What's on TV? Wednesday, February 22, 1967

The 11:00 p.m. movie on KTVU is The Frightened City, a 1961 filmin which "An accountant organizes a protection racket in London." It stars a pre-James Bond Sean Connery, and a pre-Pink Panther Herbert Lom, and while it's always fun to see actors in roles other than those that made them famous (for instance, I enjoy Lom immensely in the psychiatrist drama The Human Jungle), it's a little disconcerting to see both men going over to the dark side. Oh well, it's only a movie, right? You can find this and more in the Northern California edition.

This week in TV Guide: February 18, 1967

What better way to start the week than by spending a day with Dean Martin? That's what Leslie Raddatz is here to tell us!

Fortunately for us, the day happens to be a sunny Sunday in Southern California, the one day a week that Deano spends on his television show. (When you're the highest-paid entertainer on television, as Martin is reported to be, you get little perks like working one day a week.) However, don't think that the day begins and ends at the studio. By 11:00 on this Sunday morning, Martin has already been up for more than four hours, had breakfast, and played nine holes of golf at the Bel-Air Country Club.*

*Don't think that Martin is averse to work, though; this year he will do 30 episodes of the show, plus a pair of engagements in Las Vegas, and still find time to shoot four movies.  

He spends the first couple of hours at the studio running through his musical numbers with music director Les Brown and his orchestra, and now he's watching the run-through of the show on his dressing room monitor, with stand-ins substituting for him in the comedy routines he'll be doing with Marty Allen and Steve Rossi, and Eddie Foy Jr.; Martin works best when he's spontaneous, and often he'll rehearse only his own lines, to keep his reactions fresh. After returning to the set to rehearse a song with Leslie Uggams and his weekly schtick sitting on the piano with Ken Lane, he's back in the dressing room, nursing a Scotch. Someone "close to the show" confides to Raddatz that Martin sips pretty steadily throughout the day, but he's never drunk: "How could a drunk get up at 6 o'clock in the morning, play nine holes of golf and then spend the rest of the day working on a show he’s never even seen before, with music cues, tricky arrangements and all the rest of it?"

Next, we see Martin waiting for a doctor to give him a shot; he's still dealing with the aftereffects of a cold and laryngitis, which has forced some of the guests from previous shows to come in today to do "pickups," accounting for the longer day. (While he complains that "I could have been sleeping," a friend says that Dean is generally an "early-to-bed, early-to-rise guy" who's always up by six, and seldom goes to parties.) Once the doctor has done his duty, Martin is joined by three of his children, and they watch a tape of last week's show. He's not one of those who avoid watching themselves, but he also doesn't study his past performances; he watches purely for entertainment. 

The actual taping of the show begins around 8:00 p.m., when he appears on stage to help warm-up the audience. He generally returns to his dressing room when other performers are on, but he's always watching them on the monitor. Other times, while technical adjustments are being made or sets are changing, he's joking with the audience. And now he actually starts to perform; as another friend says, "In the rehearsal, he just reads the jokes—he doesn’t do them." Radditz notes that some of those jokes, "which he read perfectly at rehearsal, he now pretends he can’t make out and squints at the cards. The audience roars."

By 11:00, the show is done, the pickups concluded, and Martin heads for an Italian restaurant with Mort Viner, his agent and old friend. Often, they'll play some pool afterward, on the table in Deano's house, while he winds down. Not tonight, however; it is now after midnight, and as Raddatz says, "it has been a long day." And, in all likelihood when the show is finally aired, a good one.

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During the 60s, the Ed Sullivan Show and The Hollywood Palace were the premier variety shows on television. Whenever they appear in TV Guide together, we'll match them up and see who has the best lineup.

Sullivan: Scheduled guests: Joe E. Lewis; Pearl Bailey; Pat Boone; Met coloratura soprano Gianna D’Angelo; comedian Jackie Mason; the Four Tops; saxophonist Boots Randolph; and the Martys, a teeterboard balancing act. (According to the episode guide, Morey Amsterdam was an additional guest, and Jackie Mason and Gianna D'Angelo did not appear.)

