Series from a D.P. Poet

It was only a half-hour show, done in the commercial-cut format of the western and the soap opera. Yet it was one of the most effective shows on TV this season.

A Trip to Czardis, on Manhattan's WCBS-TV, told of two small boys in the Florida pine woods who go with their mother and uncle to see their father, sick in a nearby town. As it turns out, he is not really sick; he is in prison, and a crowd is already collecting to watch him hang. He says goodbye to the boys, giving one a watch, the other its chain. The older boy understands, his brother does not.

That was the simple outline of the play; what made it exceptional, as played by an excellent cast including Mildred Dunnock, was the unpretentious directness with which Edwin Cranberry's short story reached the TV screen. If at times too deliberate, the show was neither sentimental nor afraid of sentiment, skillfully played on the viewers' emotions with the cool, sweet memory of an earlier trip to Czardis when the father was still strong and happy; with the boys' childish, poignant attempt to find a present they can take to him; above all, with the wrenching contrast between innocence and death.

Dry Ink. The play was particularly notable in the hopeless desert of summer programing, but it would have stood out at any time as the first of a new series--The Robert Herridge Theater--that has long been one of the finest unseen programs ever assembled. Producer Hf-ridge began it over a year ago at CBS Films, a semi-independent TV packaging firm, but as show after show went on tape, the series looked so widely various that potential customers felt they did not know what they might be buying. In ten months, many agencies and sponsors smelled quality and kept their ink dry.

Four shows were bought last fall by stations in Scandinavia and Germany; the program has also been sold in Australia and Canada. Now sold at last in the U.S.--but only in five cities--the series is mainly dramatic, ranging from John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea to adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart and Shirley Jackson's coldly disturbing The Lottery. A play called The Gunfighter sends the average western up in gun smoke as it concentrates with the tension of High Noon on the 30 minutes that precede a professional killing. Always varied in mood, the series trips along with Burlesque Pantomimist Irving Hoffman in some splendidly kookie blackouts, stages a Frankie and Johnnie Ballet with Ballerina Melissa Hayden, and sits in on a wordless session with Jazz Trumpeter Miles Davis.

The better sort of television has long been the province of Robert Herridge, 42, once called by Variety "the literary conscience of the medium." Using no sets but considerable imagination, he originated WCBS's Camera Three seven years ago, did productions of Hamlet, Moby Dick, The Heart of Darkness, a ten-part Huckleberry Finn. As a summer producer for the once-memorable Studio One, he did the fascinating Mr. Arcularis, by Poet Conrad Aiken, and Steinbeck's Flight.

Espresso-Shop Idealism. A kind of D.P. poet, wearing moccasins and no tie, Herridge went to Northwestern, once held a poetry fellowship at the University of California. Leaving academe astride the flaring rationalization that "one should live at the center of experience of his time," he hit the road. He loafed, worked on road gangs, on farms, on beaches as a lifeguard. He published stories in Scribner's Magazine and the American Mercury. Following his Steinbeck period came his Hemingway period. Herridge enlisted in the Army Air Corps, flew missions over southern Europe. After the war, he padded around Greenwich Village, wandered into television ten years ago to beachcomb for money.

Still pursuing a freewheeling life, Herridge is apt to turn up at parties with two or three dates; in his office he keeps photographs--even an oil portrait--of assorted musky ladies of close acquaintance. He talks with espresso-shop idealism about TV, but he matches much of that talked idealism in his work. With far more non commercial daring than a David Susskind, he brings audiences a lot of the variety and vigor that TV once promised. Something less than television's first saint, he at least, in the words of one of his directors, "compulsively avoids the obvious."

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