‘MEAT-AND-POTATO’ PROGRAMMING LEADS CABLE REBOUND

For the nation’s 35 million or so cable television subscribers there will be some good news and some bad news emanating from here this week. On the up side--for viewers as well as the cable industry--cable’s prolonged, two-year slump looks over. The bad news is that subscribers are footing the bill for the recovery.

Significantly, most of the action in cable programming appears to be coming from the so-called “basic” cable networks, the meat-and-potatoes end of the business that, for years, has provided the medium’s bulk but little of its sizzle. The hot basic cable networks right now are ESPN (the sports channel), Lifetime, Arts & Entertainment and the other services that were always out there but never managed to attract the industry’s attention the way Home Box Office and other pay-TV channels did.

Basic channels are coming into their own as a result of two very profound changes that have taken place in the cable business over the last 18 months or so--deregulation and the demise of pay television.

In the wake of last year’s federal legislation, the Cable Communications Policy Act, cable system operators are finding gold in the basic networks that used to be easy to ignore and easier still to forget.

“Basic is a more practical product (and) people are settling in patterns of viewing,” said Char Beales, vice president for programming and marketing of the Washington-based National Cable Television Assn., which opened its four-day annual convention here Sunday.

Fewer than 15,000 industry officials are expected for the four-day show, which likely will be the industry’s smallest turnout since 1980.

Basic cable’s resurgence is likely to be the underlying theme of this year’s convention, which gets under full steam this morning with a review of the economic impact of the new federal law.

Perhaps the most profound impact of the new law has been the deregulation of the fees that operators may charge for their basic services. Nationally, those fees reached an average of almost $9 a month last year, up from only about $6 a decade ago. Those price increases are likely to accelerate, even as some cable operators around the country are experimenting with cutting the prices of pay-TV channels.

Home Box Office and other pay-TV networks are still trying to recoup from the dual disasters of videocassette recorders and the negative public reaction to program duplication of multiple pay-TV services.

Rising basic fees are not likely to help turn pay-TV around either. Escalating basic rates will hurt the second, third or fourth pay services as subscribers see their monthly bills gradually increase, suggested HBO Chairman Michael Fuchs. “I don’t think that will help HBO,” he added.

“The trend started to emerge last year,” said Roger L. Werner, executive vice president for marketing for ESPN. “Operators saw that ‘multipay’ (multiple pay-TV channels) was not going to be an area of real robust growth in the near term.”

With the new industry interest in and economic vitality of basic services, they are trying some new program forms. At the same time, basic channels are attracting attention because they are developing their own identities and, even, stars, such as Lifetime’s Dr. Ruth Westheimer (the radio sexologist who has really come into her own on cable).

The basic programmers’ apparent willingness to try anything that’s not been tried before is most evident, perhaps, in two unusual programs set to air on ESPN this fall. In a startling break with its charter and tradition, ESPN plans to air two sports-based dramatic programs.

Last spring’s one-man Broadway show “The Babe” features actor Max Gail (famous for his character Wojo on the “Barney Miller” TV series) as the legendary George Herman (Babe) Ruth.

Joining that baseball hero on ESPN’s schedule is actor Robert Knuckle in the Canadian-produced “Lombardi, I Am Not a Legend,” a play tracing the coaching career of the late Vince Lombardi.

Neither play promises to break new dramatic ground, but they are showing that ESPN (and cable in general) is willing to try new twists on the old and largely discredited “narrowcasting” philosophy that launched national cable networks in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.