Show Business: Nothing Else Like This

"Plop fall the plums." Plums fall very rarely in television, but last week—with that line from an ancient Chinese poem—a major plum indeed was offered on New York's independent WNEW-TV and Washington, D.C.'s WTTG-TV. British Actor Paul Scofield (A Man for All Seasons) and his wife, Actress Joy Parker, read poetry for an hour, ranging from Shelley's Ozymandias to T. S. Eliot's Family Reunion, and from Lord Byron's Don Juan to D. H. Lawrence's Bats.

Full of skill in her own right, Actress Parker nonetheless seemed a recent graduate of an elocution school beside...