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PAGE 7—The Georgia Bulletin, January 22,1981
Space Coaster And The New Voice: Shows For Kids, Teens
BY HENRY HERX
NEW YORK (NC) -- Anyone who watches television
with some regularity knows that the new series belatedly
appearing this season are as a group probably the worst
batch of misfires the networks have ever sent our way.
Of course, much the same was said about the new
series introduced last season. It is, in fact, a familiar
refrain dating from the mid-1970s.
The networks used to defend themselves against their
critics by claiming they were only “giving the public what
it wants.” Apparently, if the high rate of cancelled series
means anything, it is easier to get the message about what
the public doesn’t want than what it’s looking for.
In one area of series programming, however, the
message from the public is unavoidably and
unmistakeably clear. In hearings of congressional
committees and federal regulatory agencies, in numerous
conferences and other public forums, the testimony of
parents, educators and community groups have been
united in calling for more and better television shows
specifically made for young people.
Each of the networks does provide some quality
programming for the young, but other than a few family
series and specials their attitude toward youngsters can be
gauged by watching the Saturday morning ghetto of
kiddie cartoons.
One response to this lack of quality in quantity
programming for youngsters is “The Great Space
Coaster,” a five-day-a-week half-hour morning series
created especially for the six-to-11-year-old audience,
although it can be shared by the rest of the family.
The series premiered the first week of January on 52
commercial stations reaching more than 70 percent of the
country. Depending on the station, it airs between 7 and
8:30 a.m., an important time period because it is
estimated that more children watch television before
school during the week than watch all three networks
combined on Saturday morning. (In Atlanta, the show is
appearing on Channel 46 from 8:30 - 9:00 a.m. Monday
through Friday).
The show combines live action, puppets, music and
animation in an entertainment format conveying
educational information related to children’s social,
emotional and intellectual growth. An educational panel
provides the instructional concepts which are then
translated by a team of award-winning writers into
entertaining situations and skits.
It sounds like something public television would do
and it is not surprising that the producer of “The Great
Space Coaster” is Andrew Ferguson Jr., who won many
awards as the producer of the Children’s Television
Workshop’s series, “The Electric Company.”
A few observations on the basis of having seen one of
the first shows: The production quality is first-rate and
the writing is excellent with a lot of puns and word play,
but perhaps a bit over the head of the very young.
The best thing about the show are its six marvelous
puppets with names like Goriddle Gorrilla, Gary Gnu and
M.T. Promises. They are distinctively designed and
animated, a pleasure to watch and enjoy no matter what
the age of the viewer.
It obviously will take a while for “The Great Space
Coaster” to pull its component parts together and jell as a
show. It knows where it wants to get, its sponsors, The
Kellogg Company and Hasbro Industries, are committed
for a year and the public should give it all the
encouragement it needs to develop into an award winner.
An entirely different approach and format is being
offered the teen-age viewers of “The New Voice,” a
24-part weekly series. (In Atlanta, the show will appear on
WGTV-Channel 8 beginning Tuesday, Feb. 3 at 7 p.m.)
The format is built around six high school students
from varying backgrounds and ethnic groups who work
together on their school newspaper, The New Voice. In
researching and reporting stories for the paper they
confront a range of social and personal problems that are
of concern for today’s adolescents.
Each episode explores a single issue, approaching it
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The Year Of The Disabled
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No disabilities block creative love. Top
left, Bill Fero, who lost both his legs nine years
ago to a land mine in Vietnam, cradles
five-month-old Lien Cap Kim in his arms. At the
suggestion of a parish priest, Fero has been
sponsoring Vietnamese families and giving them a
chance to get started in the United States. With
the aid of his adopted families, Fero is able to do
much of the work himself at his farm in
Whitewater, Wisconsin. Above, Theresa, a blind
woman, works at her loom in the workshop of
the Little Flower Convent School for the blind
and deaf in Madras, India. Run by the Missionary
Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the
school serves 450 deaf children, 170 blind
children, 100 deaf women and 50 blind women.
