Cable's Cultural Crapshoot

By Gerald Clarke

CBS's $10 million service is the latest to vie for highbrows

"CBS Cable would like to help expand your universe," said the advertising brochure, and for once chest thumping seemed in order. The occasion was last week's entry by CBS, one of the giants of network television, into the rapidly expanding cable field. In tone and focus, its new CBS-C service is a bold gamble of more than $10 million on a market that has often proved treacherous for TV: cul ture and fine arts. In the first seven days, viewers were almost buried under good shows, or, at the very least, good intentions. Shakespeare, Beethoven and Napoleon were among the big names; Calamity Jane, Quentin Crisp and an odd English botanist named David Bellamy were among the smaller ones. Not always successful, CBS-C's first week was nonetheless al ways impressive.

Carried by 250 cable companies around the country, including outlets in 38 of the top 50 markets, CBS-C al ready reaches a potential audience of more than 3 million subscribers, and CBS executives expect more cable companies to sign up in weeks to come. CBS, which likes to think of itself as the "Tiffany Network," is staking its money and its considerable prestige on . market surveys indicating that millions of Americans are as interested in Bach as in baseball and are just as fascinated by that early soap opera about the House of Atreus as they are by that later one in Dal las. One statistic that particularly intrigued the network's officials: between 1976 and 1979, ticket sales for what might be called high culture -- theater, dance, opera and symphony -- jumped from 44 million to 55 million, an average annual gain of 8%. In almost the same period, from 1975 to 1979, attendance for adult-education courses in the humanities rose 23%.

Further buttressing the CBS decision was an Arbitron study showing that light-viewing families wanted to see more drama, dance and music on TV than did families more accustomed to hovering around the set. Not surprisingly, Arbitron also discovered that those very same light viewers tend to make and spend more money than do the heavy viewers, a point that doubtless did not escape executives at Black Rock. The appeal to advertisers, the network reasoned, would prove irresistible.

The advertisers are still waiting, but initial audience reaction was enthusiastic.

"Our viewers love it," said Robert Strock, marketing director of Theta Cable, which delivers CBS-C to 100,000 homes in the Los Angeles area. "We are already getting tons of calls. CBS's lineup for October is a knockout."

CBS-C's executives have concocted a shrewd mixture of dance, drama, music and talk, with twelve hours of program ming a day, seven days a week. Nine of the twelve hours are repeats, however, and only three hours will actually be new each day. About 40% of the menu is imported. Since the BBC has promised first choice of its programs to the RCA/Rockefeller Center network, which will go on the air early next year, CBS-C is leaning heavily on Britain's commercial stations and TV companies in Italy and Germany. From Britain comes a nine-part series on the love life of Napoleon Bonaparte, with Ian Holm as the Little Corporal and Billie Whitelaw as his Josephine; a drama series called A Play for Love, which debuted last week with a new one-acter by John Osborne, starring Alec Guinness; and the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Macbeth, with Ian McKellen as the Scottish insomniac.

Germany's contribution is Ludwig van Beethoven, an eleven-hour series in which Leonard Bernstein conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in all nine symphonies and assorted lesser works. By the standards of commercial television, the American 60% is made up of generally low-budget productions: the dance troupes of Twyla Tharp and May O'Donnell, Count Basie at Carnegie Hall and Elizabeth Swados' musical reworking of poems by William Blake. The host and narrator for most of the programming is Patrick Watson, 51, a Canadian journalist, broadcaster and writer who wears a dinner jacket, affects a hearty manner and will probably be considered inoffensive by most people.

