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Show BROADWAY AND MAIN STREET Television Versus IQ It Can Be Made Cultural Medium By BILLY ROSE As an old blab merchant, I seldom pay much attention to the other fellow's speeches, and when I do it's generally to take umbrage um-brage rather than notice. This week, however, I'd like to turn coat and tables on myself and do some hefty hollering about a speech on the future of television recently delivered de-livered by Dr. Millard Faught, an economist, at the University Club of Chicago. I happened to pop-eye a copy of it the. other day, and while I haven't the space to give you the whole 4,000 words, here's a bit of the cream off the tOD ... 1 To begin with. Dr. Faught axioms ax-ioms that TV can be used for a lot of things besides selling eyewash, mouthwash and hogwash, and insists in-sists that its full potentialities will never be realized if we allow it to be taken over lock, stock and antenna by the hucksters. In his opinion, the new dingus can do an unprecedented job for us in a dozen esthetic Spanish, or child care, or interior decorating, whereas the average class on campus today consists of from 25 to 50 students. YOU-SEE revenue . from these home extension courses would provide pro-vide the monies for new university buildings, laboratories, scholarships scholar-ships and teachers' salaries, and once and for all our colleges could stop passing the hat. Education, the doc goes on to say, is our best bet to stand off totalitarianism, despite de-spite which it's probably the most obsoletely merchandized comodity in our society. The economist stresses that be has no quarrel with the advertisers, adver-tisers, but maintains that if they're the only source of revenue, reve-nue, TV is a cinch to wind up the same sort of cultural pigmy that radio is. The living room, he argues, is probably the room farthest removed re-moved from the marketplace, and if Joe Jones and his missus want something in it besides cornflake and Cuticura commercials, they'll have to contribute the pennies to make it possible. The government could probably be pressured into doing it for them, but who with an IQ above zero, asks Dr. Faught, wants political appointees messing with our educational processes and cultural preferences? I particularly like the last line of his speech: "Never in the history of the communicative arts was there a greater premium on foresight." home screen as so much hash. To unscramble the picture one picks up the phone and asks the operator to pipe in the missing 1 per cent through a gadget on his set hooked up to his telephone line. At the end of the month, the charge for this service is included in his phone bill, and the gross take divvied betwen the television station, sta-tion, the creator of the program, and the phone company. According to Dr. Faught, Phonevision or some equivalent device will make it possible to collect millions of dollars in a single evening for, let us say, the Red Cross by putting on one nationwide benefit video show. It will enable our sick-unto-dearth Hollywood studios to quintuple quin-tuple their audiences and double their grosses, and also make possible 10-million-dollar gates for championship fights and World Series games. But, opines the good doctor, its most eye-bugging eye-bugging impact will be on education. edu-cation. By bringing the classroom into the home, it will be possible for 100,000 students simultaneously to take the same beginners' course in fields providing, of Billy Rose course, that a method can be devised whereby someone besides the advertiser foots part of the bill. The gimmick he suggests is a television box office operating on a pay-as-you-see-it basis, and the one he specifically mentions in his speech Phonevision is due to be tested in Chicago this fall with the blessings of the F.C.C. LEAVING ELECTRONIC double-talk double-talk out of it, Phonevision, which was recently demonstrated for me, is simply this: a system whereby 99 per cent of an image is telecast dee of charge, but shows up on the |