Palace: Host Bing Crosby presents Ella Fitzgerald; Phil Harris and Alice Faye (Mrs. Harris); comedian Dom De Luise; the Nitwits, English music-hall clowns; the acrobatic Medini Brothers; and Hendra and Ullett, an English comedy duo. 

I've always leaned toward Palace when Bing Crosby hosts, and this week is no exception. Besides a Bing and Ella duet, Phil Harris and Alice Faye are always entertaining, and Dom De Luise can be very funny. Over on Sullivan, Morey Amsterdam is a fine substitute for Jackie Mason, and the music lineup is varied enough for everyone. When the shows line up this well, there's no other alternative than to declare the week a Push. 

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From 1963 to 1976, TV Guide's weekly reviews were written by the witty and acerbic Cleveland Amory. Whenever they appear, we'll look at Cleve's latest take on the shows of the era.

Cleveland Amory invades the world of science fiction this week, with ABC's new series The Invaders, and the question is whether or not we can stand more than one invasion. 

It's difficult to tell whether Amory has a real feel for sci-fi or not; he treats the program as something of a joke, an "Us vs. Them" scenario in which Earth is threatened by aliens who look just like Us, talk just like Us, act just like Us. Only one man stands between Us and Them, and that one man is David Vincent, played by Roy Thinnes, which means we're in a fair amount of trouble. You see, Vincent isn't a scientist or military man or anything like that; he's just an architect, which means he's not necessarily a credible authority when it comes to convincing the authorities that the Earth is under attack. And then there's the fact that so many of those authorities are either in the power of Them, or actually are Them. And just to complicate things, "you can’t tell whether one of Them is one of Them or just in the power of Them unless they get headaches and take pills and things; and, even after you do get it all straight, our guess is you’re not even going to trust the commercials."

Cleve's favorite episode so far featured Suzanne Pleshette as a stripper who decides to help Vincent, even though it turns out that she's one of Them too. When Vincent discovers this, he asks, quite sensibly, why he should trust her. "All right,” she says, “I’m an alien. But I am to Them too. Ever since I was little I had this difference. My father had it too." What that difference is, Amory doesn't say, probably so the suspense isn't ruined. The Invaders is a Quinn Martin show, like The Fugitive, which means that Vincent will come under attack each week, will be threatened with capture by the aliens each week, will try (and fail) to convince others of the threat each week, and will escape at the end of the episode to fight another day, or at least another week. See the problem? Amory compares the series, somewhat unflatteringly, to War of the Worlds, and the panic the radio version supposedly started in New Jersey, site of the Martian invasion. What does this have to do with anything? Well, he concludes, The Invaders is "a great show for the kids, but for the rest of you, our advice is to join New Jersey and take to the hills."

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Unlike Leslie Raddatz's day in the life story about Dean Martin, Dwight Whitney's look at the post-Ben Casey career of Vince Edwards isn't nearly as flattering, or as satisfying. To begin with, Whitney interjects himself directly into the story, and while this may be a favored style of the day, it's a technique I've never been particularly fond of. I suppose it's unavoidable in this case; Whitney has known, and written about, Edwards for several years, and that gives him an insight into "Vince Baby," as Whitney refers to him, that others might lack. And don't get me started on "Vince Baby" in the first place; it appears in the title of the article ("Vince Baby Plays It Cool"), and it's how Whitney refers to Edwards throughout the article. A little of that goes a very long way. 

Perhaps to compensate for this, Whitney doesn't shy away from Edwards's less attractive qualities. Given what we've read about Edwards in the past, this may have been unavoidable. He's always been portrayed as intense, scowling, difficult to work with. He insists he's changed; "In the early years I was a little hostile, but you grow out of that and realize that everybody’s got a job to do." But it doesn't take long for Whitney to see Vince's "old fierce, scowling self." We learn, for example, that Vince Baby has it set to make it big time in motion pictures. He's signed a "dream" contract with Columbia for two movies, with script and director approval, star billing above the title, snd a minimum budget for each of nearly two million. So far, though, nothing has come of it, and Vince thinks he knows why. "What TV actors have really broken through? Not very many. Know why? It’s pure snobbery. The men who run this town are sitting on a bonanza and they don’t know it! They’re fools. Otherwise they’d be breaking the doors down trying to get TV stars. But, oh, no, they’d rather import something with an accent that covers a multitude of bad acting." 

