A DIFF’RENT STROKE : GADFLY COMPLIMENTS NBC PROGRAM

Action for Children’s Television, the industry gadfly, was so smitten with an NBC News program for older kids that it wrote a laudatory newspaper ad for the first time in its history and talked NBC into paying for it--to the tune of $140,500.

Sounding like the cat who swallowed the canary, ACT president Peggy Charren said in an interview: “I feel like we co-opted NBC. I feel like Cinderella. I got somebody to pay for my publicity.”

NBC said it was the first time it had paid for somebody else’s ad.

“You could say we finally got our ACT together,” said M. S. Rukeyser Jr., NBC’s vice president for corporate communications who was contacted by Charren and immediately agreed for NBC to pay for the unique promotional exposure. “In this case, ACT’s interests and ours dovetailed. Good programming makes strange bedfellows.”

The full-page newspaper ad, written by Charren, was placed in Monday’s editions of seven major newspapers (including the Los Angeles Times), appearing one day before the second installment of NBC’s “Main Street.” The one-shot $140,500 expense, a figure supplied by NBC, is roughly $30,000 less than ACT’s entire operating budget for 1985.

In her 17 years lambasting the TV industry for abandoning children, Charren never had actively promoted a program. But she was so impressed by the September episode of “Main Street,” with “Today” show host Bryant Gumbel, and was so annoyed that NBC had given the once-a-month afternoon series the promotional cold shoulder that she decided “to make a little noise for them.”

Last month’s “Main Street” had segments on strip searches and a South African boy talking about apartheid.

Today’s program (being broadcast at 3 p.m. on Channel 4, and at 4 p.m. on Channel 36) features a 17-year-old AIDS sufferer who contracted the disease from a blood transfusion, a story on tougher academic requirements in Texas high schools making more athletes ineligible for sports, and an interview with an 11-year-old girl who recalls the Mexico City earthquake.

Charren’s ad, featuring four kids beseeching readers with their pointing fingers, says: “Attention . . . Families With Kids Over 10 . . . ACT wants you to watch NBC’s ‘Main Street.’ ”

Rukeyser said the ACT-generated expenditure was more than a monthly afternoon program normally would get. And that was one point of Charren’s self-appointed commercial campaign.

“They put this thing on in the afternoon and people only found it because they were looking for soap operas,” Charren said. “If it failed to get any ratings, then they could cancel it and say, ‘See nobody watched it.’ ”

The first installment of “Main Street” averaged a 3.7 rating (percent of the nation’s 85.9 million TV homes), which is comparable to the audiences that tune in for the networks’ occasional afternoon dramas for children, but lower than afternoon soap operas.

Before the first episode was broadcast last month, Charren was prepared to call PTA organizations on behalf of “Main Street.” “Nobody (from NBC) ever called me back,” she said.

That’s when she decided to write her fantasy ad and call Rukeyser. “It was like I was Queen for a Day,” Charren said. “I had won the lottery.”

ACT doesn’t officially endorse programs, preferring not be a seal of approval. Instead, it lobbies for more and better shows for youth, while representing powerless children in legislative and regulatory hearings.

“In ACT’s history, we’ve never been this supportive of a show,” Charren said. “I would never have gone overboard for a dramatic show. But this was nonfiction children’s programming, and that’s been a black hole on TV.”

Charren said only public television is committed to news and informational programming for children. Since President Reagan’s policy of deregulation allowed the commercial networks a free rein, ABC dropped “Animals Animals Animals” and “Kids Are People Too” and CBS canceled “30 Minutes” and “Razzmatazz.”

Charren said there is no weekly nonfiction television for kids on ABC, CBS or NBC.

“What’s different about this show is that the stories aren’t condescending to children,” said Charren, who founded ACT as a young parent and now has two grandchildren.

NBC’s tactics also are different.

“That’s not the way an establishment business institution usually behaves,” Charren said. “ACT causes a lot of problems for NBC in Washington. We’re a major critic of the industry.”

Charren planned to be in Houston on Monday to testify before the House telecommunications subcommittee against the spate of sponsor-generated cartoon series--Charren calls them “program-long commercials”--on TV.

The ad was scheduled to appear in Houston and Boston, ACT’s home base. The other five cities--New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington and Cleveland--have NBC’s owned-and-operated stations.