Television: Tale of 76 Cities

Millions prep for Dickens

For three hours last week some 32 million Americans tuned in on the CBS television adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. But a significant chunk of the audience was not simply watching—and shivering at—the crash of the guillotine, or hoping that Sydney Carton could somehow make the supreme sacrifice and get the girl too. They had been primed for the show by reading the TV script, prepared by John Gay, and by answering questions about the story. Samples: What roles do the two cities play? Which city has the more important role? Why?

Those scripts were distributed in 76 cities to an estimated 9 million elementary and secondary pupils as part of an educational experiment known as the CBS Television Reading Program, which promotes television not as a boob tube but as a device designed to whet children's interest in reading.

Program scripts are printed in advance of the broadcast date by local newspapers (among those that are participating: the Minneapolis Tribune, the Detroit Free Press and the Baltimore Sun), and the material is discussed beforehand in class. Local sponsors like the First National Bank of Boston, the Carruth Mortgage Corporation in New Orleans and Atlanta's Six Flags over Georgia pay for production of the scripts and teachers' classroom guides.

The program seems to play well in the classroom. New Orleans English Teacher Louis Rodrigue reports, for example, that even poor readers are enthusiastic about working their way through the TV scripts. What is more, he says, students often ask for additional reading after viewing specials like "Day of Infamy," a 1978 episode of The Waltons about Pearl Harbor; last year's The Corn Is Green, the story of a schoolmarm in a Welsh coal-mining town, starring Katharine Hepburn; and Dickens' Tale. "If there were programs like this every month," says Alvan Benjamin of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, "we could use them."

Even so, Madame Guillotine and Madame Defarge were unable to match the drawing power of such ABC competition as Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley and Barbara Walters interviewing Burt Reynolds, Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood.