Before the three tenors

Luciano Pavarotti (God bless his soul!), Placido Domingo, and Jose Carreras forged a partnership and pushed through joint concerts, through the last decade of the 20th century and into the first five years of the 21st, that made opera a much-sought musical experience all over the world--and not only in elite circles. At least two of these operatic gods, if I remember right, made it to singular--and sadly, single--performances here in the Philippines.

The truth is that there is a very limited audience for opera in the Philippines. In our generation, one reason may be that the few opera singers that we produced never quite gave the genre the life, the vitality, the excitement that accompany the performances of more dedicated opera singers abroad. Perhaps it is the thinness of the Filipino voice, the lack of verve in the Filipino operatic singer, the stiffness. Opera, after all, is theater and not just music. Opera is not opera without spirit, without brio.

Did Lilia Reyes exhibit that spirit in this Elvira Manahan production? Frankly, almost 30 years after the event, I don't remember anymore. Perhaps students of Philippine television can look for the tape of this show and find out for themselves. But as any television reviewer knows, the good thing about this kind of production--it was not a television coverage of an operatic presentation; it was a presentation of a few operatic and other musical numbers especially choreographed and designed for television--is that it can make opera acceptable even to people who wouldn't think of buying tickets to listen to opera in the theater. The secret is in the packaging.

A few times in my career as an observer of local television, I conversed with Elvira Manahan about her productions. Many only remember her as the host of Two for the Road. I remember and salute her also for pioneering in the production of television shows that sought to provide the Filipino televiewing audience with experience in watching opera and ballet on the small screen.


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

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There is an unlikely blend of cult and culture waiting to be discovered by a distinct segment of the televiewing audience. And the Elvira Ledesma Manahan (as the credits go) production, Lilia Reyes and Other Voices, is opening Philippine television's doors for such a discovery. The special ranges the musical scale from classical to popular and flashes back through the glorious years of a private family estate and a renowned popular theater. Surprisingly enough, the trip is thoroughly enjoyable. The mix in the production's cultural bag is culled from the operatic aria and the soulful ballad. These, plus an excellent combination of stylistic skill and visual flare, fine craftsmanship, and expert musicianship.

Lilia Reyes is, undoubtedly, the star of the show. With the astonishing variety of her repertoire and the virtuosity of her performance, she makes the demands of singing opera sound like a cinch. Her interpretation of Menotti's "The Telephone"--a satiric but entertaining piece, at once poignant and wonderfully funny, laced with musical and verbal wit--is a gem of a performance, solid and memorable.

Rico J. Puno, a little uneasy outside his natural turf, shuffles through the production with the guilty look of someone who feels, for once, certainly insecure. He hams it up though, and quite charmingly, in his operatic duet with Lilia Reyes. But he is still at his best when he sings a Charo Unite song. With his own type of singing and his own kind of music, he provides a perfect foil to Lilia's opera, without demeaning either.

Not for years, certainly, has the possible popular appeal of opera been mined with as much joy and humor on local television as in Lilia Reyes and Other Voices. And not for some time have we seen as beautiful a blending of the documentary and musical formats as in this one-hour special. Instead of simply prefacing and illustrating the musical numbers, the production provides viewers with enough substantial background on subject and location, utilizing the informal conversation technique in some instances and, in others, narration. Throughout both techniques, the camera lovingly catches images and transforms them with deep-focus photography, slow dissolves, highlights, and double exposure (or what goes for it on tape), searing them into the eye of the mind with varying degrees of clarity. In few local productions have we seen such intuitive understanding of the grammar of filmmaking--of what the camera could see and say--applied to television.

Many images could hardly be bettered: the opening frame showing the Metropolitan Theater, like an obelisk reaching out to the blue sky; the high comedy of "The Telephone"; the little chat between Elvira Manahan and Lilia Reyes on the open porch of the Benitez house; the beautifully angled interior shots of the theater with the camera moving effortlessly through balustrades and stair steps and seats. One scene, however--the one where Lilia Reyes sings her first Tagalog song--is beautifully but self-consciously posed in the garden; later, you notice the flatness of the scene, the lack of movement and depth.

