TV Abroad: The Red Tube

The TV scene is unmistakably the old Ponderosa. As the Cartwright family digs in to defend the ranch against a band of rustlers, there is a clatter of hoofs. Suddenly one of the boys shouts: “Nie strzelaj, Hoss! To szeryf!” That’s dubbed-in Polish for “Don’t shoot, Hoss! It’s the sheriff!”

It’s also Bonanza, Polish-style. Like most other East European TV establishments, Poland is cutting away from Soviet television imports and is filling its tube with U.S. shows. Dr. Kildare is so popular in Poland that Communist Party meetings are no longer held on Wednesday nights. Perry Mason argues his cases in eloquent Serbo-Croatian in Yugoslavia. Rawhide rides hard in Rumania, and Alfred Hitchcock is a chilling success in Bulgaria.

Blurbs & Swipes. Apart from U.S. shows, however, the Iron Curtain countries still come on strong with dialectic. Television’s purpose, sums up the Hungarian theoretical journal Tarsadalmi Szemle, is “agitation and propaganda in a perseveringly Marxist spirit.” To that end, a typical recent night’s fare in Budapest kicked off with a blurb on the activities of red-scarfed youth groups. Then followed a 15-minute commentary on Southeast Asia by an official of the party newspaper, and an unillustrated and soporific 45-minute autobiography by a 70-year-old Communist militant.

The rest of the evening included a static sports roundup (a ten-minute speech by an athletic functionary, scenes of a factory woman doing calisthenics), a performance of Chekhov’s Platonov’s Loves, Thirty Minutes with the Hungarian Railway Philharmonic, and a half-hour newscast, with headlines read by a tight-lipped blonde. As with the rest of East European television, Hungary’s news presentation carries virtually no film footage, nor even voice reports from foreign correspondents. The lead item usually updates what the satellite networks call America’s “dirty aggressive war against the brave, peace-loving Vietnamese.” And often there will be a swipe at “the revanchist Kiesinger-Strauss government in Bonn.”

The degree of party chauvinism ranges from country to country. East Germany’s Deutscher Fernsehfunk carries no U.S. programming, and ladles out the thickest propaganda. Every week, for example, it puts on a Meet the Press-type show starring the same man—Old Propaganda Czar Gerhard Eisler, now 70. Otherwise, East Germans get their TV entertainment from Fussball (soccer) coverage, old movies, and—for viewers within range of West German channels—a few U.S. series.

Peaches & Sympathy. The lowest-keyed and slickest propagandists are the Czechs, who employ their innovative cinematic techniques for programs on the virtues of working in the peach-canning or fertilizer industries. The Czechs also have the liveliest commercials. One holiday-season spot shows the last-minute buying rush, and cuts to a popular actor looking dispiritedly into his empty wallet. Then a bleached, beehived blonde sympathizes: “Don’t worry about money: buy a camera on the installment plan from Foto-Kino.”

The most progressive Eastern European network, predictably enough, is the Yugoslav. The news is played fairly straight (though the Israelis were labeled “aggressors” in their war with the Arabs). Uniquely in Eastern Europe, Jugoslovenska Radio-Televizija dares a weekly hour of social and political satire. And on a Thursday-night interview show, Host Jovan Sčekic questions government officials with an inquisitorial style reminiscent of the old Mike Wallace; home viewers are invited to phone in sticky questions of their own. Yugoslav audiences, in fact, get plenty of say about programming. At one point after a thunder of complaints, the network uncanceled a show called Dennis the Naughty Boy.