertinently at the teacher, just as the children did in that final skit of the show. These days, I understand, schoolchildren are no longer punished by being told to stand at a corner or write a sentence a hundred times. I do not know if, these days, they are also allowed to be impertinent. And in a children's show, at that.

But let me watch Kaluskos Musmos in its entirety next week, and let me see if, indeed, the children's show is a children's show is a children's show.


-- NBT


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No title in original published column