The musical numbers performed in the Metropolitan Theater benefit from precise staging and expert sound dubbing, both contributing to a polished production. Only in the dialogue portions does the sound track fail the viewer, muddling the conversations and making portions unclear and incoherent during the sneak preview of the show. Let us hope that when the special is finally aired, the situation will have been cured or minimized. Otherwise, the audience will miss some quite trenchant and amusing comments by the participants.

Unhappily, not all in the cast are as comfortable to watch in their roles as Lilia Reyes, Rico J. Puno, and Elvira Manahan. In the two locations where she appears on-screen as narrator, June Keithley tends to compete with the background and the narration rather than work with both. There is history, and grandeur, and generations of gentility in the Benitez estate and the Metropolitan Theater, but what one hears is the jagged, high-pitched speech of a scenery-chewing orator. Will we ever learn that narrating is not declaiming and that the most effective narration is always natural and low-key?

These minor defects aside, however, Lilia Reyes and Other Voices stands as a stunningly filmed and carefully produced experiment in the use of sophisticated electronic equipment to bring culture and mass audience together in an occasional but perhaps beneficial friendship. Opera is not popular entertainment. Lilia Reyes and Other Voices tends to bridge the traditional gap between art and entertainment. It is a measure of the show's success that it has not only done so painlessly but that it has also in the process approximated art itself. This kind of opera, I can take and enjoy now and in the future.

-- NBT

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No title in original published article

Junk on time

It wasn't martial law that imposed a discipline of sorts on the local television industry: it was cable television that did. True, there was a sudden acceptance of greater responsibility on the part of the stations and those who ran them. But the responsible outlook seemed enclosed and limited within specified network departments. Outside those departments, the local television industry hummed happily along, pursuing whatever it had designated as its path, seemingly quite unconcerned about much else.

This unconcern was not really about quality. The effort to achieve quality was--looking back at that time now--certainly there, certainly even more then than now. The unconcern was actually directed more toward the sensibilities of the television audience.

The root of this unconcern can be traced to the situation in the industry at unique times in our history. During martial law, the democratic environment that had previously dominated the industry became compressed into what, in every possible way, was a monopoly. After the breakup of the dictatorial regime and the so-called return to democracy, the industry opened up. But how can there be no real competition when--as economists love to say--there is no level playing field?

Now, the playing field is more level and the situation I wrote about below probably happens only rarely. I really wouldn't know. As I wrote in previous posts, I don't watch local television shows anymore. The ability of cable to lure audiences may have imposed discipline in that area on local television networks, but it also unleashed frightening forces in another area. Who wants to be fed with what you were promised when what you were promised was junk food? Oh, I'm sorry--the top two local television networks do love to trumpet at the end of every survey period that, yes, millions of Filipinos love the junk food they dish out.

What can sane people answer to that? There's the rub? Catch-22?


"Impressions," TV Times, 17-23 June 1979

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It must have been a little after 9:30 p.m. that first Thursday of the month when I flicked the channel selector on to 2. I had left my watch in the study room and, for fear of missing even a second of what could be a great show, I decided not to check the time anymore. Wasn't it all relative, anyway? The important thing was to catch the action, and I expected a lot.

Still, I was a little late. The screen was already on a tight freeze, the title passing by my dislocated sight much like the spark of lightning that had just then broken out fiercely across the leaden sky. But wait! Was that not a familiar face, one I had seen many times before, walking hospital rooms some years ago?

YES! It was indeed a familiar one: Joe Gannon, moving heavily around his patients with that ever-anxious, ever-questioning look in his worried eyes, shuttling incessantly from room to room with precisely the prescribed attitude of determination sedated with politeness and concern. His patients, this time, were a football-playing husband high on uppers and the wife, whose mobility the husband had compromised in a car accident that badly damaged her spinal column. The husband had reasons for taking his uppers, his downers, his anything and everything: to keep him on his feet and scoring his goals; to keep his inflamed and diseased guts from spilling out, robbing his team of its star player and his family of its millions in income.

It was acceptable entertainment, perhaps a little too melodramatic, spiced with the American mania for winning, tinged with accusations about the prohibitive costs of hospitalization and rehabilitation, filled with the contemporary passion for accomplishment and recognition, highlighted by the monotonous earnestness of one doctor who never seems to make a wrong diagnosis and who goes through heroics with every patient and every case. It was a storyline in the true Hollywood tradition, so traditional you could almost hear the handkerchiefs softly fluttering in the background.

