A requiem for Uncle Miltie

By CARL HEINTZE

Milton Berle's death the other day has led m to speculate on what's happened in my lifetime to television.

What's happened, it seems to me is mostly bad.

I decided this after thinking of seeing Uncle Miltie in the early days of the medium dimly visible in black and white on a flickering screen and yet still very funny, something worth watching.

It was a time when there was a lot worth watching on television:

It wasn't merely the novelty of having a performer or two in your living room at least once a week.

It was the material they used. It was entertaining and informative.

It was things like "Your Show of Shows" with Sid Cesear and Imogene Coca, "Omnibus," and "Playhouse 90," Edward R. Morrow, Jackie Gleason and the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, "Wide Wide World," and "The Wide World of Sports."

None of these survived to the present. Not only do we no longer have television plays and documentaries worth watching even much of Public Television has descended into hours of "Antiques Roadshow" and the constant amazement of antiques' owners at the prices their treasures supposedly will fetch at auction.

What television has to offer, aside from news, which is, itself, now become entertainment of a sort, really isn't worth watching. And, oddly enough, the effort to make news entertaining and newscasts entertainment has tended to make the news unreal. The war in Afghanistan or Kosovo is terrible for those caught in it, but for the rest of the world it is something that shows up in the evening on the color screen. It belends in with the unreality of reality shows until it, too, is no longer real.

There's a reason for this, I suppose. In fact, there are probably several reasons. Despite the fact that television has become progressively more technologically advanced, there is simply too much of it. If one subscribes to a cable service or a satellite dish there are literally hundreds of programs from which to choose.

Many of them are relics from the past. "I Love Lucy," for instance, is still running somewhere, as is "MASH," because both were consistently funny. Years after they were made they still are.

But television in its proliferation has become an enormous maw into which talent is poured and into which it disappears never to be seen again. It is simply not possible to create "A Show of Shows" once a week forever as all those immortalized by Neal Simon's Laughter on the 34th Floor" realized.

Someone once said television is not a medium anyway, it's an appliance. And we tend to treat it that way, turning it off and on like an electric range or a floor lamp to fill the empty spaces in our evenings. Pay Per View television is an effort to get beyond this and it might work if its material were better. But it's not.

Like television the film industry was a factory which churned out movies to fill the demand.

A few were good, some were mediocre and a lot were bad. We called the bad ones B pictures to indicate they were something less than eye catching, but someone watched them anyway.

Television has descended to this level. A few programs now and then are worth watching, but most aren't. And so we study the news, making it a kind of entertainment. Beseiged by commercials which grow ever more frantic for our attention, we turn the sound off and often we fall asleep under the stultifying influence of shows that don't go anywhere, shows that are slick without being memorable and flashy without being funny.

We miss you Uncle Miltie. We miss you a lot.

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