What's on TV? Friday, July 13, 1979

We don't have a Midnight Special vs. In Concert or Kirshner's Rock Concert comparison this week, and it's probably just as well, as Special has a highlights show featuring the best of 1978, hosted by Wolfman Jack himself. You can see the lineup for yourself down there; I don't think any show could compare to this one. It's a good night's entertainment, and you're seeing in in this Dallas-Fort Worth edition.

What's on TV? Wednesday, July 14, 1971

In Saturday's article about Sesame Street, I mentioned how about 20% of the stations showing the program were commercial, not educational. We can see that in today's listings, where three commercial stations have it on; all three are CBS affiliates, and all three air Sesame Street immediately prior to Captain Kangaroo. That's seems like good scheduling to me; Children's Television Workshop urged stations to view the two shows as complimentary, rather than competitive. You can also tell, from the call letters and the common programming, the shared ownership of the KX family of stations: KXMD, KXMB, KXMC and KXJB. (There's also KXMA in Dickinson, which isn't in this issue.)  WDAY and WDAZ also have common ownership; not a surprise when you're talking about such a vast area as North Dakota, with a relatively small population. That's the edition we're looking at this week, in case you hadn't noticed.

This week in TV Guide: July 10, 1971

Indulge me for a moment in a personal reminiscence. It was the summer of 1971, the year before we moved to the World's Worst Town™, and we were on vacation at a lake resort in Alexandria, Minnesota. We were often in the area during the summer, considering Alex was only about an hour from the town of infamy, and while I have nothing against the place other than KCMT, that doesn't mean I'm in any hurry to go back. But I digress.

I was going through television withdrawal, since our cabin didn't have one, and I was particularly suffering since Tuesday night was the baseball All-Star Game, the Midsummer Classic, played that year in Detroit. (Tuesday, 7:00 p.m. CT, NBC) We were in the dining room of the resort, between dinner and dessert; I heard a shout from the lounge, where there was a TV tuned to the game, and rushed in to see what the fuss was about. (To this day I marvel at how patient my mother and grandparents were with me.)

"What happened?" I asked a man who was watching the game.

"Jackson just hit one off the light tower," he replied.

I'd missed Reggie Jackson's home run, but caught the replay. It was a titanic shot off the light standard on top of the roof of the right field stands at Tiger Stadium, traveling so high that the camera was unable to follow its flight all the way up. (It's been estimated the blast would have gone well over 500 feet had the tower not gotten in the way, and was reportedly still going up at the time.) It was instantly one of the most famous home runs in All-Star Game history, and remains so to this day.

It was an immensely entertaining game, with the American League ending a long losing streak by beating the National League 6-4, with all ten runs scored on home runs. The rosters of the two teams included 25 future Hall of Famers (including both managers), an astounding amount of talent

The only way it could have been any better would have been if I could have seen it all. And if that doesn't mark me as a true child of television, I don't know what does.

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There was, at least, one good thing to come out of my six years in the WWT: Sesame Street.

By the mid-1970s, I'd become so desperate to watch something—anything—besides the bilge on KCMT that I'd taken to watching the show in the afternoons after coming home from high school, courtesy of KWCM in Appleton, the only station other than KCMT that we could get without an antenna. I was, of course, much too old to be part of the show's target audience, so I watched in the detached way that adults did, enjoying the sly humor included for the benefit of parents forced to watch with their kids, jokes that preschoolers would never get.

*Sample: Ernie (to Bert's brother Bart): "I'm aghast!" Bart: "No, I'm aghast—you live here!" 