But where-oh-where was that publicized "totally new concept in prime time entertainment, that unique fine-tuned coordination among doctor, hospital and staff"? Where was the "authenticity of real-life doctors and nurses, of real-life cases"? Why were we watching all these screen stars trying to act like real people when what we were expecting to see were real people trying to act like screen stars? And where--we wondered through commercial breaks and return sequences-- was the announcement of the title of this f--- show?

Of course, I comforted myself, it is possible this is really the pilot of the announced series, indeed "picking up from where the fictionalized medical programs of the '60s and '70s left off." Dr. Joe Gannon was certainly a fictional character, as Dr. Casey and Dr. Kildare were and as Marcus Welby was. Even as Dr. Quincy is. It was a little far-fetched, but we could not allow ourselves to be accused of a marked lack of optimism.

There is surely nothing wrong with being optimistic, although my optimism had by then been redirected toward the hope that, sometime in the middle of the long hour, the station would mercifully announce that, yes, "the program you are now watching is not Lifeline" but some old resurrected episode from some dark and ancient vault filled to the ceiling with outdated television features.

Well, at the end of an hour, it did come--the announcement that what I was watching was, after all, Medical Center. By then, the announcement had become unnecessary. My remembrance of shows past may be spotty but still serves me. However, to other viewers--those lured by the promise of something else, of something different, perhaps of something better--who had missed the opening credits and who did not know until the end that they were not watching Lifeline, it may have come across as a crude joke.

Some of them would surely have appreciated an announcement, not only in the beginning and at the end but also somewhere during the middle of the hour. Provided, of course, that they can still be enticed to watch out for Lifeline despite the fact that it has already been postponed. And postponed. And postponed.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

The old and the young

Many a time, I sit down and insist, "Yes, ours was a great time, filled with the most fantastic talents and the most unforgettable shows." Many other times, I'm not really sure. There is as much mediocrity in any generation as there is brilliance.

But memory is selective, and we often imbue our past with much more than it rightfully deserves. I had an exchange of emails recently with a young lawyer who sang hallelujahs about a television network and its standards manual, which, truth to say, that 50-year-old network seems to have found a need for only today. I tried to educate him a little in the realities of the television industry, in the relationship between a standards manual and ratings.

I wanted him to understand, lawyer as he was, that in the industry, a standards manual and ratings navigate separate territories and that to expect them to coalesce at any point, or for one to boost the other, is to ignore each one's essential roles. I wanted him to realize that in the industry, the two must necessarily take adversarial roles if they are both to be effective, not only because of the nature of each but also because of the nature of television itself as a mass medium. In his reply, he said he hoped it wasn't a youth-versus-age thing.

Of course, I answered back that it wasn't. But in retrospect--today--I wonder. Perhaps it is, after all, yes, a youth-versus-age thing. Perhaps the truth is that it wasn't so much that he disagreed with me as that he didn't in any way carry the baggage that I did. Nor did he want to. Like many of the young today, and like me when I was young, he wanted to pile up his own mistakes. I also didn't want to learn from the old when I was young.

The piece below, not deliberately, dealt with young talents and old talents in television in the '70s. They worked in differing genres, though the young really could have taken the time to learn from the old. Perhaps if they had, they could have become legends as well.

Then again, who can say our legends are the youth's legends, too?


"Impressions," TV Times, 10-16 June 1979

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By the time this piece comes out, a decision on the future of Son of My Son would have been made. As we met our deadline, Patsy, the sharp-tongued comedienne who can range the gap between aggrieved innocent and streetwise wife with amazing dexterity and brilliant realism, had just moved on to her final rest.

Pugo, considered the dean of Filipino comedians, had earlier made his last bow, reaping well-deserved and unanimous applause from fans, peers, and successors alike. Now, Tange--the only remaining comedian in the regular cast of the weekly comedy series--has just been reported by a morning daily to be in critical condition.

