Frost/Nixon interview cut

I was going to say may I hasten to make a small apology, but 'haste' is hardly the word to use about a correction that comes limping in a month late. Some of you may remember that after Mr David Frost's first interview with Mr Nixon, I pointed out an omission from the television version heard in Britain and America that was not sinister but certainly seemed odd. I now discover that this interesting passage was not heard in any televised version, at least it was not heard in the United States also.

You'll remember that the first interview was actually the last one to be recorded but because it was about Watergate, the producers put it on first – shrewdly and correctly guessing that it would quicken public interest in a series which almost, till it went on the air, had produced an alarming amount of public apathy. 

The passage which nobody saw televised had Mr Frost trying to pin Mr Nixon down to an admission that he had indeed obstructed justice. Mr Nixon said he knew very well what he was doing but he'd done it from motives of policy. At which point, Mr Frost asked him if he knew the text of the statute that has to do with obstruction of justice as an impeachable offence. And Mr Nixon said that he hadn't looked at it since he was in law school. Whereupon Mr Frost read it out aloud and pointed out that the statute was not interested in motives, however noble. It found an obstruction if the 'intent' to obstruct was there. 

Well, if none of you heard this coming from your television set, how come I heard it? I didn't. I heard the British transmission and compared what I'd heard with the text of a big cover story published before the interview went on the air in one of the two American national weekly news magazines. A couple of weeks before the interviews came on, Time and Newsweek had assumed, as the rest of the American press had, that public interest in the series was so lackadaisical that Mr Frost and his staff might well have backed a loser. 

At any rate, the producers were sufficiently alarmed to decide to release to the press some snatches of the famous, or infamous, Watergate tapes that not even Mr Nixon had heard. The New York Times printed them verbatim and this stirred up such foam of interest that the two news magazines suddenly decided to tell and print all they knew. And they knew a great deal of what was going to be put on the air because at least one staff member had sat in on the taping of the first television interview. 

Either the Time man sat in, or he had access to the full transcript of what Mr Frost and Mr Nixon had said to each other. Because I could not see the American televised version, I compared the British with the text printed in the news magazines and there, sure enough, was the passage about the statute governing obstruction of justice, which seemed to me interesting, at the very least. But since no American newspaper that I saw commented on it, I assumed that the passage must have been taken from the American broadcast. In other words, the news magazines, one or both, published before the broadcast an exchange of dialogue between Mr Frost and Mr Nixon that was edited out of the version seen and heard in both the British and the American broadcasts. 

This is one of the consequences of the invention of television tape. In the old days, all television shows, whether news or drama or whatever, everything but films of any kind were done live. You saw them as they were being done. But around, I think, 1960, tape came in, television tape and practically everything but spot news was done ahead of time, on tape, not only for convenience but also in the interests of a smooth performance. 

However, this invention generated its own problems, particularly in news programmes because, as with Mr Nixon's own sound tapes – I mean the recordings he made secretly in the White House – it's now possible for a producer or a network official to see a programme before it goes on the air and edit out something that seems dull or offensive or libellous or whatever. And this, of course, gives a new lease on life to a censor, or what the American television networks call, with a marvellous straight face, 'continuity acceptance'. Most, probably all television networks have an actual department, even if it's only one gimlet-eyed lady or gentleman, called continuity acceptance. So nowadays you never really know that what you're seeing is all that happened at the time. 

I've had my own slight but palpable brushes with continuity acceptance in the filming of my history of the United States. There was a scene in the episode on the Spanish heritage in America which went into the origins of branding cattle. We took this from what I called 'the heraldry' of ranching, the brand signs, down to the actual branding of a roped calf. It was not allowed to be shown in America on the grounds that the actual contact of a red hot brand and the hide of a calf, followed by the quick yelp of the beast was more than American sensibilities could stand. 

Well, considering the orgies of blood and violence provoked by almost all the television police dramas which infest the networks from afternoon to midnight, such a scruple might seem a little over-tidy at this late date. And again, in the final episode of America which compared the values of the seventeenth-century colonists with the values of today, there was a passage about Las Vegas. I wanted to sharpen, as vividly as possible, a contrast between the thrift and austerity of the Puritans and the luxury, the barbarity if you like, of Las Vegas, which I called 'Babylon in the desert'. 

And to do this in a sequence of images, we showed dice being tossed, one-arm bandits whirring, the electrical sign outside a nightclub which could provide enough illumination for a town of 60,000 people and then, to the accompaniment of a blare of jazz, a strut of semi-nude girls in a midnight show. And for a flashed second you saw a pair of buttocks and then a bare breast. Well, this bit was also cut from the final film for the American showings. 

Although our cities and small towns are agog with cinemas showing intercourse in gigantic close-ups, pornography as hardcore as any you can find, the television networks, on the whole – the public television network is a brave exception – believe that the sight of a buttock or a nipple would be too much for the hundred millions or so who watch nightly television. Continuity acceptance is there to keep us pure. 

Well, we didn’t fuss about the Las Vegas bit but I did put up a small, and as it turned out, hopeless protest about the branding of the calf. It seemed to me to be all right to cut out the branding in any country which also prohibits the eating of veal, but I was not able to make the point convincingly enough that there is a particularly offensive sort of hypocrisy in people who are appalled at the notion of pig sticking but also love pork. So that had to go too. 

Well, what emerges from the freedom to edit tape – what emerges for me at any rate – is gratitude for television when it's being a fly on the wall. In other words when it's showing you something in the immediate here and now. The most honest, the most memorable, stuff that comes out of American television is the coverage once every four years of the national nominating conventions. There is the speaker saying what comes to mind at the moment, there are the floor managers ducking from delegation to delegation, cozening and cajoling, there are the delegates mad at their own chairman, there are the protesting caucuses, and there, in 1968, was the living fury of the cops and the protestors on the streets. 

Now, of course, even when we're seeing a convention, or a fire, or a terrorist besieged with hostages, or bits of guerrilla fighting, we're still at the mercy of what the cameraman chooses to show us and that will always be so, but it is possible to let our suspicion of his motives grow paranoid. If he has only a minute of film, naturally he's going to look, like the earliest film makers, for the most motion: bursting flames, a rifle shot, a tank on the move, somebody in a temper, and this gives to much of our television news coverage a frenetic quality which is something less than the whole of life. 

But the love of motion is inherent in the motion-picture medium and, in my experience, cameramen on dangerous assignments do their honest best to give you the feel of the experience of being there. And when it comes to a political convention, there is a general in charge of the army of reporters and cameramen, the director, who knows that if he skips some telling conversation on the floor of the convention, some surprising alliance between political enemies in a hotel room, the other network will get it. 

This week we have a far more serious complaint about the sins of television in representing or misrepresenting the behaviour of the police and private detectives. Two professors of law at the University of Massachusetts, Stephen Arons and Ethan Katsh, watched and monitored television crime shows between autumn 1974 and the spring of 1976 and they've published their findings which amount to a powerful indictment of, especially, the most popular of the police dramas. 

What they complain about in programmes like 'Kojak' and 'Colombo' and 'Police Woman' is innumerable scenes in which the police or the detectives violate the legal rights of people and project a picture of the police that is alien to the constitution. Hardly a single viewing hour passes, they say, without an illegal search or a confession obtained by coercion, or failure to provide counsel, or any mention made of notifying suspect's of their right against self-incrimination. What Mr Arons and Mr Katsh fear is that the constant acting out of unconstitutional behaviour will soften up the public politically, so that people will come to believe that just so long as the bad guys are caught, violations of the constitution will always turn out to be a good thing.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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