WHEN I first saw television, quite a few years ago now, I thought what an ideal medium it would be for presenting conversation. Supposing, for instance, there had been hidden cameras at some of Dr Johnson’s meetings with his cronies, or down at Streatham when he was staying there with the Thrales.

What a wonderful record of these occasions would have resulted! Not, of course, as good as Boswell, but an excellent supplement to him.

Or would it? Many efforts have been made to capture authentic conversation on the television screen, but, as far as I know, none has wholly succeeded.

Conversation, that most delightful of all pursuits, has, by its nature, to be spontaneous, unrestricted in its range, and based primarily on ideas rather than curiosity. The moment a topic is fixed, much of its charm is lost.

One can converse all night, but only with difficulty for a specified period of time. Ideas are inexhaustible, but curiosity about another human being is soon satisfied.

I read somewhere that once, at a dinner party, the historian Macaulay was asked by his neighbour what he thought about the novels of Jane Austen. He made no reply, and then, later, when there was a lull in the general conversation, banged the table with his fork and said: “I have been asked what I think of the novels of Jane Austen.”

Thereupon, he delivered a long, cogent and perceptive disquisition on the subject. No doubt the other diners were edified, but an effective stop was put to all subsequent conversation. Macaulay would have been quite unsuitable for the new Appointment With . . . television programmes. which are aimed at reproducing the sort of conversation two people might have on a casual encounter.

They are quite definitely not interviews. There is no intention to score points. They are discussion, not argument.

Though superficially similar, discussion and argument are as different as birdwatching and grouse shooting — the one designed to observe and study the ways of birds, the other to bring home as large a bag as possible.

When two people discuss, the purpose is to exchange and enlarge their mutual understanding of ideas; when they argue, each seeks to demolish the other’s ideas and promote his own.

Of course in discussion a point of view necessarily emerges, as does the character, the attitude of mind, of the person who holds it. Everything about human beings gives them away — the lines round the mouth, the posture in a chair, voice, expression, hands, as well as views on matters trivial and profound. No disguise is possible.

“Love’s mysteries in souls do lie,” the poet Donne wrote, “but the body is his book.” In conversation, the pages of this book can be turned over and read.

The persons chosen for Appointment With . . . are not necessarily eminent or notorious. All that is required is that they should be able, and sufficiently uncommitted, to converse freely and uninhibitedly.

It is also essential that they should interest me. Most of those set in authority over us are, by virtue of being so, bores. Being a bore is part of the price they pay for exercising power.

Thus, for instance, supposing he were available, President de Gaulle would not be suitable. Being in power, what he can or would say is predictable, and therefore uninteresting.

On the other hand, Jacques Soustelle, his former henchman and the architect of the coup which put him in power, is interesting precisely because he has been sacked from de Gaulle’s Government and expelled from the party he founded to support it.

He is also a brilliant anthropologist, a man of outstanding intellectual attainments in whom the addiction to politics is at war with the instincts and aptitude of the scholar.

Again, Lord Chandos is suitable because, like Soustelle, he is exceptionally intelligent and cultivated, as well as being a politician who, by his own wish, abandoned Westminster for the City.

By birth, upbringing and fortune, one would have expected him to be carried as effortlessly and instinctively to the upper reaches of the Conservative Party as salmon are to their breeding places. Instead, he became a tycoon.

Death of a Salesman, however one may rate it as a play, is unquestionably a valid and poignant comment on the assent society in which, for the time being, we seem fated to live. This, not marrying Miss Marilyn Monroe, brings Arthur Miller into the terms of reference of Appointment With . . . He is a deeply serious writer who, like Ibsen (whom he much admires), has sought in his writing to unravel the tangled skein of our time.

There are many others. In talking to these people I try to forget cameras, studio signals, all the gimmickry of television. The object is to converse with them, as I might if some adventitious circumstance had thrown us together, without premeditation, system, or any thought of their public faces — just with them.

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