Without these mainstays, Son of My Son can no longer be the comedy that it purports to be. Comedy is a difficult art, certainly more difficult in a medium such as Philippine television is today, which seems unable to find gifted gag writers with a consistent hold on their craft. Thus, television has had to depend most of the time on the innate wit of the comedians themselves. Sadly for Son of My Son, the remaining members of the cast do not possess the skills of those who have gone ahead.

Pugo and Patsy were outstanding examples of tried-and-true comedians who cut their teeth on the vaudeville stage, doing their thing in front of live audiences. Tange is a more recent product, but he too exhibits a keen sense of timing and a clear understanding of what tickles the local funny bone. In the sphere of local comedy, all three are unbeatable within their areas of specialization and characterization.

******

Watching Becca Godinez and Mike Monserrat on 2-Night a few weeks ago, our attention naturally wandered to similar ongoing combinations: June and Johnny, Joy and Bobby, Julie and Philip (this last team having only very recently been disbanded). Unfortunately for the men, the women always seem to dominate such combinations.

Johnny Litton is, of course, a television natural, despite the extreme feelings he seems to arouse among some viewers. Still, it is obvious that--certainly by choice--he plays a supportive role to the more excitable, more intense, and also more vulnerable June Keithley.

Robert Jaworski is new in the TV genre he has chosen to get into this time. He is also--certainly by nature--more reticent, more self-contained, and plainly more private a person than the stage-honed, bright-eyed, very peppy Joy Virata. Fortunately, he can count on a tight script to prop him up, although these days, he comes up with his own quite effective one-liners. He is still uncomfortable doing interviews, but he manages to provide the Celebrity host duo a gratifying amount of charming simplicity and good-natured bewilderment--all in all, an everydayness that is very refreshing.

Mike Monserrat, however, is no Johnny Litton. Nor is he a Robert Jaworski. He is younger than the two and lighter on his feet. He tries hard, too. Perhaps it is just that, paired with the articulate, sparkling, and actor-proof Becca Godinez, he is at a distinct disadvantage. It takes him long--sometimes painstakingly too long for the viewer--to get to the point, even if the point is only to introduce the next guest and the next number. He is at his best when he dances. So perhaps he can be made to dance (and sing?) more and talk less. However, he already dances a lot on Penthouse 7. And when viewers watch both shows, even if not in their entirety ... well, you can guess the result.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Good stories are not hard to find

Filipino dramatic productions on television--except for a very few that did not last long--have always been more boring than not. And there are no productions more boring than the local teleseryes that have sprung, no thanks to the ratings war between the two largest local TV networks.

Which is, to me, totally incomprehensible. Why hasn't any local TV network executive in charge of dramatic production ever gotten it into his head to visit a school library or a local book store and, taking an armful of the classics (or even the newer published books) given his scriptwriters orders to produce an adapted script out of every story in a published book of short stories, out of every segment of a novel, out of every chapter of a biography or autobiography? There is no shame in adapting a published story to film or television, as long as the effort is a genuine adaptation and the proper credits are given.

Then, perhaps we can watch stuff on local television more interesting than the eternal love triangle, the battered child or spouse, and the scheming madrasta or lustful stepfather.


"Impressions," TV Times, 3-9 June 1979

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Watching Peping on and off can provide the viewer with regular exercises in suspended disbelief. One time, and the little boy appears and disappears from the screen like everybody's favorite dwarf. Another time, and he goes frolicking around with a portly friar. More recently, he suffers nightmares about an unborn brother. All of that strains my credulity a lot.

Yet, I am somehow thankful--for a few pluses that are outside the quality of Peping's episodes and not tied up with whether they are worth viewing or not.

I am glad that at last, we have found another child talent worth building up--someone more mannered, less quarrelsome than Niño Muhlach. Someone more in the mold of your child and everybody else's. Precocious, but in the quiet manner of most Filipino children, without the shrill and sometimes oppressive flamboyance set by local cinema's current child wonder.

Perhaps we can then have more drama series other than those about love (as in romance) and storylines a little more different from the rest, with a twist here and there. A child can bring light to the dark weave of the Filipino psyche.

Not that Peping's episodes have, so far, been exactly promising. In the one that I watched recently, Peping's mother and father separate because of the mother's jealousy, only to come together when Peping disappears. Nothing new to the storyline. Even the existence of the father's daughter by another woman does not make the episode any more imaginative or interesting.

