Newer Than Baseball

In a Brooklyn theater last week, 4,000 junior high school students booed Russia's Andrei Vishinsky and warmly cheered U.S. Delegate Warren Austin. Except for these partisan outbursts, the teen-agers found the long speeches and static drama of the specially arranged telecast of United Nations in Action (weekdays, 11 a.m. & 3 p.m., CBS-TV) neither so funny as Milton Berle nor so exciting as baseball. "Of course," one 14-year-old conceded, "baseball is more known, because it's older than the United Nations . . ."

In the three weeks of televised United Nations sessions (sponsored, without commercials, by Ford Motor Co.), some adult viewers have found moments that neither Berle nor baseball could equal.

There was high drama in the denunciation of the Soviet Union by Britain's Hector McNeil while, beside him, Vishinsky sat, chin on hand, glowering through horn-rimmed glasses, only moving to make a penciled note or rasp a quick order over his shoulder to a subordinate. Again, there was a moment of tense comedy as McNeil (looking remarkably like Arthur Godfrey) listened with polite incredulity to Russia's Amazasp Arutiunian, whose hunch-shouldered delivery and darkling glance were strongly reminiscent of the late Fiorello La Guardia.

There was a touch of slapstick in the shot of a delegate dozing off during a tedious speech and being fussily wakened by an aide who had noticed that the TV camera was recording the cat nap. Particularly effective on TV is the contrast between the tuned-down but passionate voices of the Iron Curtain delegates, speaking in their native tongues, and the cool, detached accents of the English interpreters giving a running translation of the speeches as they are being made.

As entertainment, the United Nations was shaping up as better than anything else on daytime television. Dramatically, the chief flaw was still the tendency of the opposing orators to repeat their arguments over & over again. As one of the Brooklyn teen-agers complained: "They just say what they think or what their country thinks, but they don't listen to anyone else. Once a person finishes talking, he goes to sleep already. He just listens to his own side and thinks he's right all the time."

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