HOWARD ROSENBERG : A GLOBAL INVASION BY U.S. TV

Big Ben, symbol of Britannia.

When Big Ben strikes 11 a.m., the “Bonanza” bunch rides again on this side of the Atlantic, fighting off a lynch mob in Virginia City.

Big Ben strikes 5:30 p.m., and Officer Ponch pursues a thief in “CHiPs.” Big Ben strikes 9:30 p.m., and Detectives Crockett and Tubbs confront a smuggler in “Miami Vice.” Big Ben strikes 10:30 p.m., and another murder is committed in “Kojak.”

Meanwhile, the British watch Starsky and Hutch tool around in a hot rod. They see Mr. T scowl, J. R. Ewing plot, the Carringtons suffer and Street Hawk cruise the crime beat.

Is American TV--widely exported throughout the world--the window through which the British and others view our culture? It’s a sobering thought.

I asked a Londoner to name the worst television in Britain. “Aside from the American programs?” she sniffed.

Not everyone here shares her opinion about U.S. television, and some British TV is awful, too. Many American TV series have a huge following in this nation and Britishers watch a lot of American TV.

The evidence is in the TV listings for the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) and Independent Television (ITV). The BBC and ITV together air more than two dozen American series each week, most of them compressed into prime time.

The list ranges from “Hill Street Blues,” “The Cosby Show,” “Cheers” and “Taxi”--some of the few series shown here reflecting the elite of U.S. TV--to “Starsky and Hutch,” “CHiPs,” “Kojak” and “Bewitched.” Even “The People’s Court” can be tasted here along with tea and biscuits.

Do Britishers regard American TV as a chip off the American block?

“When my daughter was 15, I went through two weeks’ schedule of U.S. television shown here,” said British TV dramatist Brian Phelan. “The America my daughter experienced through TV is a violent America, an extreme America. Nowhere on TV was the ordinary American society shown.”

If America isn’t exporting goofy series, it is exporting formulas for goofy series. The result is worldwide “goofivision,” a growing fill-in-the-blanks TV. It extends from Japan, now the most game-show-crazed nation in the world, to Britain, where domestic productions of “What’s My Line,” “This Is Your Life” and “The Price Is Right” are TV staples.

When it comes to sitcoms or Britcoms, it’s hard knowing if the chicken or the egg came first. The sitcom is generally considered indigenous to American TV. Since the early 1970s, however, a number of American sitcoms from “All in the Family” to “Three’s Company” have been based on popular British series.

ITV’s Thames Television now has an agreement with CBS giving the American network first refusal on Thames sitcom concepts. Thus Thames, the largest and most comedy-minded of Britain’s independent production companies, tends to produce sitcoms whose premises are potentially exportable and adaptable to America.

So the line separating British and American TV comedy gets blurrier.

While watching British TV, in fact, one is struck by how homogeneous television has become internationally in both form and content, largely because it’s cheaper to import shows than to produce them domestically.

Some of the TV trade travels from Britain to the United States, where money-pinched PBS has traditionally relied on British drama. A smattering of British series, such as “The Saint” and “The Avengers,” have been widely syndicated in the United States. The American miniseries is probably rooted in the success of Granada Television’s “The Forsyte Saga,” and British-created costume dramas occasionally show up on cable TV.

But the United States is the TV export super-giant, spreading a global cultural imperialism wherein J. R. Ewing becomes the true Voice of America and Lucille Ball--not Presidents, prime ministers or the Pope--the most recognizable personality in the world.

These days, a nation’s TV tends less to reflect its own culture and traditions more than those of the nation whose programs it buys en masse, in most cases the United States.

What’s good for the seller is not necessarily good for the buyer. There is some feeling that reliance on American programs tends to stunt domestic TV development and may even have political consequences.

Consider the Philippines, for example, a sometimes-volatile nation whose TV is awash with mind-dulling U.S. soap operas. The Filipino love for acting and participation in TV drama is stifled by the invasion of American TV, Father James Reuter told a British TV interviewer recently.

“It is escapism,” said Reuter, a Jesuit who once produced TV programs in Manila. “It takes the minds of the people off the present situation. They (the authorities) don’t want anything that will get people thinking about the way things are here.”

Can it be that American TV is a sociopolitical pacifier that helps keeps repressed foreign populaces in line by diverting them from domestic troubles? If so, Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines and other dictators may owe their political survival in part to Hollywood.