What is interesting, though, is the fact that the episode provides a few glimpses into the tired old world of local television drama. I had wondered all the while where newer station-produced dramas are going, and how they will get there. If Peping is any indication--and why should it not be, when it was given a prime-time slot--then I can say that local station-produced dramas are trying to move up in ideas but failing in the implementation.

Essentially, the episode of Peping that I am talking about is another overextended hour anchored on a very thin storyline, very slow pacing, and very trivial acting.

The storylines of local dramas simply cannot be improved unless the stations are willing to develop a full stable of good writers and a full inventory of good stories. This should not really be difficult because nobody demands that all stories presented on television be original, only that they throw some piquant and arresting light on the obscurity of the human tragedy or the absurdity of the human comedy.

To do this, the networks can cull from the best and the worst of the world's literature--including our country's own--and compress, condense, adapt, snip, scissor-and-tape, visualize. I shall be the last to fault the networks for adapting--from the West or the East, from Europe or Asia--existing stories as long as proper acknowledgment is made. I shall be the first to complain--as I have complained in the past--about purported originals that are not original at all.

With substantial storylines and tight scripting, pacing should not be the problem it is today for local dramas and local directors. A director can do no more with an eight-page loose script for a 45-minute dramatic episode--unless he is extraordinarily adept, totally experienced, remarkably literary, in which case, as with film, the drama becomes the director's medium--except to implore his performer to look lugubriously at space, cry copiously and endlessly, shake his head violently, and stare fixedly at the camera.

Out on location, a director can at least make performers walk long stretches or drive long distances, providing a little movement and a little interest. But within the tight confines of a studio set, a director has nothing to work on but the performer's faces. Unless it is the hideous Mabini paintings. Or the ubiquitous centerpieces of plastic flowers.

And acting cannot but be influenced by storyline and role. No performer can afford to dum-dum it through a weighty story, a demanding role, masterful direction, and inspired acting by other performers. He goes dum-dum once, and he sticks out like a sore thumb. He does it another time, and he bombs before he has even ignited.

But when the storyline is trivial and the pacing is slow and the performances are all limp, then what should be the mean becomes the standard. The result is episodal mediocrity. Mediocre episodes lend credence to charges that the small screen is a mediocre medium.

That is why I have always held out for a substantial storyline as the basic requirement for interesting drama. Stories we can really chew on, not sleep through. There is no lack of such stories, if our television writers will only swallow a little of their misdirected pride, dig deep into the bottomless mine of world and local literature, and put in a little more work into fleshing out their scripts. So much depends on a good storyline--on stage, in literature, on film. And definitely, on television.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Even more life after TV

In the '70s and '80s, almost everybody agonized over the supposedly inordinate hold of television on children's time and minds. Parents, teachers, and psychoanalysts worried about the controlling violence, the social instability, the emotional emptiness and discontent, the sexual abnormalities they suspected the small box would work on the psyches of generations of children.

For a whole decade now, the same fears are being expressed, this time about another small box--to be more accurate, a whole information network carried on a decreasing screen size--with a greater reach and more dangerous potential. Perhaps another decade, and we will be worrying about an even more powerful adversary, still beyond our ken today, that will be invented to capture man's imagination and, at the same time, endanger his humanity.

With time--28 years now after I wrote these pieces--I have come to a more serene acceptance of the inevitable destiny of the human race. As thinking occupants of this planet, we cannot stop the creativity and ingenuity our minds are capable of. All we can do is hope that as science and technology advance, so will faith and the integrity of the human spirit.


"Impressions," TV Times, 27 May-2 June 1979

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There is still an overwhelming majority of crime dramas on local television, compared to shows belonging to other genres, as far as prime-time canned programs are concerned. On the present schedule, there are as many as 12 American and 4 British crime dramas during the week, placing the ratio on the average at 2-and-a-little-more canned crime dramas a night.

Not that this should cause intense worry among social scientists, educators, and psychoanalysts. Or so I believe. The thing is to get an adequate and palatable mix of different shows from the other genres, which should not be too difficult considering that the present weekly schedule offers at least 8 half-hour comedy rib-ticklers, 5 musicals, 7 action/adventure shows, 6 dramatic series, and 3 science-fiction teasers. And we are not even counting the local shows, which are nil on crime and heavy on tearjerkers and musical/variety shows.

