TELEVISION REVIEW : The Laguna Shown on Bravo Fails to Ring True : The 10-minute show is more of a tourist promotion than an honest look at cultural activity. The program can be seen Sunday.

Bravo, the cable network that touts itself as “the culture channel” and its “Artsbreak” features as “the network’s cultural news series,” has produced a short program about Laguna Beach that has little to do with news or culture.

In reality a tourist promotion that would do the Chamber of Commerce proud, the 10-minute show will be broadcast nationally on Sunday (locally at 4 p.m.) and will continue to air throughout the fall “at least a dozen times,” said Bravo spokeswoman Caroline Bock.

“Artsbreak” host Jerry O’Neill, opening the program in sunglasses and shown against a beach backdrop, notes that “this beautiful coast town has inspired artists for almost a century.” Orange County as a whole, he says, is “a thriving region for cultural activity.”

The scene then shifts indoors to the Laguna Art Museum, where director Charles Desmarais provides a bit of an antidote to the glib, gee-whiz introduction.

Looking pale and scholarly in his bow tie and jacket, and somewhat ill at ease in front of the camera, Desmarais explains that the town’s “social history is all tied up with its art history.” He points out that the museum was founded in 1917 by a group of outdoorsy painters--the most prominent “a guy named Norman St. Clair”--who initially got together to show their works at City Hall. They were known, Desmarais continues, as “ plein air artists” or “the Eucalyptus artists” or, by “people who denigrate” them for their inert seascapes, “the frozen wave school.”

This “unique, if kind of rear-guard” group was influenced, the museum director says, not only by the French Impressionists but by their own love of the extraordinary beauty and the unusual light of the California environment. Thus, by implication, the touristic attractions of Laguna Beach are inescapable even in Desmarais’ thumbnail sketch of the museum’s origins.

Next to natural beauty, of course, one of the great tourist turn-ons is celebrity. And Laguna Playhouse executive director Richard F. Stein dutifully trots out two celebrity names--Bette Davis and Harrison Ford--in his brief account of the playhouse’s 71-year history.

“While we can’t exactly claim to have given her her start in show business,” he says of Davis, who participated in a 1969 playhouse fund-raiser, “one great name we can claim to have discovered is Harrison Ford.”

Ford starred in a 1964 playhouse production of “John Brown’s Body,” we’re told. But the truly trivia-minded will get a tidbit about the movie star worthy of “Entertainment Tonight” (were the item not so old). “It is out here on Laguna Canyon Road,” Stein says, “that (Ford) got his famous scar on the chin” in a motorcycle accident.

Well, now we know.

The Pageant of the Masters, the biggest tourist attraction of Laguna Beach’s arts institutions, gets a central segment of the program and proves to be the most visually interesting because of its backstage glimpse of last June’s presentations.

What began as “a sideshow” in 1932 but now draws tens of thousands of spectators each summer is “cast by size, not by talent,” says pageant publicist Sally Reeve. The camera shows us children and adults being made up with paint to look exactly like figures in famous artworks, and as they take their freeze-frame poses, the pageant is explained for what it unabashedly is: an elaborate celebration of oversize kitsch.

Only Molly Lynch, artistic director of Ballet Pacifica, addresses current arts issues of any relevance to the county. In a brief interview she notes that the “dance community is very small” here and, far from being a thriving ballet center, needs exposure to outsiders. Consequently, she sees part of her mission as importing choreographers from New York and elsewhere to set works on the company, in addition to staging works of her own and those from the standard repertory.

The Capistrano Valley Symphony, a pops orchestra that plays occasionally in Laguna Beach and Dana Point, is also featured. “We fulfill a cultural need,” says Barbara O’Hara, president of the orchestra that has not given a classical concert in four years. Nevertheless, she goes on to assert that because of the Capistrano orchestra, “people don’t have to drive all the way to the Los Angeles Basin to hear some good-quality music.”

The Pacific Symphony and the Orange County Philharmonic Society--which has been bringing the likes of the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra and dozens of others to the county for more than 30 years--probably would beg to differ that it took the Capistrano to fill that need.

“Artsbreak” will be shown on Bravo cable channel Sunday at 4 p.m. and several more times throughout the fall season.