THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, May 1, 1995 TAG: 9505010043
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
My recent lament that modern telephones ring so discreetly that nobody can hear them beyond 10 feet is balanced by a contrary development in communications.
Even as manufacturers are lowering the decibels in home telephones to the point that we can't hear them, national television networks are raising the volume of telephones ringing in TV dramas.
The networks deny it, but for years they have hiked the sound during commercials. So when viewers rush to the refrigerator during a break, they still hear the spiel for hair spray while they are fixing a leftover potato-salad sandwich. On rye.
There is a fellow sitting in the networks' central pumping station in Dubuque reading a comic book.
When, glancing at a clock, he sees it's time for at least half the nation's population to run to the refrigerator, he throws a lever and the TV noise level rises to the blaring pitch of an air-raid siren in sets coast to coast.
Give it to the free enterprise system for ingenuity. If the viewer making a sandwich in the kitchen can no longer see the commercial, he at least can't escape hearing it.
Network accountants should reduce by half the rates for sponsors' commercials that are heard but not seen during viewer forays to refrigerators.
Consumer groups ought to petition the Interstate Commerce Commission to lower rates during raids on the refrigerators of the Republic.
But that is only the beginning of the networks' resourcefulness.
When the viewer, laden with a leftover potato-salad sandwich that would choke an elephant, returns to the overstuffed chair before his TV screen and starts overstuffing himself, he is apt to doze.
And when he falls asleep, the comic book reader at the central pumping station throws the lever and the next telephone to ring in the TV drama rents the air with a blast that would outdo the trump of doom.
The viewer starts to his feet, flinging potato salad to the ceiling.
Have you noticed how often the telephone rings during TV dramas? As a piece of business giving actors something to do, answering the phone supplanted the lighting of a cigarette.
Three decades ago the movie screen clouded with cigarette smoke as actors lit up.
What was once the ultimate gesture of sophistication now would be considered gauche. So actors turn to the telephone.
Many a time, supine on the couch, reading or ruminating, I have been summoned by a telephone ringing somewhere.
Leaping to my feet, galloping, just behind and sometimes over the Labrador retriever, I dash to the phone, pick up the receiver and bellow hello - only to find nobody's there and realize that the phone ringing was on TV.
The Labrador retriever finds these races to the telephone that doesn't ring quite exhilarating. by CNB