Whitney acknowledges the difficulties of making the big transition from television to movies, and says"those who did make it—McQueen, Garner, Van Dyke, Marvin—were not exactly Cary Grant. Superstar he would be." In case you're not sure, that would be Oscar nominee Steve McQueen, Oscar nominee James Garner, Oscar winner Lee Marvin, and Dick Van Dyke, who was in the Oscar-winning Mary Poppins. Maybe they're not Cary Grant; nobody else was or is. However, considering that three of these men were considered among the coolest stars ever, and the fourth one of the most beloved, I think Whitney was a little off the mark in this comment. Perhaps he was too focused on his snark to notice. 

But back to Vince Baby. He's done all the right things that a star should do: he's been seen in the right places, with the right people; he's looking at buying a house in the right neighborhood (Bel Air); he gets his hair done with the right stylist (Jay Sebring); and he got a new press agent, a new girlfriend, and a more swinging lifestyle. He turned down plenty of offers for "schlock" movies and television series (including a detective series written by Blake Edwards and produced by Aaron Spelling that came with a two-season guarantee), and made a strong pitch for roles in movies such as King Rat ("it went to George Segal. George Segal!!?), The Chase (Robert Redford got the part), and In Cold Blood and Funny Girl, but missed out both times. 

Still, life is not bad for Vince Baby: he's been accepted by the jet set for doing all those right things, and he remains confident that what he wants will come, if he's patient. "I won't settle for second best," he tells Whitney. "You need a little mozel [luck]. You pray a little. You build excitement with activity.

Night clubs! Records! Publicity! Keep yourself hot. Go. Go. Go. And wait for your best shot..."

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We don't have anything from Vince Baby on this week's hits, but that doesn't mean we're without choices. 

You may or may not remember that the success of Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol spawned a spin-off series, The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo, which put our near-sighted hero into various roles from classic literature. A number of those episodes were turned into movies, such as Mr. Magoo in the King's Service (Saturday, 9:00 a.m. PT, KCRA), made up of adaptations of The Three Musketeers, Cyrano de Bergerac, and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. 

Jack Benny and George Burns guest star on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (Sunday, 9:00 p.m., CBS), and the two oldtimers wonder if they need to create new images for themselves in order to capture the "younger generation." My suspicion is that they're probably still funnier than the Brothers just the way they are. In this week's Doan Report, by the way, Richard K. Doan reports that the latest addition to the CBS lineup is running neck-and-neck with perennial champion Bonanza. For the Tiffany Network, the "all-but-unbelievable" news comes after years of struggling to offer competition for the Cartwrights, with everyone from Judy Garland to Julie Newmar swinging and missing. Might the Smothers Brothers be the ones to finally break NBC's stranglehold on the timeslot? Stay tuned.

Also on Sunday, N.E.T. Opera presents Jack Beeson's 1965 modern opera "Lizzie Borden" (8:00 p.m., NET), a retelling of the legendary (and alleged) axe murderer that focuses on Borden's possible motives. It's a fascinating couple of hours (we've got it on DVD), performed by members of the New York City Center Opera Company, conducted by Anton Coppola, Franis Ford Coppola's uncle. 

If you remember the premise of Run for Your Life, you may also remember that Paul Bryan, the doomed lawyer played by Ben Gazzara, comments that he hasn't had a vacation since law school; thus, with only a couple of years to live, he's decided to cram all the living he can into those years. Sensible, but I've always wondered how it is that he's got so much experience at these various activities if he's never taken any time off. Case in point: this week's episode (Monday, 10:00 p.m., NBC), in which Paul finds himself in Czechoslovakia to compete in an important road race—and, by the way, to help a scientist defect to the West. Amazing how he could find the time to become a competitive auto racer while spending all his time in court, not to mention becoming a spy at the same time. Sounds to me as if he's already crammed a lot of living into his life.