And if you notice, even the canned crime dramas are now coming with a very welcome shot of humor, certainly to keep the violence from further disrupting those who are already a little emotionally unsteady. The new season of Quincy, M.E., with its remarkable use of forensic medicine and its unabating analyses of corpses, often takes time off from crime-snooping to deliver a lesson or two on living and human relations. And Jack Klugman often affects an occasionally piquant face and delivers a timely hilarious line.

Eddie Capra Mysteries goes light a great many times. Capra is persistent, merciless, savage, shrewd, irreverent. But he also exhibits a marked sense of humor, a dedication to the truth, and a definite love for children. And who can deny that much of what keeps the young glued to CHiPs is not the action, not the violence, but Erik Estrada? Kaz is not only funny, he is uproarious, a true caricature, with Ron Leibman acting the role--the lawyering, the coarse shouting, the drum-playing--with cool humor and easy amiability. Even the prosecution lawyer with whom Kaz always tangles in court is a true and truly amusing caricature.

Of course, Starsky and Hutch may keep the blood pouring in great arterial gushes and surely, many times, we want to rap Delvecchio and his big mouth. But Harry-O, with his constant philosophizing about life and living, paints a sensitive portrait of the detective as an innocent: neither tolerating nor espousing violence, but dreaming only of the beach when a case is over, and a girl to go with the beach cottage. He is at once poignant and wonderfully funny and, in the balance of adult perceptions, must surely weigh two tons above the others.

Even the second-stringers in the list of canned crime fighters are real lightweights, though lovable ones. Steve McGarrett of Hawaii Five-O is the superfluous champion of self-conscious overacting; Jigsaw John is middling, plodding, but competent; Man Undercover's David Cassidy suffers--on the local schedule--from heavier competition on the same timeslot.

Which is why I can hardly agree with those parents who keep their children off television completely for one reason or another: there's too much crime and violence on TV; there's very little creativity; it is nothing more than a fantasy machine. I certainly do not think you should make the television a full-time babysitter. I also do not think you should let children watch certain shows without some sane adult company.

But I believe that the television set, properly used, can be another complement to a child's never-ending world of learning. After all, a child's day should be a beautiful patchwork of teaching activities, enriching contacts and broadening experiences. With a parent's help, television can be one more of such--constantly opening a child's eyes to the world around him, his heart to people everywhere, his spirits to the beauty of ideals and the nobility of a good life. And every time I watch television with the children--answering with utmost care the endless why's of my three-year-old thinker, wondering at the images etching grooves in the memory of my one-year-old visualizer--my belief is reinforced.

The technique, of course, is to provide the child with a wealth of other experiences throughout the day and throughout all his growing-up days so that television will not become his exclusive guide to life and reality, so that television will become--with enough selectivity--another useful source of information, knowledge, entertainment, even art. As it really is.

Besides, what is wrong with vicarious experience, with fantasy? Literature is no less a vicarious experience. So is film (and ours was the film-and-literature generation). And theater. Fantasy can make up the stuff of ambition, heroism, courage, daring, idealism. As long as the child is advised that television is not the world, and that a bigger reality flows all around him--not out of the small home screen-- then, television shows should comprise just one more addition to the collective memory of his generation and the singular development of his own human and humanizing wholeness.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Laughing through a roast

Today, with cable, we can get anything we want--within the parameters of decency, of course--from the television screen. If not at the time we want it, then all we need to do is be patient. So, for would-be dance divas, the dance contests that highlight the best dancers and the best choreographers. And for those who don't care for dancing, a multiplicity of options: one-man comedy acts, nonstop drama/melodrama series, musicals, art shows, news, sports.

Back in the '70s and '80s, the choices for Filipino televiewers were very limited. Once you found a good thing, you had to hold on to it and hope there were others doing so and that, together, you could organize enough critical mass to sway the decision-makers, whether in local or foreign networks.

