1. Make the following into questions about other people’s likes and interests using the language in the boxes above.

E x a m p le:

Do/like watching TV?

Do you like watching TV?

1. Are/interested/ current affairs?

2. Do/happen/like reading tabloids?

3. Are/into watching TV a lot?

4. I wonder/you/at all interested/international politics?

5. Are/interested/the Internet?

2. Make the following into statements about likes and interests using the language in the boxes above.

1. I/not find watching/documentaries/enjoyable?

2. I/into watching the news.

3. I/not over-keen/listening to the radio.

4. I/interested/ reading newspapers.

3. Use appropriate language from the boxes above to ask answer people’s likes and interests in the following situations.

E x a m p l e:

Two friends at watching TV… reading newspapers.

(a) Are you into watching TV?

(b)No, I’m not particularly keen on it.

1. A young member of the family to an elderly relation … the Sunday newspapers.

2. An employee to his/her boss … watching sports on TV.

3. Two good friends … the latest news.

4. Two work colleagues … watching youth programmes with their children.

Supplementary Texts House of Horror

This week’s main television event – the first live pictures of the House of Commons in session – signals the climax of the love-hate relationship that our politicians have had with the cameras for nearly half a century. For much of that time hate has been the dominant emotion.

Over 40 years ago the BBC invited the then Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, and the Opposition leader, Winston Churchill, to make televised addresses to the nation for the first time. They turned the idea down flat. “When I was very young,” Churchill said, “if one said something in one's constituency which might have led to trouble if it was spread abroad, nothing happened. Now one has to weigh every word, knowing all the time that people will be listening all over the country. It would be intolerable if one also had to consider how one would appear.”

Yet how they appeared has been a domi­nating concern of all his successors at No. 10. Most have come to share a profound distrust of what they see as the power of television and the people who work in it. Churchill’s own belief that the BBC was “honeycombed with Communists” was matched by Harold Wilson’s near-paranoid conviction that the Corporation was run by card-carrying Con­servatives engaged with others in a plot to bring him down.

And until last year, most MPs felt that TV represented too potent a force to be allowed access to the nation’s prime forum of debate. As the Tory MP John Stokes unavailingly argued just before the Commons voted to admit the cameras: “Television has corrupted our English civilisation, our taste and our morals. It would be a crime to have it in it he Chamber: the House would be dragged to even lower levels than it has reached lately – and they have been pretty low.”

But in the early days there was little to suggest that the small screen would become the most powerful of all means of political persuasion. For 10 years after the Second World War, the BBC had a formal arrangement with the political parties to keep television out of politics. Under the so-called 14-Day Rule, no subject to be debated in the Commons during the coming fortnight could he discussed on TV. “It would he shocking to have debates in this House forestalled time after time on this new robot organisation of television,” declaimed Churchill.

When he became Prime Minister again in 1451, Churchill reacted to the TV cameras in the manner of a XVII century aristocrat who did not want the vulgar mob to stare at him. He would either walk straight past them or put his hand over the lens if the cameras came too close. In 1953, he opposed the televising of the Coronation hut was overruled by the Queen. The success of that broadcast

transformed television’s public standing and convinced politicians they would have to come to terms with the small screen. Even Churchill himself arranged – in dead secret – to have a TV screen test at his country home.

In the film, which remained hidden for over 30 years, Churchill’s contempt for tele­vision comes over clearly: “I am sorry to have to descend to this level, but we all must keep pace with modern inventions and it is just as well to sec where you are in regard to them.”

When he was shown the film, Churchill hated it. But other leading Tories realised they had to overcome their instinctive fear of the new medium. Among them was Harold Macmillan. In 1953, as Secretary of State for Housing, he starred in the Conservatives’ first party political broadcast. The programme took the form of an ersatz interview, with Macmillan being asked questions by William Deedes. As there was no adequate recording in those days the broadcast had to go out “live”, and the two men spent a whole day rehearsing every supposedly spontaneous question and answer in advance.

“We were locked in the BBC for almost the whole of the daylight hours,” remembers Deedes. “From time to time the BBC’s formidable producer, Grace Wyndham-Goldie, would scold us for slackness, inattention, failing to memorise, and for looking down at the paper, which was absolutely forbidden.” The demands of the broadcast stirred in Macmillan memories of his service as a Guards officer at the Battle of the Somme 40 years earlier. At the end of rehearsals Mrs Goldic suggested that the two men should rest before they went on air.

By the mid-Fifties politicians had built up exaggerated hopes and fears about the power of TV. During the l955 General Election, when the three main political parties had, for the first time, their own series of election broadcasts, Churchill's son Randolph wrote: “It can truly be said of the election telecasters on either side that any of them can lose the election in five seconds.”

Macmillan himself turned down a request to appear on the BBC’s election results pro­gramme, saying: “I don’t think I look very good on television and I don’t want to have any more to do with it.” But within two year he was Prime Minister, and said of his first broadcast to camera from No. 10: “This ordeal was like going over the top.”

A highly emotional man, Macmillan was sometimes physically sick before television appearances, but he gradually became confi­dent enough to be able to use them as a prop. He began one party political broadcast with the mechanics of production – normally so carefully concealed – deliberately on display. “Well, there you are, you can see what it’s like: the camera’s hot probing eye, these monstrous machines and their attendants – a kind of XX century torture chamber.”

Although politicians recognised the pain­ful necessity of coming to terms with television, for years they voted to keep the cameras away from Commons proceedings. Says Sir Robin Day, the first broadcaster in lobby in favour of

admitting the cameras: “The instant reaction of most MPs I talked to was over my dead body.”

That proved to he the literal truth. It took three decades before a new generation of MPs went over the decidedly live body of Mrs Thatcher and voted for televising the Com­mons. The Prime Minister has always been a convinced opponent of admitting the cam­eras. She argues that the lights and the heat will destroy the intimate atmosphere of the Commons; her opponents claim that she has resisted the cameras because she thinks they will be to her disadvantage.

What seems likely is that TV, with its tendency to intensify impressions, will work both ways for Mrs Thatcher. For some, she will come out as the indomitable battler standing firm against a mob of baying men. She will probably adapt her present tech­nique of seeking to outshout the Opposition and learn to wait silently at the despatch box during the noise. But for other viewers, what is known in Conservative circles as the “TBW That Bloody Woman Factor” will be more in evidence than ever.

Sociology.1998