At lower left a man holds his daughter and her
tiny crutches near their Shanty Town Home on
the edge of Tegucigalpa, Capital City of
Honduras. The child is a victim of Polio. The
United Nations has declared 1981 the year of the
disabled person. (NC Photos)
Pope Shows Solidarity With 64 Solidarity
55
VATICAN CITY (NC) - Two contemporary Polish
newsmakers - Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa, head of
the Polish independent union Solidarity - met for the first
time Jan. 15 in the Vatican.
At the gathering the pope showed solidarity with
Solidarity by lending his prestige to the philosophy and
aims of the autonomous union movement that has shaken
Poland and the communist bloc in the past six months.
The pontiff also asked Solidarity to act with courage,
prudence, and moderation and praised the Polish
government for using non-violent means in dealing with
the labor crisis.
“The creation of the free union is an event of great
importance,” said the pope in a meeting with Walesa and
his delegation. The meeting was open to the press.
“It shows that there does not exist - because there
should not exist - a contradiction between such an
autonomous social initiative of working men and the
structure of the system that hails human labor as the
fundamental value of social and state life,” he said.
The comment was a response to frequent warnings in
the official media of the Soviet Union and other Eastern
Bloc countries that the Solidarity movement is revisionist
and has dangerous anti-communist elements.
“It is evident that men who carry out a determinate
work have the right to associate freely precisely by reason
of that work, for the goal of assuring all the goods for
which that work is appropriate,” he said, contradicting a
basic Soviet doctrine of direct party control over the
unions.
“This is truly, and will continue to be, a strictly
internal issue for all Poles,” he said, echoing Polish
church, government and Solidarity declarations aimed at'
fending off Soviet intervention.
“The effort of those autumn weeks was not turned
against anyone,” the pontiff added. “Nor is that effort
which continues to lie ahead of you turned against
anyone. It is not turned against - it is turned exclusively
toward the common good.”
“To undertake such an effort is the right, indeed the
duty, of every society, of every nation,” he said.
Walesa, the stocky, mustachioed electrician who
surprised the world by leading the August shipyard strikes
in Gdansk and successfully forming the communist
world’s first independent labor union, was on a six-day
visit to Italy that combined elements of religious
pilgrimage and union business.
Upon his arrival at Rome’s Fiumicino airport Jan. 13
he was met by two delegations: one representing the
Italian labor unions and one representing the Catholic
Church.
In his brief comments at the airport Walesa emphasized
his priorities.
“I want to be clear.” He responded to the union
leaders’ welcome. “I’ve come to see the Holy Father.
There are many important reasons for this visit. After the
pilgrimage we will be happy to meet with you. We have
much to learn from you, since we have just barely been
born.”
Also at the airport to meet Walesa was his stepfather,
Stanislaw, who had not seen his stepson since emigrating
to the United States seven years ago.
That afternoon Walesa and his 16-member delegation
made an unscheduled hour-long visit to St. Peter’s
Basilica.
They sang Polish hymns and prayed as they toured the
church and visited the chapel dedicated to our Lady of
Czestochowa, patroness of Poland, in the basilica’s
subterranean grottoes.
The group spent a good part of the next day visiting
the famous Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino. They
attended Mass, prayed and sang at the chalice-shaped
Polish cemetery holding more than 1,000 Polish soldiers
who died in World War II while storming the monastery to
retake it from the Germans.
In the afternoon they visited Avellino, the destroyed
town at the center of the November earthquake that
killed more than 3,000 people in southern Italy.
Before the public papal audience with the Solidarity
representatives Jan. 15, the pope met privately for 30
minutes with Walesa, then met his wife Miroslawa, his
stepfather, and the other members of the delegation.
A Vatican spokesman said Walesa dropped to his knees
as the pope came to greet him, and the pope reached out a
hand and lifted him to his feet. No other details of the
private meeting were released.
At the public audience, Walesa gave a five-minute
introductory speech without notes.
He disclaimed any political or religious ambitions for
Solidarity.
