BROADCASTING MUSEUM : A PEEK AT RADIO, TV’S CHECKERED PAST

The way Fred Allen saw it, “Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in the navel of a flea. . . . “

The way Robert Batscha sees it, TV suffers because we tend to use it as visual Muzak. But “if you look selectively,” he says, “you can find very good work done by very good people.”

It is Batscha’s job to look at TV selectively. He heads the Museum of Broadcasting here, a rapidly expanding electronic haven for 25,000 television and radio programs--including those on which Allen starred until his death in 1956.

Established by CBS founder William S. Paley, the nonprofit museum premiered in 1976 with a small staff and a budget of $250,000. Now it occupies nine floors of a Paley-owned building at 1 East 53rd St., has 50 full- and part-time workers and a budget this year of $2.5 million.

Within the next three years, the museum plans to expand further and move one block south to 52nd Street--a few doors from CBS headquarters--into a new 17-story building costing $40 million, land included.

There, instead of 23 audio-video consoles for inspection of broadcasting’s past, there will be 100. And instead of a single theater seating 63 persons, there will be two--one seating 75, the other 200.

A larger house notwithstanding, the museum’s basic premise will be the same, Batscha says--namely, that broadcasting “is as creative a form” as literature, theater and art, and therefore its significant moments should be preserved “and made available to the public because it’s part of our civilization.”

Unlike the era of, say, the Sumerians, broadcasting’s civilization includes commercials. And strange though it may sound, Batscha, when seeking a specimen of electronic yesteryear for the museum, always tries to get a copy that includes the original network commercials.

This is partly because visitors to the museum--who are asked to contribute a modest sum for entry--find it great fun looking at advertisements for Edsels, dancing packages of Kools and hammers pounding the heads of cold sufferers.

More importantly, Batscha says, a program’s commercials tend to reflect the attitudes of America--or at least Madison Ave.--when the program aired, and “it really does give a historical setting for it.”

No commercials are on view in the museum’s current 14-week exhibit, entitled “Columbia Pictures Television: The Studio and the Creative Process.”

On the bright side, the exhibit, which ends Aug. 1, includes a 1953 drama, “First Born,” which may be of historical interest. It marked the TV debut of a couple who later left acting and now work in Washington--Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis Reagan.

The collection displays the wares of both Columbia Pictures Television and its predecessor, Screen Gems, and offers examples of “Playhouse 90,” “Alcoa/Goodyear Theater” and such yesteryear favorites as “Father Knows Best,” “Naked City” and “Route 66.”

The networks are suffering lean times these days. But Batscha, 41, a well-dressed, well-spoken New Yorker who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on TV coverage of international affairs, says business is up, and then some, at the museum.

Last year, 110,000 visitors, triple the number in 1984, came to inspect programs ranging from Edward R. Murrow’s “This . . . Is London” radio broadcasts of World War II to “Charlie’s Angels,” from the surreal comedy of Ernie Kovacs to that of Geraldo Rivera.

Batscha, who became the museum’s president in 1981, says the visitors fall into three general categories:

--The general public, including a lot of teen-agers who want to see videotapes of events that occurred before they were born, such as news coverage of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, or the American debut of the Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

--Students and scholars (“the most-utilized part of our radio collection is the coverage of the Second World War,” Batscha says).

--Professionals in news or entertainment. The latter, he says, include the young writers of NBC’s David Letterman show, who come seeking sustenance and no doubt an idea from the TV comedy, drama and trivia of years past.

Some observers of entertainment worry that this sort of reliance on the television of yesteryear--or old films, for that matter--is a sad state of affairs. They argue that many of today’s young TV and film writers and executives tend to be thin on originality in that they only seem able to echo, remake or at best parody that which they’ve seen on TV or in film school.

The result, this school of thought holds, often is considerably less imaginative than what popped up on television in its earlier years on such programs as Sid Caesar’s “Show of Shows” and “Maverick.”

(Back then, Roy Huggins, producer of ABC’s light-hearted Western series, had Marion Hargrove write an episode based on R. B. Sheridan’s “The Rivals”--and gave Sheridan a story credit, even though the dramatist died in 1816.)

It is true, Batscha says, with television--as with art, literature and theater--”that there’ll be a lot of people who just copy and don’t do it well.

“But (in TV) there are going to be a lot of brilliant people who are going to be able to build on the work of a Larry Gelbart in comedy, or a Paddy Chayefsky or a Rod Serling in drama, because it’s available for them to watch.

“If nothing else, what we’re doing here is making available the literature of radio and television for future generations to watch.”

The museum, which does not rent or loan out its electronic literature, has no problems acquiring its programs, Batscha says. It has contracts with CBS, NBC and ABC that permit it to select up to 300 hours of programming each year from each network for the museum collection.

Similar pacts with the major Hollywood studios produce a yearly yield of 50 hours per studio. All of that results in 1,500 hours of programming a year, with another 1,500 acquired from public TV, cable TV, syndicators, voluntary donations from individuals and private collections.

The programs that the museum chooses fall into three categories, he says:

--Historical importance, such as the coverage of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 or the current coverage of the Iran- contra hearings in Congress.

--Cultural significance, such as the acclaimed “Hallmark Hall of Fame” dramatic specials, or “Omnibus,” “Playhouse 90,” classical and popular music specials, and “Dance in America.”

--Social significance. Programs in this category, which include those high on the Nielsen charts in a given season, may not necessarily be high art or even good, but indicate what lit up the nation during a given period of time.

“For example, ‘Dynasty’ has an enormous--in a sense--social significance,” Batscha says.

In the ‘60s, “when I was in college, you had the counter-culture, and poverty was king,” he explains. Students were turning their backs on material things, becoming social activists, trying to help the poor, fighting to end racial and sexual discrimination, and, of course, protesting the Vietnam war.

“All of a sudden,” he notes in a slight tone of wonder, “in the last seven years the money, clothes, power”--as celebrated in “Dynasty”--”has caught the public’s imagination. . . .

“There is something that that program represents, a social significance about our time, that future social historians will want to look at in trying to figure out what was going in our country at this point in time.”

When later asked whether he thought television is getting better or worse, Batscha replies that “from our point of view . . . it’s really an inconsequential question.

“Because we’re not looking at the big picture. We’re looking at the individual programs.”

He concedes that there are times when all of us, when watching television, get the uneasy feeling that we ought to be doing something better with our time, perhaps reading a book or playing poker.

“There’s no question about that,” he says. Which is why, he adds, we should carefully choose what we really want to watch each night instead of simply coming home, turning on the tube and evolving into a video-numbed subspecies of humanity known as a couch potato.

“You don’t walk down the street and see a cluster of movies houses and just walk into one to see what’s showing,” he says. “You check out the reviews, you read about it, you try to make sure you’re not going to be wasting your time.”

People should approach television the same way, he says: “If you sit down on Sunday night with your newspaper’s TV supplement and pick out six hours (during the coming week) that you are going to watch, I think you’re going to find an excellent six hours.”