Radio: The Invasion

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England has not been successfully invaded since William the Conqueror rode over the luckless Saxons nine centuries ago, but the island's invulnerability is about to end. Next month commercial television will invade staunch Britain, surging onto the air waves that have long been the placid domain of the uncommercial, unexciting BBC.

Through several years of debate in the newspapers and the House of Commons, citizens—mainly a mixture of Laborites, churchmen and the more conservative Britons—have been fearfully prophesying the onslaught, forecasting an instant drop of cultural standards to the twelve-year-old level that they insist television has induced in the U.S. But other millions wait like a huge fifth column, eager for the day when they can switch their allegiance and their TV dials to multichannel reception and to something more stimulating than the toneless, grey gruel fed them by the BBC.

Admen's Heartburn. This week, amid the scaffolding of half-finished office buildings, in ancient music halls hastily made into studios and in smart Mayfair suites, feverish platoons of producers, directors, scriptwriters, camera crews, actors and admen are marshaling their forces for TV-day—Sept. 22. Commercial television, British-style, will not start out as a replica of the American brand. By government ruling, only six minutes of sales talk will be allowed each hour, and the plugs must be concentrated at the beginning and end of the hour, or during "natural breaks" in the program. No sponsor may pick his own show: his sales message must be rotated in different spots according to the convenience of the program companies who rent TV facilities from the government's watchdog Independent Television Authority. This has caused some heartburn among admen. Groaned one: "Suppose a cigaret commercial gets placed next to a discussion of lung cancer!"

There are other limitations. Commercial TV will broadcast 52½ hours a week (compared to some 130 hours in the U.S.). The screen must be left blank on Sunday mornings so as not to compete with churchgoing; no Sunday afternoon shows may be aimed at children, because they might entice them away from Sunday school. At 6 every evening will occur the "toddler's truce," an hour of TV silence, so that parents can wring out their moppets and put them to bed. The program companies have made an unwritten agreement to limit U.S. imports to 25% of the week's programming. But arrangements have already been made to acquaint Britons with I Love Lucy (scheduled to compete with BBC's prize variety hour, The Ted Ray Show), Dragnet, Hopalong Cassidy, Ed Murrow's Person to Person, and Billy Graham. Last fortnight the contracts were signed for the import of Liberace, complete with candelabra and toothy smile. But many of the home-grown products will bear a resemblance to U.S. shows. Example: Sunday Night at the Palladium, featuring such stars as Gracie Fields and Johnnie Ray, will be a vaudeville hour on the lines of Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town. Basically, the commercial TVmen think the BBC incapable of offering them real competition.