Ian Cross: The God man on TV

By GILBERT WONG

Regrets, yes, Ian Cross has had a few. He sits in an Auckland cafe, sipping on a flat white. He's 75, well into comfortable retirement on the Kapiti coast, but the aura is still there. His play The God Boy, opened in Auckland last Friday, based on his novel of the same name which enjoys the status of a New Zealand classic and has been a school text since the 1960s. Cross has run the Broadcasting Corporation, spent a year as a Burns fellow, edited the Listener and been honoured by the Queen for services to broadcasting and literature. All this is shorthand for what he remains: a significant cultural figure. In person he embodies a kind of old-fashioned decency and intelligence. Where one expects world-weariness, there is still a journalist's sharp interest in current affairs.

But, yes, those regrets. As chairman of the Broadcasting Corporation from 1977 to 1984, he presided over the creation of TVNZ.

"I melded South Pacific TV and TVOne together and that caused a lot of angst, but I was convinced of the need to do it. Looking back I created a Frankenstein's monster. Television is the most pervasive and democratic medium in any country. Every western country has a non-commercial television service. We haven't."

It made sense in 1981. Private television had not taken off. The state broadcast monopoly meant the two channels competed against each other for news and programming. The result was an expensive collision of taxpayers' funds. Cross' great mistake was an assumption.

"It never crossed my mind that any New Zealand political party would turn its back on non-commercial television. But along came Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble (then Labour cabinet ministers) who brought in the State-Owned Enterprises Act and applied it to television. As a state-owned enterprise it operated as a private enterprise. Profit became the measure of performance. Social responsibilities were handled elsewhere."

TVNZ would, and has, argued that it does fulfil a socially responsible role, providing local content in the form of news and drama.

"What don't we have? Oh sure, there's lip service to documentaries. But what has been lost is drama. TVNZ's idea of drama is Shortland Street, which is lamentable. It's a television soap."

Cross, a regular theatre-goer, regrets that a generation of actors and directors are best known for their appearances in commercials.

"We should be comfortable about using our acting and dramatic resources to produce seven or eight hour-long dramas a year at least. There is a resource waiting for television to tap, but they are not interested unless it appeals to a young audience and if it brings in a lot of money."

Cross has little time for the pragmatic argument that the dividends TVNZ has repaid to the Government coffers will have gone to keep services like health, education and welfare afloat.

"If you make television simply an extension of the advertising industry you are unpicking the educational structure for the country. Television has contributed to a dumbing down of the country. You either believe in the power of communication and its effect on the minds of people or you don't. If you do and we do, then how can you treat the most pervasive medium as a semi-cultural brothel?"

He likens mass media to the nervous system of society.

"Now if that's sending confusing reports, creating fear, and directing you to superficial reactions, there is an effect on you as an individual, but what happens to society?"

Television news, he says, has created a class of story where personal injury or tragedy is the narrative.

"It adds up to a sense that somehow everything is wrong. It gives people a fragmented view of society."

Cross says a true public broadcaster would provide an antidote to this. It would be a place where good minds and human intelligence could be satisfied.

That's why he lobbied for the inclusion of the clause in broadcasting legislation that the prime function of television was to protect and nurture New Zealand culture and identity.

This is not an elitist position, he contends. "The fact that only about 9 per cent of the population go to university doesn't make it a minority pursuit. We aren't going to do away with universities."

He says all this with firmness, but no bitterness, more a sense of bemusement at the outcomes he could not have predicted.

The idealist of the past is a different man today. He's had time to think on cultural identity, that quality he wanted television to nurture.

"I have grandchildren and they aren't the New Zealanders I envisaged. To develop a unique cultural identity you have to be in isolation for at least 200 years. We never had that time, were never free of the British influence."

Cross counts himself as a member of the postwar literary generation - writers like Sargeson, Gee and Frame were literary nationalists.

"We thought this is going to happen here. Then along came global communications. We're writing in an anglo-global tradition, and fair enough.

"Everybody I know who's written a novel might as well have written them in Surrey or Omaha.

"I would say the nearest we got to indigenous literary expression, and don't cringe here, was early Barry Crump. Because he hadn't read much it came straight from his guts. But I can't regret what's happened. We can't go back. We're global villagers with a certain relaxed tolerance."