“We are not and never will be a political group. We will
not say Masses or build churches,” he said. “We are
interested in the rights of man.”
“We are working for the people, who have the right to
work under human conditions,” he said, adding that this
could include workers “who are building churches also.”
The pope joked saying he is “not as smart, and I have
to read my text. But this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t
come from the same source - the heart.”
The Polish government was represented at the audience
by Kazimierz Szablewski, head of the government
delegation for permanent working contacts with the Holy
See, and his aides.
The peaceful, non-violent approach to the recent
events in Poland “gives honor both to the representatives
of the working world . . . and to the representatives of
Poland’s state authorities,” the pope said.
He said the whole world has taken note of “the special
maturity that Polish society, and in particular the working
men, have shown in undertaking and resolving the
difficult problems presented to them in a critical moment
for the country.”
He urged Solidarity to continue acting with “the same
courage there was at the beginning of your initiative, but
also the same prudence and moderation.”
from different points of view, raising questions rather
than providing pat answers. It is an open-ended approach
intended to engender thought and discussion, opening
minds rather than closing them.
Some of the topics are those of every generation, such
as peer pressure or selecting a career. But most are
specifically about the problems of growing up today -
drugs, violence and, inevitably, sex.
The series began with an episode about a teen-age
prostitute. What the show was really about was runaways
and how tough life on the street can be. It was very
effective, completely deglamorizing the subject without
being preachy.
Even more effective is the third program, airing Jan.
25, on the tragedy of teen suicides. The emphasis here is
on the necessity for the family and friends of anyone who
is depressed to keep on listening and loving.
Parents might prefer that their teen-agers not have to
be concerned with problems such as these. But it would
be illusory to think that they are faced only by teens in a
large city such as Boston, where the series is produced.
Teen-agers need all the help they can get, and this series
certainly encourages some good home discussion and
perhaps a little guidance.
(Henry Herx is on the staff of the U.S. Catholic Conference De
partment of Communication.)
Children Of
War 9 Drought
LOS ANGELES (NC) -- Paulist Father Ellwood Kieser,
producer of television’s “Insight,” has returned from a
journey he did not want to take, a trip to a place of death
he describes as an “Auschwitz with children.”
The tall, energetic Paulist priest who works in the
sophisticated, modern world of television production
went to the bleak, arid Horn of Africa where famine in
Somalia and northwestern Kenya is victimizing three
quarters of a million people.
He went there in the latter part of 1980 with actor
John Amos, who played Kunta Kinte in “Roots.”
They were invited to go by Catholic Relief Services,
overseas aid agency of U.S. Catholics, and Lutheran World
Relief, which have formed an ecumenical coalition
involved in famine relief.
The purpose of the trip was to enable the two men to
see the severe famine for themselves, return to this
country and speak at press conferences and talk shows to
inform Americans and r^obilize support for a solution.
The trip, said Father Kieser, had nothing to do with his
work with Paulist Productions. “But on another level it
had everything to do with them. I didn’t feel like flying
halfway around the world, but I also didn’t feel right
about saying no. So I said yes. I’m glad I did.”
He visited camps where about 750,000 people are
starving in Somalia after being driven out of Ethiopia by
Russian and Cuban troops.
“We spent two days in these camps. Conditions there
are really quite desperate. Sanitation is about
non-existent. Health care is little better. The people are
getting less than half the minimum amount of food
required to sustain human life.
“Almost everywhere we looked, we saw evidence of
malnutrition. As a result disease is rampant. Measles and
diarrhea are killing off the children - 41 percent of the
families in the camps have already had a death.
“It’s a heart-rending situation,” said Father Kieser.
“These are a strong beautiful people. There is a great sense
of dignity about them, an immediate friendliness, an
undercurrent of joy in the smiles that light up these lovely
black faces. Yet they are starving to death.
“In the Kakuma region of northwestern Kenya, where
we went next, the situation is even worse. The Turkama
tribe lives there. They are a simple, warm, affectionate
people. Many of them are Catholics, very good ones I
might add. For centuries they have lived by grazing their
cattle across the beautiful African prairie.
