Seeing the World

NBC's suave, articulate President Sylvester L. ("Pat") Weaver Jr. likes to wrap his fancier TV ideas in even fancier clouds of philosophy. Last week in Manhattan, Weaver rose before a roomful of reporters to announce a new idea. "How wonderful it would be," he wistfully began, "if everybody were rich." By the time he finished speaking, riches of a kind seemed within reach of anybody with the price of a television set.

"The privileged classes," Philosopher Weaver said, "pursue the better things in life." They get out and see the world. To the underprivileged who do not, Weaver proposes to bring Wide Wide World. It will be televised June 27 from 8 to 9:30 p.m., E.D.T., and at unspecified times thereafter.

Weaver's latest, greatest show (previous ones: the spectaculars, Home, Today, Tonight) is a super-spectacular, at least in conception. Its first program will cost $150,000. NBC unblushingly reports: "The Planet Itself and Everything on It Inspired NBC President Weaver to Conceive Show Which No Person Young at Heart Can Ever Forget." Showing the wide, wide world will require twelve mobile units, 40 cameras, 1,000 performers and technicians, 10,000 miles of telephone line. It will hop cross-country from Broadway to the shores of San Diego and the ski slopes of Mount Hood, zoom east for a water spectacle at Jones Beach, take in a couple of scenes from Julius Caesar at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ont., listen to a jam session on New Orleans' Bourbon Street and switch to Tijuana to watch the Mexican comic pantomimist, Cantinflas, fight a bull with nothing sharper than his wit.

If the show does only a tiny part of what it is ballyhooed to do (entertain, educate, inform, cultivate, expose people "to the great ideas, the great achievements, the great history of man," enable people to understand one another and adequately replace the direct experience of reality with a TV camera lens), it should be at least great.

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