Andy Griffith branches out from Mayberry to try his hand at a variety hour (Tuesday, 8:30 p.m., CBS), with his guests Don Knotts, Tennessee Ernie Ford, the Back Porch Majority folk group, singer Maggie Peterson and the Bruce Davis Quintet. Included during the hour is one of Andy's famous monologues, this one on "a successful small-town boy named William Shakespeare." Also on Tuesday is a rare television appearance by singer Peggy Lee in The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (7:30 p.m., NBC), in an even-more-absurd-than-usual tale about a three-woman race to gain a mineral that can turn laser light into a death ray. If you're interested in movies, there's the Oscar-winning The War of the Worlds (9:00 p.m., NBC) in its color television premiere, and Patterns (11:00 p.m., KTVU), Rod Serling's adaptation of his own television play that helped launch his illustrious career.

Perry Como celebrates Washington's Birthday with a Kraft Music Hall special (Wednesday, 9:00 p.m., NBC) that features the comedy team of Burns and Schreiber, and singer Frances Langford. I notice that Perry's singing "Lazy River"; I wonder if it's the  thrillerPotomac River, which Washington supposedly threw a coin over (it was actually the Rappahannock), or the Delaware River, which Washington and his troops crossed on Christmas night, 1776? Or am I just reading things into it? That's followed by an intriguing I Spy (10:00 p.m., NBC), featuring Boris Karloff as a scientist whom Kelly and Scott hope to convert to supporting the United States. No word as to whether or not this is the same scientist who defected in Run for Your Life. 

Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic take center stage on Thursday with a Young People's Concert salute to the late American composer Charles Ives. (7:30 p.m., CBS) Appropriately enough, two of the Ives pieces performed tonight are "Lincoln, the Great Commoner" and "Washington's Birthday." Later, on Star Trek (8:30 p.m., NBC), Kirk and Company come up against a planet engaged in computer-controlled warfare with a rival planet; casualties are determined by the computer, with the "victims" ordered to report to human disintegration chambers. If this sounds slightly familiar to you, this is one of the stories I wrote about in Darkness in Primetime. And on ABC Stage 67 (10:00 p.m., ABC), Maurice Chevalier and Diahann Carroll team up for an hour of music from France, Broadway, the movies, and popular music.

Movies score big again on Friday, with Breakfast at Tiffany's (9:00 p.m., CBS), starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard, and Oscar-winning music from Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer. That competes against a completely different movie, Roman Polanski's feature film debut, the disturbing 1962 thriller Knife in the Water (9:30 p.m., NET); meanwhile, on N.E.T. Playhouse (9:00 p.m., KQED), singer-actress Lotte Lenya (whom you might remember as one of the heavies in the Bond film From Russia with Love, as well as being in the lyric to Louis Armstrong's rendition of "Mack the Knife") offers a tribute to her late husband, composer Kurt Weill, who wrote "Mack." And speaking of songwriting, ABC's in the game with the music documentary Songmakers (10:00 p.m., ABC), featuring a look at today's biggest stars, including the Mamas and the Papas, Dionne Warwick, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Judy Collins, Burt Bacharach, the Byrds, Henry Mancini and others.

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MST3K alert: Gorgo (English; 1961) It might not have been a good idea to bring that live prehistoric monster to London— it has a parent that’s coming after it. Bill Travers, William Sylvester. (Saturday, 1:00 p.m., KTVU in Oakland) Leonard Maltin's memorable cameo as himself, trying to come up with the world's worst movie in order to torture Mike and the Bots, is one of the great bits in the show's history. Asked if this movie was going to "hurt" them, he replies, "Well, that's a matter of opinion, Mike. Now I actually like Gorgo, but when we reviewed it for my number one best-selling Movie and Video Guide, it put two of my assistant editors into intensive care. So who knows?" Need we say more? TV

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Around the dial

Ahis week at Cult TV Blog, John continues his "Tony Wright Season" with another of my favorite series, The Persuaders!, starring Roger Moore and Tony Curtis, and, in "Someone Like Me," Tony Wright. If you find you're seeing double after watching it, don't say I didn't warn you.

Speaking of seeing double, at The View from the Junkyard, Roger is reviewing The A-Team episode "Double Heat," in which the Team travel to Marina del Ray to involve themselves in a kidnapping designed to keep a key mob informer from testifying.

