Welsh Journals

should be great moments in television, and its the frequency of these great moments as a result of new endeavour by new authors that we are all interested in. I am glad to say that I am not the only one who believes that we are about to enter a new era in this respect. After I had put together these few thoughts for you today, I came across this passage, written by an American, Victor Ratner, in 1955. 'The programme structure already favours the side of serious pro- gramming, not light programming. More of such material is already offered in total than its numerical size of audience warrants. This happens in mass magazines and newspapers as well.' If that is true in America, it's certainly so in this country. 'Such weighting in favour of serious and cultural programming takes place for a variety of reasons; the "importance" of the minority audiences, the prestige value of such programmes, the desire of media to discharge their responsibilities for balanced programming and "cultural leadership" 'What we can expect, I think, as the audiences of our time continue to grow is the creation of more and more great art cast into the language of ordinary people, the same insights into truth, expressed for majority rather than minority audiences Those last words express much the same sentiments as I tried to put over to you earlier, and when two minds, divided by two thousand miles of ocean think roughly alike, there must be something in it. And then, Ratner remarks: 'What seems like a swift lowering of our cultural standards may be only the slowing up of a train as it takes on many millions of new passengers-who ultimately will be carried to those higher spheres of culture where only a small fraction of the human race found itself in the good old days.' He may be right. I hope so. Certainly, television has brought many of the classics, especially in the field of drama within the range of the ordinary household, classics that the mass audience would not have seen otherwise. The Americans are very fond of quoting the fact that their presentation of 'Richard the Third' on television was seen by far more people than had seen the play since it was written. Our claims might not be as great but they are just as remarkable. But it's Ratner's point about 'great art cast into the language of the ordinary people' that inspires me, and makes me wonder if we shall