Sesame Seedling

With the functional illiteracy rate in the U.S. estimated possibly as high as 25%, President Nixon last year proclaimed the 1970s as the "Right to Read" decade. It sounded like many another empty proclamation, except that in this instance the Government assigned the problem in part to the Children's Television Workshop, those truly wonderful folks who gave us the classic show of the preschool generation, Sesame Street. On Thursday night, Oct. 21, some 145 commercial channels will carry a sneak preview of what 18 months of research, a budget of $7,000,000* and the Workshop's wonted imagination have wrought. Judging from several prescreenings, The Electric Company, the new daily half-hour reading series for 7-to 10-year-olds, is a worthy sibling of Sesame Street, and a bright second cousin to Laugh-In in its youthful prime.

Chic Gig. The show's first objective is to be entertaining enough to attract and hold what its research staff finds to be a TV-savvy, channel-hopping and, hence, "fearsomely tough" audience. In this they will undoubtedly be successful: The Electric Company jolts along at breakneck pace, acharge with knockout graphics, funky score, zonky electronic effects and berserk wit. It takes healthy cognizance that the TV generation is into games Dick and Jane never played. Fargo North Decoder, is a crack word detective, Easy Reader a hip-talking addict of the printed word, and Julia Grownup a butterfingered TV chef, whose recipes become a kind of primer. There are parodies of soap operas, TV quiz shows (Wild Guess) and the film 2001, but some of the sassiest material seems lifted from the "Chitlin'," or black vaudeville circuit.

If anything, Electric Company wit may be a bit precocious for second-graders, since the head writer, Paul Dooley, is an alumnus of the satirical Second City theater troupe and one member of his staff has just arrived from the Dick Cavett Show. It is even now apparent that an appearance on Electric Company is going to be the chic guest gig of 1971-72, just as a cameo spot on Batman was the kick of the late '60s. Top comics like Mel Brooks, Bob and Ray, Tom Lehrer and Victor Borge have all signed up to do the show.

The series' seven-member repertory troupe features Rita Moreno, the Puerto Rican-born actress who won an Oscar in West Side Story, and Bill Cosby, who after five seasons gave up Hollywood TV series to pursue a doctorate in education at the University of Massachusetts. Cosby is not unfamiliar with academic slow starters--in worse days he had to do a rerun of tenth grade. The second bananas are all first-rate, notably Judy Graubart, whose roles include Julia Grownup; Skip Hinnant, the Don Adams-style sleuth, Fargo North; Lee Chamberlin, as Rosalie the fortuneteller; and Morgan Freeman, the elongated Flip Wilson cast both as Easy Reader and a soul-sound disk jockey.

Fierce Alarums. The reading lessons sneaked into all this entertainment are based on a study of 40 different teaching systems and consultations with more than 100 experts. What survived for next week's premiere shows is a "cafeteria curriculum," including variations on both the Look-Say and Phonics approaches still competing for ascendancy among U.S. reading authorities (TIME, March 29). Inevitably, in the next few weeks, the proponents of these orthodoxies and others can be expected to raise fierce alarums. Herman Keld, a spokesman of the phonics school and one of the originators of the Pop-Up instructional spots now seen on NBC, has already warned that, though "The Electric Company will make the good reader better, the children who are confused will now be lost."

That may be, but Joan Ganz Cooney, the Workshop's president, will run continuous tests on the effectiveness of the show and try to rejigger it accordingly as the season progresses. The same spirit of self-criticism appears on air. Constantly carping at the teachings of other characters and at the idiosyncrasies of the English language is an off-camera omnipresence named J. Arthur Crank.

*Underwriters, besides the U.S. Office of Education and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, include the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and Mobil Oil Corp.

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