Bob Sassone has some nice footage, unseen for 60 years, of the great Vince Guaraldi performing "Linus and Lucy," which was actually written for an unsold Charles Schulz documentary, before it went on to great fame in A Charlie Brown Christmas. 

My first introduction to Dick Tracy was not through the comic strips, nor the movies, but through the cartoon version that featured Tracy with some animal assistants. I know, sounds like some kind of drug hallucination, doesn't it? Anyway, Martin Grams has a piece about a Tracy adventure novel from 1945, Dick Tracy Meets the Night Crawler.

Daniel Boone is another of those shows I remember from my childhood, but I never really stopped to watch it much. Why? I don't really know—I like Fess Parker and all— even after reading Paul's review of the series at Mavis Movie Madness. Maybe someday.

We throw the word "great" around quite a bit; I did so myself in referring to Vince Guaraldi above. But Robert Duvall truly was great, and at A Shroud of Thoughts, Terence has a fine tribute to his remarkable career; he also shares the TCM Remembers short honoring Duvall.

How about a little more video? At Television Obscurities, Robert has the network promo for ABC's series Room 222, from 1970. Was that series a comedy or a dramedy? I lived in The World's Worst Town™ when it was on, and it aired in our market, as I recall, in a late-afternoon, off-network slot.

And last, but most assuredly not least, I'm back on Eventually Supertrain with Dan to discuss the penultimate (I think) episode of Garrison's Gorillas. And stay tuned for The Yellow Rose and Ghosted; it's another fun show. But how could it not be with that crew? TV

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The end of the world as we know it

You may recall that last year, I wrote an entire book about modern society's descent into hell. It rang a bell with a lot of people, who see a deterioration of the world that seems more or less inevitable now. I see more and more people reacting to our current state of being with something close to despair: some of their fears are, I think, greatly exaggerated or misplaced, but others seem to hit a little too close to home for comfort. 

Perhaps you've wondered, during these times, what the end will be like, and if you'll be around to experience it. The thought raises a great many questions, both theological and philosophical. But let's face it: we're here to talk about television, and for our purposes, the major question is this: how will television cover the end times?

When Ted Turner started CNN, way back in 1980, it was with the promise that the network "would stay on until the end of the world." Now, based on the network's increasingly dwindling viewership, you might wonder if the end of the world is a little closer than you'd like to think; personally, I think it's less an indication of an approaching doomsday and more an issue of the network's mismanagement. It seems to me as if CNN lost its way some time ago, and given the uncertainties about its future ownership, it's not wrong to wonder if CNN, as we knew it, remains a viable concern. 

Regardless of how one might feel about it, you can't help but note the irony of it all, especially when considering the video below: the infamous, oft-rumored and apparently confirmed, “Doomsday Video” that Turner had prepared for broadcast at the end of the world.

You may well have seen the video since it first surfaced about a decade ago. The premise is just bizarre—it sounds like something you’d see on The Simpsons, doesn’t it? In fact, it's more than a little unsettling to watch. (Having the band play "Nearer My God to Thee" is a nice touch, though.) It’s also somewhat problematic theologically, whatever your beliefs. My own thought is that the Second Coming probably won't need breaking news to announce it. But who knows? It’s not as if there's any precedent to go by.

Now, CNN is not the only network to have thought about the potential of this story; the late Roger Ailes once mentioned that Fox would be there to provide live coverage when the end comes ("God to World: It’s OVER"), and I suspect MSNow, or whatever the hell it's called nowadays, would be of the same mind ("World to End: Women, minorities affected the most"). No word if they have a similar video locked away in a secret vault.

Whatever—but if CNN still plans to air this tape when the world ends, it would first behoove them to make sure that the network doesn’t end before the world does. TV

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What's on TV? Tuesday, February 15, 1966

Pre-empting The Fugitive this week is The Anatomy of Pop: The Music Explosion, a  look at the roots of popular music, with an all-star lineup of performances and interviews including the Supremes, the Temptations, the Dave Clark Five, Marty Robbins, Tex Ritter, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, Billy Taylor, Richard Rodgers, and Tony Bennett; the narrator is ABC News anchorman Bob Young. Since it survives on YouTube, it's well worth an hour of your time. That, and more goodies, are in today's listings from the Northern California edition.