But all that is in the future; let us return to 1971, when the occasion for Cookie Monster's cover appearance is the second anniversary of Sesame Street's premiere, as Max Gunther takes a measure of the show's first two years. It's difficult to appreciate exactly how revolutionary Sesame Street has been since its premiere, but to fully understand, one has to go back to the state of American education in the years preceding its debut. "Sesame Street began," Gunther points out, "because many people in this country were worried about what happens to poor kids—the so-called 'culturally deprived'—when they start school." They lack the exposure to books and magazines that other children have; thus, "they come into kindergarten or first grade with an often cruel handicap." Letters and words are unfamiliar to them, they don't understand what the teacher's talking about, they fall further behind, and may give up in frustration, winding up on the mean streets of the ghetto. The Head Start program, which was meant to address the situation, fell short. The cost of various early education proposals was often prohibitive. It was then that Joan Cooney suggested television. After all, almost every kid has access to one, and TV has long been adept at selling products. Couldn't it also sell education?

The show has had its share of critics. A Cornell psychologist complains that Sesame Street is part of a dream world, with "no racial tensions; nobody ever gets mad; no sharp words are spoken." How, he wonders, does this prepare children for real life? A school principal says that the show "makes no demands on the kids. Real school and real life aren't like that. If a problem is troubling you, you can't just switch it off and walk away." The show has ten times as many fans, though, who point at dramatic increases in test scores among disadvantaged children who watch Sesame Street often. And Susan, one of the show's humans who was previously a housewife, is now a nurse; "Women's lib has a thing about housewives."

The producers envision Sesame Street as a show continuously evolving to better serve the needs of its young viewers. The research chief of Children's Television Workshop constantly tests kids' reactions, incorporating the findings into future shows; for instance, they've discovered that children are not, as one might suspect, bored by seeing the same thing several times in one broadcast; repetition, therefore, is a key aspect to successful learning. They also tend to remember things when they're able to say or sing it along with the performer on-screen. And fully 20% of the stations showing the program are commercial stations in areas that don't yet have educational television; although CTW won't allow advertising during the show, many station executives know that kids watching Sesame Street will probably leave the TV tuned to the same channel afterward, allowing them to charge a premium for that show. In other cases, corporations and civic groups have bought the time to air the show. And a second show, The Electric Company, is planned for this fall; its target will be 7- 10-year-olds.

Within all this good news, the cloud on the horizon, as always, is funding. Congress will do its best, and new licensing deals will help. "I think we've started something big," Cooney says; her Congressional ally, Sen. John Tunney, agrees. "People are only beginning to understand what early schooling can accomplish." And even I was able to learn something; thanks to Sesame Street, I can at least count to 20 in Spanish.

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You know that I try to be as positive as possible, but the truth is that we've got a case of the summer blahs this week. A couple of movies stand out, and we'll get to them, but between summer replacements and repeats, there's just not a lot to fly at the top of the flagpole. It doesn't mean we can't find a few highlights, though. For instance. . .

I had just started to get an appreciation for golf in 1971, so when I say that the All-Star Game was the big sporting event of the week, it's more a matter of personal opinion. Other eyes are looking toward England, where the 100th British Open, the world's oldest golf tournament, is being contested at Royal Birkdale, with ABC providing same-day coverage of the final round on Wide World of Sports (Saturday, 4:00 p.m.) Lee Trevino, in his greatest season, wins a thrilling duel with Lu Liang-Huan and Tony Jacklin to take his first of two consecutive British Opens; it's also his second consecutive major, having bested Jack Nicklaus in a playoff to win the U.S. Open the previous month. Later that night, NBC's Saturday Night at the Movies presents the touching movie A Patch of Blue (7:30 p.m.), starring Sidney Poitier, Elizabeth Hartman, Shelley Winters (who won an Oscar) and Wallace Ford in what Judith Crist calls "a quartet of brilliant performances" that "make the sentimental melodrama memorable." Sunday belongs to PBS, first with the return of Evening at Pops (7:00 p.m.), tonight featuring an all-Tchaikovsky hour with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. That's followed at 8:00 by Masterpiece Theatre and part one of one of its most famous stories, The First Churchills, with John Neville and Susan Hampshire.