Of course, I wondered sometimes if they ever listened to me. I never got telephone calls from survey companies asking me what shows I watch on television, or what brand of anything I purchase. Not what I feel or believe about the country, the government, our leaders. Not on any topic of national, business, or entertainment interest. At all.

Perhaps I should be happy I was never a statistic.


"Impressions," TV Times, 29 April-5 May 1979

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I do love a good roast. Perhaps it is because I prefer to be hit by the verbal club rather than be socked by the sight gag. What Bob Hope says is what makes me laugh, not how he looks. How Cloris Leachman (in Phyllis) thinks is much funnier than what she does.

So, I like Something, at least the roasting part of it. The other numbers, I can get--and sometimes better--in other shows. The backdrop, I can gawk at--and better-looking ones--in House and Garden. But the roast I will take, with great laughter. Now.

Many will say the show is a blatant imitation of a foreign production. But comedy should be universal, and I cannot be expected to control my laughter just because it comes courtesy of a foreign format. And as long as every other show on local television does not imitate it, an hour of roasting a week is welcome.

Thankfully, those who roasted the roastee in that episode of Something that we watched did it with truly evident affection for the roastee, rather than with the ill-concealed coldness with which their American counterparts perform the exercise in many a Dean Martin roast. Some of the lines said about Maya Valdez were mirth-provoking and uproariously funny, managing to exercise the funny bone while keeping a sympathetic finger on the human pulse.

I would not know, of course, whether any roastee's seat is cool enough for him to be able to laugh through an hour of roasting. There are many who consider a roasting an exercise in emotional violence and offhand cruelty. But I do know something. Anybody who can laugh while others rip off his masks and and smash his defenses cannot but gain in inner confidence and wisdom. The experience is simply too unique not to figure in the individual's consciousness. And anybody who can smile through a roast, and smile at those who roasted him after the event, in all sincerity, seeing it neither as an insult nor a critique but very simply a show, has effectively underscored his stability and accepted his humanity.

Aside from that, and certainly equal to it, is the fact that a roast can provide ordinary viewers a few good and booming laughs. At other people's expense, of course. But what can be very much wrong with doing it while they are around and not when their backs are turned?

A warning, though. The time will surely come, and soon, when the show's producers will find it difficult getting roastees with enough confidence in themselves and roasters who are both excellent wits and real friends of the roastee. When that time comes, we hope the producers will know that the time to end the show has finally and irrevocably arrived.

******

Mga Kuwento ng Pag-ibig very often manages to entice. It is technically well-done, with storylines that are crisp and crackling. The talents, too, often perform creditably. Those who do not are, at least, not made to look silly and stupid.

But now, Armida Siguion-Reyna can perhaps turn her attention to the development of lesser-known--and even unknown--talents with the face, the flair, the flamboyance for TV acting. Plus the sensitivity for the kind of dramatic productions she likes.

Charo Santos is undoubtedly a very competent, highly skilled performer, with her own taut style of delineating a role, but it would also be worthwhile to watch other talented names and faces make it in the kind of roles she often portrays for Aawitan Kita Productions.

The stage should be a good place for starting the hunt.

******

I have nothing against dance shows, and this opinion must be a minority one. But I find 3-1/2 hours of dancing on television every week--plus the sporadic dancing in all those other daytime variety shows that cannot seem to do without dance numbers--just a little too much. Especially since the dances all look alike and there is no real effort to instruct the viewers.

Dancing, admittedly, is an art. And television, as a mass medium, should devote a little time and attention to it if it is to satisfy the needs of its vastly varied audience.

But must I have 3-1/2 hours of it a week? And why only disco dancing? And should the dance programs come a little too close to each other in the week?

I don't particularly like Deney Terio (he is straight out of glittery, garrulous Hollywood) of Dance Fever, but it seems to me he has the best idea for making a disco dance program watchable: fast pacing, some judging, a little instructional at the end, and short, short, short.

Penthouse 7 is simply too long. After the first hour, boredom sets in. The dance numbers should probably go through stricter screening. Some dances of the modern group appear to serve no purpose. A little less of the cutie-pie chatter (which, as I can deduce from some of the letters received by "Feedback," riles many viewers, and I can understand why), even less of the plugs, a tighter show all throughout--these may help make the show more tolerable.

-- NBT

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