Abstract
For readers of a certain age, the new historical study One Night on TV will bring back nostalgic memories of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when short (sometimes fifteen minutes) popular music programs, many of them broadcast live, helped to define early network television. The title compares widespread (after 1951, national) exposure on television to one of the largest theaters in New York.
Forman, who teaches communication at Northeastern University, provides the best history to date of the incorporation of musical performances into TV programs up to 1955. Elvis’s landmark television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show came early the next year; the Beatles’ debut on the same program took place in 1964. The genre discussed here disappeared by the 1960s as other more lucrative formats crowded out music short-form programming.
Forman examines how executives in both music and TV came to understand the convergence of the two media; how celebrity musicians (such as singers Dinah Shore [on the cover], Vaughn Monroe, Tony Martin, and Frank Sinatra, and orchestra director Fred Waring) struggled to adjust to the requirements of television—more and hotter lights and far tighter staging, for example. Forman reveals how a few relative unknowns with an intuitive feel for the medium were sometimes rapidly catapulted to stardom. (Read the book to find out who they were!)
Forman argues that early television production influenced the aesthetics of musical performance in this period, particularly those of emerging rock and roll. We may smile today at the almost formal coats and ties of pop and rock singers in this era, but television’s conservatism was only one cause.
Of course, popular music also helped to shape television—its technologies, its program formats, and even its basic structure. Furthermore, television soon became a factor in the decline of big bands, the growing popularity of the accordion (short-lived, as it turned out) and guitar, the decline of the old Hollywood studios, and a rising awareness (in some quarters, fear) of ethnicity in music.
One Night on TV reminds modern readers that popular music performances, relatively cheap to produce, were essential to the success and spread of television in its early years.
Then, across the pond, The Television Entrepreneurs, a useful British study, draws on business-oriented TV shows, such as the BBC dramas The Apprentice (another high-quality American export!) and Dragons’ Den, among numerous others, to explore the relationship between TV portrayals of business and the real world of business and private enterprise.
Based on interviews with British TV industry figures, other business executives, and a sample of viewers, the study provides a view into audience perceptions of business. It also explores the role played by television in shaping that view as well as what the public understands (or does not) about the world of business and finance.
The study is presented in two parts—“Industry, Text and Media Discourse” and “Audiences, Television and the Entrepreneur.” In the first, the authors identify important structural shifts in both television broadcasting and the wider economy that account for these changing presentations, while examining the extent to which TV’s developing interest in business and entrepreneurial issues is simply a response to wider changes (such as national political races) in society.
And in the second, Boyle and Kelly ask (and offer a tentative answer) whether TV drama is playing a larger role in defining how viewers perceive business, finance, entrepreneurship, risk, and wealth creation. Mapping dramatic narratives of television entrepreneurship and analyzing the context in which they are produced, the authors investigate how the audience engages with such programs and the possible impact these may have on public understanding of business more broadly.
Boyle teaches at the University of Glasgow, where Kelly is a research assistant. Some of this material has already appeared in journal articles. It is a sad comment on business, however, that a brief book lacking charts or tables should cost so much! Better (at the least) to issue it in paperback.