Sticking with PBS, Lorne Greene, Dan Blocker and Michael Landon teach the difference between near and far on Monday's Sesame Street (4:30 p.m.). Turning to the networks, Dave Garroway returns to network television after a nine-year absence with CBS Newcomers (9:00 p.m.), a weekly talent show with professional entertainers from night clubs and theaters around the country. You can read more about that at Jodie's Dave Garroway blog here and here. If you're not in the mood for Tuesday's All-Star Game, ABC has a rare prime time network showing of a classic movie, with 1939's Made for Each Other, starring James Stewart and Carole Lombard. It's classic soap opera as well, Judith Crist says, but with Stewart and Lombard "at the height of their romantic appeal," the mush is "not only palatable but well worth savoring." If you think we've had it bad with the coronavirus, just look at the staff of Medical Center Wednesday (8:00 p.m., CBS)—they're looking for a missing radium implant that could contaminate the entire hospital. Over at NBC, the Kraft Music Hall (8:00 p.m.) has moved across the pond for the summer, with British comedian Des O'Connor and Connie Stevens doing the honors; this week, their special guest is Phyllis Diller.

Thursday, NBC Action Playhouse (6:30 p.m.) has a rerun from 1966 (see what I mean by a weak week?), Massacre at Fort Phil Kearny, a drama about the military inquest into the deaths of 81 U.S. soldiers massacred by Sioux warriors in 1866. It's got a good cast, though, with Richard Egan, Robert Fuller, Carroll O'Connor and Robert Pine. A Tom Jones special (6:30 p.m.) highlights ABC's night, with Nicol Williamson, Tom Paxton and Lulu. Future Oscar winner Joel Grey (he wins next year for Cabaret) plays a jockey suspected of throwing races on Ironside (7:30 p.m., NBC), with former Tarzan Ron Ely, future Paramount CEO Sherry Lansing, and Dana Elcar. Later, Johnny Cash is the honoree on This Is Your Life (9:30 p.m., KTHI). And we'll bring the week to an end with Friday's summer replacement series It Was a Very Good Year (8:30 p.m., ABC); the year is 1939, which was an extraordinary year: the German invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland, Picasso's extraordinary antiwar painting "Guernica," the movies The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, the opening of the legendary New York World's Fair, and the retirement of Lou Gehrig.

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And speaking of Tom Jones. . .

It's not unusual to see Tom featuring in an ad like this, but it's also interesting to see the wide variety of names and styles that were big in 1971: Led Zeppelin; Dean Martin; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Glenn Miller; Mantovani; Loretta Lynn; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; the Bee Gees; Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and more. It's quite a slice of musical life—if you can't find anything there, I imagine you just don't like music. Ads like this were common in TV Guide; most of the time you could find them in the center section where the paper was stiffer, but this one was on the last two pages of the issue. And you can appreciate the latest in technology: records, cassettes, and 8-track!

June and Allan Jefferys' humorous article about being the first family on the block to have a VCR is about technology as well. Being able to show movies without commercial interruption makes the Jefferys a very popular family, and it isn't long before they're hosting movie nights for their friends, complete with popcorn and theater seating! It kind of predicts the home theater experience of today, albeit on a much smaller scale. 

It reminds me of something else though, of how technology used to bring people together in social situations. Having the first VCR on the block wasn't any different from having the first TV, or a radio that could bring in stations from other parts of the country—it became an occasion for having friends over, getting to know your neighbors, just like playing cards or having dessert on the porch. Bars installed TVs and saw their business explode. Nowadays the neighborhoods are virtual, and technology is accused of isolating people, of pushing them apart instead of bringing them together. But things could be a lot worse than our own virtual community here.

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And finally, a word from our friend gracing this week's cover, the Cookie Monster:

 Who says there's no class on TV anymore? TV

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Running out of TV? Nonsense!