CBS expects to lose money before it starts to make it. Its new service is offered free to cable companies on the condition that they do not charge their subscribers a premium for it. Revenues will come from advertising. There will be five minutes of commercials per hour, compared with 91 minutes on prime-time commercial TV, and there will be only one sponsor for each program. Advertisers will not be able to buy small chunks of a minute, or even 30 seconds, as they are now in the habit of doing. Commercials, moreover, are not supposed to interrupt the continuity of a show; they will come at odd times, and playwrights will no longer be required to provide a climax every 15 minutes. In the first week, that benign rule was violated frequently. Almost all the commercials were awkwardly placed, and little effort seemed to be made to preserve precious continuity. So far, only three advertisers--Kraft, Exxon and Kellogg--have committed themselves beyond the first week, and most of the commercials are tasteful house ads, promoting upcoming shows. Eventually, however, CBS expects that more advertisers will be attracted by its ritzy audience. Revenues will never match those of the big, over-the-air network; a one-minute commercial on Dallas, for instance, averages $320,000; on little brother, CBS-C, five minutes will cost an average $60,000.

But neither will production costs be as high. Some CBS-C programs will be made for as little as $25,000--hardly enough to buy the Cokes at the big network's Hollywood studios. "When it comes to numbers, we're in an entirely different world from the networks," says CBS Cable President Dick Cox, 52. "What it takes to be successful in our milieu is a hell of a lot less than what it takes in theirs."

Not less competitiveness, though.

Enough new companies are leaping into the field that CBS-C will find out very soon just how big the audience for culture really is. The others:

-- BRAVO, which began in December 1980, was the first culture service. Owned by Cablevision Program Enterprises, BRAVO has 100,000 customers, who are spread across the U.S. and pay between $8 and $10 a month for the commercial-free service. Unlike CBS-C, which tailors most of its own productions to the size of the small screen, usually shooting in TV studios, BRAVO favors stage performances before live audiences. Recent presentations included jazz from Carnegie Hall with Eubie Blake and Herbie Hancock, a concert by the St. Louis Symphony and a backstage look at the New York City Opera with Beverly Sills.

-- ARTS, which is short for Alpha Repertory Television Service, was launched last April. Jointly owned by ABC and the Hearst Corp., ARTS was expected, like CBS-C, to carry commercials. So far, advertisers have been reluctant to commit their dollars, so the nightly 9-to-midnight programming goes free of charge to 5.1 million cable subscribers. The most highbrow of all the culture cables, ARTS has offered a complete performance of Handel's Messiah, documentaries on the lives of Tchaikovsky and Benjamin Britten, and an analysis of a painting by English Artist George Stubbs, The Grosvenor Hunt.

-- The Entertainment Channel, the RCA/Rockefeller Center network, will arrive fourth, after CBS-C. When launched in early 1982, it will charge for its programming (between $8 and $10 a month) and also carry discreet institutional advertising, a combination that some viewers may nonetheless find excessive. Forty percent of its selection will come from the BBC; the rest will consist largely of children's shows, foreign films and Broadway and off-Broadway plays. The Entertainment Channel will have enough middlebrow programs, claim its executives, to make it something broader than the other cultural cables. But those services will probably be its competitors nevertheless.

-- PBS, the last entry into the cultural crapshoot, hopes to have a pay-TV system ready sometime in 1983, at a cost of something like $13.95 a month to a potential 360,000 subscribers. PBS, which stands for Public Broadcasting System and not, as critics joke, Poor, Beleaguered and Subsidized, is trying to construct an alliance that would include its 280 member stations and such organizations as the Metropolitan Opera and the Detroit Symphony. Though nothing is definite, its programming presumably would be along the lines of its present Great Performances series.

Are there really enough culture-hungry people in the U.S. to support these operations? A number of industry observers doubt it and expect some, or all, of the new networks to suffer a cer tain amount of disappointment. "I don't think the cultural market is that big," frets David Crippens, manager of Los Angeles' PBS station KCET. "Our prime-time ratings have doubled in the last two years, but I still view the entry of the cultural cables as a challenge. We will have to provide programs that, the audiences can't get elsewhere." Viewers, whose careers and livelihoods are not at stake, may be excused a small, smug smile as they prepare for the battle to come. They can look forward not only to something good to watch, but to a whole lot of good somethings.

-- By Gerald Clarke.

Reported by Peter Ainslie/ New York

With reporting by Peter Ainslie

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