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By S. Kanfer

Prisoners often write merely to keep themselves sane. Perhaps it was the same impulse that caused Les Brown to produce a book. After 17 years on the beat, the television editor of Variety set out to chronicle a full year of TV not only from in front of the set, but from behind it, at the corner offices of the networks. He did so in 1970, which, to be sure, was not an average year. It was a period of attacks by Vice President Agnew, of diminishing revenue from cigarette advertising, of unusual audience volatility. The result of Brown's endeavors is the sanest--and the saddest--book ever written about television.

Brown calls it Televi$1on: The Business Behind the Box (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $8.95). The $ in the title is no misprint. The pursuit of the buck is no more dishonorable in television than elsewhere, but the pursuers constitute the most unabashed lot of yahoos, bunko shooters, numbers racketeers and overstuffed shirts that has been seen since Sinclair Lewis hung up his spites. Brown's cast is frighteningly real.

>Here is Robert D. Wood, president of CBS, booming one of his famous malapropisms: "Just screened the pilot for one of our new shows! Boy have we got something--a real potboiler!"

>Here is Cartoonist Joe Barbera displaying a large illustration of a beagle and a cat, central characters in a pilot cartoon about middle-class family life as seen through the eyes of their pets. "Can't sell it," complains the illustrator. [The networks] say it's too gentle. They want hard action."

"You mean violence?" asks Brown.

"We try not to use the word."

>Here is Mike Dann, when he was senior vice president of CBS, asking his underlings for suggestions to keep the network No. 1. Their contributions: "Use soap-opera aspects of Peyton Place in all our daytime promos." "We should get Dick Van Dyke to host Born Free." "Ice shows are doing well. Sullivan can do Holiday on Ice. Let's go."

>Here are Leonard Goldenson and Simon B. Siegel, top officers of ABC, firing a brilliant, outspoken executive "because he was not bland enough for television."

Moral Chill. Brown's book is considerably more than a rich thesaurus of anecdote. A sardonic muckraker, Brown demonstrates why commercial broadcasting, now a half-century old, remains "Babbitt at 50." The moral chill of the McCarthy era still afflicts the networks. Even in their journalism there is an ever-present binary fear of Government and advertisers. Thus TV-documentary writers begin a special on corruption in Saigon--only to have it scuttled. Then they are assigned a program on patent medicines--and ordered to abandon it. Then they start work on an examination of the military-industrial complex; that, too, is killed.

TV entertainment, says Brown, remains a cascade of situation comedies and law-and-order shows because TV must always reach for the lowest common dominator--viewers in the millions who represent a wide target for advertisers. But this is not a simple numbers racket. "Evidence is clear," writes Brown, "that ghetto families are among the highest users of television--but they are not the 'right kind' of consumer. Therefore they have historically received a short count in the ratings and have not had a proper vote in the popularity of TV shows. Such has been the liberalism of the networks, on the practical level."

The Time Bomb. Those who expect aid from the Federal Communications Commission will find Television even more depressing. The organization is pusillanimous, says Brown. Caught between Washington and broadcasting politics, it seeks to preserve rather than to alter. Nor can much be expected from changes at the networks. The small affiliate stations still have the right to refuse what they find disagreeable. This tail-wagging-the-dog situation curbs most attempts at quality or daring. Nor does Public Broadcasting offer a sanguine alternative. The networks tolerate it as Their Majesty's Loyal Opposition--as long as it retains its obsequious manner. Should it ever capture more than a snippet of the vast audience, broadcast lobbyists in Washington would reduce its generous funding to a trickle. Given this bland, canned state of TV, does the audience have any hope at all for fast, fast, fast relief? After 365 pages of documented despair, Brown suddenly goes upbeat, trusting the general viewer to reforest the wasteland. The result is reminiscent of the happy ending tacked to a TV melodrama. It also reflects an abiding belief in the populist tradition. "The freedom of the public," says Brown, "is the time bomb in television." So far, the freedom has meant nothing, but in Television it is both funny and terrifying to watch it tick.

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