Fine Tunings

FRESH FOUR

Last week, 46 years to the day after the BBC transmitted its first experimental television program, Britain got a fourth TV channel, joining BBC 1 and 2 and independent, commercial-sponsored ITV on the dials of the nation's 18.5 million licensed sets. Financially, Channel 4 is something of a hybrid. Roughly half of its annual budget of $181 million, which is about $6 million more than BBC 2's and about two-thirds the size of BBC 1's, is to be kicked in, by law, by the 15 producing companies that make up ITV; the rest is a loan from the Independent Broadcasting Authority, which supervises ITV.

The new channel had more than its share of premier-week problems. One director resigned in a huff because a series was "full of language I would not use in front of my own children." There was a protest demonstration by members of the Deaf and Dumb Broadcasting Campaign because the channel has no plans for captioned programming. Meanwhile, the actors' union ordered its 30,000 thespians not to appear on any commercials destined for the new channel, which cannot afford the handsome residual rates paid by ITV.

Still, critics were kind and generally encouraging about the first week's programs, which ranged from a tedious game show to Walter, a stops-out original television film starring Ian McKellen as a retarded outcast assaulted during his first night in a mental hospital by a hunchbacked midget. All the shows will be developed for Channel 4 by independent producers; by subsidizing 20 full-length features for the Film on Four series, Chief Executive Jeremy Isaacs hopes that his channel can help rejuvenate the country's languishing movie industry. As Britain settles in with Channel 4's new programming, it can also look ahead to the coming of cable. Parliament is expected to clear the legal road early next year, and some optimists are predicting that the island will be wired up within six years.

DEEP SIX

Surf. Waterfalls. Rivers. Country Roads. Video Fish. Even Video Fireplace. Images to lull the senses and, in some cases, deaden the pain; Muzak for the eyes. Video entrepreneurs are selling 60 taped minutes of soothing pictures for folks to turn their televisions into environmental lullabies. Most of the cassettes were initially marketed to hospitals, doctors and dentists, but, reports James Spencer, president of Environmental Video Inc. of Manhattan Beach, Calif., "we are finding that the consumer is more interested than the medical market." The tapes are made to glance at, to distract, not to watch. Sitting down for a serious look at Video Fish One ($39.95 retail), which is a close-up study of an aquarium, may lead to such insidious side effects as glazed eyes and numbed gray cells. It probably looks better from a dentist's chair.

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