Report from America

To many a Briton, the U.S. is a land of sounding darkness, loud with the cries of wild-eyed politicians and the gunfire of Chicago gangsters, and spottily lit by the glaring floodlights of Hollywood. About a year ago, two specialists on Anglo-American relations were gloomily talking over drinks in a London pub. The problem, they agreed, was to show America in the even light of everyday. "What we want," said Bradley Connors, public-relations counselor of the U.S. embassy, "is something like Alistair Cooke. Something that gets the flavor of America on TV as Cooke does on radio." Leonard Miall, a BBC-TV executive and onetime BBC correspondent in the U.S., concurred. Over the next round, Report from America was conceived.

"Just Like Us." Report was to be a series of six half-hour filmed documentaries, to be presented by the BBC-TV in cooperation with the U.S. Information Agency. The series was farmed out to NBC, which took it on a nonprofit basis. London-born Staffer Don Cash, 46, was assigned to produce and direct it, NBC Washington Correspondent Joseph C. Harsch to do the narration. Said Cash, an old and practiced British movie hand: "We quickly decided that the best way to inform is to entertain. That meant that each subject would be taken seriously, but treated lightheartedly. The two things we aim to avoid are bragging and lecturing. What we're really after is to put each documentary in the form of a story highlighted with humor and drama so that viewers will go away saying, 'Well, these Americans are like us. They're just good, warm people.' "

Britons saw their first Report from America last February. Called Roads and Traffic, it opened with a shot of a London policeman writing out a parking ticket for some hapless Briton, switched to a Manhattan policeman doing the same thing for a glum American motorist. There were the nerve-jarring traffic jams as well as the glossy six-lane highways, and the whole was pleasantly salted with a wry and unpretentious commentary. Reaction was immediate. "An outstanding event," said the Sunday Times. "Visual journalism at its best," said the South Wales Echo. "A winner," said the London Evening News. Just Looking. Once a month since then, Report has ranged the U.S. scene. One report managed to tell without bragging how the smog was licked in Pittsburgh. How America Shops showed a husband popping bottles into his wife's shopping basket on their way around a supermarket, another woman wandering interminably, "just looking," until she can no longer contain herself and launches into a frenzy of impulse buying. A Report on a fire in the Lutheran church in Sayville, Long Island, and the efforts of the local citizens to rebuild it, moved many British viewers to send contributions of merchandise and money.

Last week, with the sixth Report (on Automation), the series had proved so successful that it was moved up from 10 p.m. to the prime viewing hour of 7:50 p.m., and twelve more Reports are in the works for Britain. USIA is having the original six dubbed in five other languages (French, German, Spanish, Polish, Arabic). Whatever the language or the nationality, Cash aims his shows at one man with three children and a modest education, who lives in a little house just outside London and is employed as a sheet-metal worker for an automobile company. He is Cash's brother. Whenever a sequence becomes too specialized or complicated, Cash briskly cuts it, explaining: "My brother wouldn't understand that."

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