The Tact Expert

When NBC-TV produced Richard Strauss's opera Salome a couple of years ago, the striptease question had to be faced. How would the heroine be shown on TV screens after she took off the seventh veil? "Sheath her in a fleshcolored leotard," said Stockton Helffrich, a specialist in such matters. "Have the camera pan on her neck. Then once everybody knows she's wearing something under the veils, you can go to town."

The advice from the expert was followed, brought no complaints from viewers. Expert Helffrich, 44, is NBC's director of continuity acceptance, which means he is a censor with the accent on the positive. Aided by a coast-to-coast staff of 35, he passes on all radio and TV material that goes out over the network. But he has transformed the censor's formula ("You can't do this") into the editor's ("This is how you can do it").

Some of the problems of the job are set forth in an interoffice publication whose chapter headings range from "Obstetrics" to "Of necklines, lust and divorce." Complaints pour in daily, blasting NBC for such sins as undermining the language by billing the perry como show in lower-case letters, and subverting the nation by pointing out in Biographies in Sound that George Washington was not perfect. But Helffrich has found that the principal areas of censorship trouble lie in 1) racial hysteria, 2) obvious salaciousness, 3) excessive violence and 4) irresponsible slaps at mental illness.

Helffrich went to work for NBC 23 years ago as a page boy. At the time, studio executives thought that the page boys, who were guiding tens of thousands of tourists around the Manhattan studios, lacked diplomacy. Helffrich, just out of Penn State, was appointed guide in charge of tact. Except for a wartime tour of duty with the Navy, he has been with NBC ever since, and believes that he is still dealing largely in tact. Some of his decisions depend on sensitivity (the words, offensive to Negroes, of such Stephen Foster songs as Old Black Joe and Massa's in de Cold Ground have not recently been heard on NBC); some depend on horse sense (in the past year the word "hell" has been approved on ten shows, the word "damn" on seven shows, but the expression "God damn" went over the network unapproved when Actor Lloyd Bridges' emotions got out of hand during a taut moment in Reginald Rose's Temporary Town).

This week one of Helffrich's more tactful decisions probably went unnoticed by the millions whose viewing was affected by it. Without any outside pressure, he eliminated 90 seconds from NBC's Medic (Mon. 9 p.m.). The shocker of a sequence was shot in a hospital operating room and showed a Caesarian section, including the incision and birth of the baby. "Pointless realism," said Helffrich, "that was calculated to horrify."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.