“But in the last year, a terrible drought has struck.
There has been no rain. The prairie has become a desert.
The grass died. Then the cattle died. And now the people
are beginning to die. It’s an appalling situation.
“We visited a Catholic mission in this area. It’s run by a
couple of Irish priests who do a bang-up job. In the
neighborhood of the mission live 14,000 people.
“Thanks to food supplied by Catholic Relief Services,
the mission we visited was feeding 4,000 people a day.
“This seems like a lot of people to feed. It is. But look
at the reverse side of the coin. They had to turn away the
other 10,000 people. They had nothing to give them.
There was no more food.
“Because they are forced to choose, the missionaries
have decided to feed the most malnourished of the
children. Sometimes they were able to feed the children
and had to turn away their parents.”
What was his overall experience like?
“How to describe it? The Auschwitz of early ’44, with
no certainty of liberation, inhabited by children.”
Speaking of global poverty, Father Kieser said, “It
seems to me the poor and the hungry of the world are the
eye of the needle. We pass through that eye by opening
ourselves to the poor, by sharing our substance with them.
“We can find God in the poor and hungry. We may not
be able to find him any other place.”
FCC Approves Radio Deregulation
WASHINGTON (NC) - The Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) Jan. 14 approved deregulation of four
key areas of commercial radio policy, and was criticized
by the Catholic Church.
Court challenges of the FCC action are likely.
On a 6-1 vote, the commission dropped rules specifying
that radio stations whose licenses are up for renewal
ascertain and address community needs, keep
programming logs for the FCC, and keep the number of
commercials aired to a minimum. It also dropped the
guidelines calling for a specific amount of
non-entertainment programming (which includes news,
public affairs, religious, educational or agricultural and
similar special shows) and instead said that stations must
deal with community issues but can do so in their own
way - through news or other means.
The previous plan, still in force until the administrative
process for deregulation is fianlized, called for eight
percent of commercial AM stations’ programming and six
percent of FM stations’ programming to be
non-entertainment.
The FCC said that even without the guideline, stations
would still offer a wide variety of non-entertainment
programming because the public wants it.
While dropping the ascertainment requirement, which
involved surveying the community and was considered a
paperwork burden by broadcasters, the commission
stipulated the stations seeking license renewal must keep,
for public inspection, a short list of “issue-oriented”
programming responding to local needs. It also said that
eliminating the limits on commercials aired will not lead
to excessive amounts of radio advertising because most
stations were already below the 18-to-20-minutes-per-hour
standard and that the public won’t stand for excesses.
Deregulation, which had been debated for more than a
year, generated some 20,000 comments from the public
and interest groups supporting or opposing the plan. The
U.S. Catholic Conference, among others, attacked the
deregulation proposal, while noting the need for some
reforms of the rules governing broadcasting.
USCC Secretary of Communication Richard Hirsch
Jan. 15 charged that the FCC action was “an abdication
of the commission’s responsibilities as mandated by
Congress” and warned it was “subject to legal review.”
“The commission’s naive belief that the economics of
the marketplace will maintain certain standards regarding
news, public affairs and related non-entertainment
programming is nothing less than a substitution of
financial considerations for the commission’s regulatory
oversight responsibilities,” he said in a statement.
According to FCC, the new policies will increase
programming diversity and give the broadcasters more
flexibility to be innovative. For example, in addressing
community needs they will be able to look at type of
programming offered in their total market area (or region)
to see what is offered by other stations and then decide
their own level of such programming accordingly.
With other public interest groups, the USCC has
claimed that reliance on the marketplace will allow
broadcasters to ignore the needs of the poor, elderly,
minorities and others who are not among the more
affluent radio listeners.
That concern was also voiced by Commissioner Joseph
R. Fogarty during the FCC discussion of deregulation.
“Some of the minority groups may fall through the
cracks,” including the poor and handicapped, he said.