I ran across this old article in my digital files from that awful Covid Theater year of 2020, Alison Herman's story "We're Going to Run Out of TV" (complete with the panic headline; exclamation point optional). "[A] drought is upon us," she says. And even though it's dated (she was referring to is the lack of new television due to the virus), the message still pertains today. 

Nonsense! In reality, there's no lack of television out there; between DVD, YouTube, and other sources, there's more TV available than any sane person could watch in a lifetime. Of course, throughout these ten years we've established that sane people do not run this website; even so, there's still a substantial number of TV shows just waiting for viewers to discover them.

And that's the problem: when it comes to television, too many people people limit the scope of their investigation to what's new, what's now, what's dope. Maybe, just maybe, they could be persuaded to look back as far as ten years. And you might as well forget about anything in black-and-white; I'm sure there are plenty of college-age types who refuse to believe there was ever such a thing.

It's their loss. It's reasonable to assume that we all have a bias toward the television of our own time, which is why today's viewers call shows like Breaking Bad "the best drama television has ever had to offer"—which it might well be, but it's pretty hard to make that claim stick by ignoring the first sixty or so years of television's history. "Don’t we lose more than we gain by constantly promoting the new and hip at the expense of the old and unfamiliar?"

In addition to losing our knowledge of television's past, though, we run the risk of losing touch of our own cultural past.  I often point out how the shows of yesterday offer us a window to the world of yesterday—one which is only approximated in period shows such as Mad Men.  I suppose this isn't a real surprise, given that these kids nowadays think history started about ten minutes ago.  But looking at the shows from the 50s and 60s introduces us to a world of wonder, in which walking on the moon was a fantastic dream; a world of apprehension, in which the threat of nuclear annihilation was a real and present danger; a world of comfort, in which the two-parent family was the norm, and neighbors looked out for each other.  We look at the stereotypes of women and minorities and see how things have changed, we see cars and fashions and marvel how technology has evolved.  We see the small towns and byways of America in the 60s, and wonder at how completely different the country has become.  We see travelogues of distant lands, and dream of travel beyond our own homes.

Over in England, someone touched on this with regard to the ongoing controversy over Doctor Who, now on hiatus and perhaps never to return. Considering the poor quality of recent seasons, the commentator offered what seemed to me to be a sensible question: why do we need new Doctor Who at all? After all, there are twenty-five or so years of the classic version out there on DVD. We're watching them again now (and enjoying them again immensely), and depending on your viewing habits, this could keep you busy for years. When you have that kind of inventory, why do you even need new Who? It is, I think, a question for which I'd struggle to come up with a sensible answer.

Brandon Norwalk, in a perceptive 2014 article at the AV Club (which, alas, I can no longer find), referred to this lack of familiarity with the shows of the past as "television's cultural amnesia."

When television fans lose their familiarity with classic television, every little formal discrepancy—from black-and-white to a multi-camera format to more obviously stylized performance—leads to perceptions that older TV is dated. And that, in turn, leads to blanket dismissals.

And that's the point about classic television, and what this blog has attempted to say about it over these many years. For classic television is not only old B&W programming, frequently primitive and sometimes very difficult to watch. It's more than that, though: it is our world—the world that has been shaped by generations past.  When we lose touch of it, we lose touch of ourselves.  It's part of the magic of classic television—the magic of memory.  It's like looking through a family scrapbook, where we can watch ourselves grow, and grow old.  When we suffer from amnesia, when we lose touch with our roots, we are the poorer for it, for as Nowalk writes in conclusion, "To the untraveled viewer, the horizon is endless. I highly recommend exploring." TV

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What's on TV? Tuesday, July 5, 1966

Tonight, CBS Reports, hosted by Charles Kuralt, investigates "The Spring Grove Experiment," a look at two patients given LSD treatment at Spring Grove State Hospital in Maryland. "Films show patients under the effects of LSD: a woman, who suffered a nervous breakdown, and a male alcoholic. Six months later at their homes, they describe the effects the therapy has had on their lives." Hint: many people were involved in these experiments, and the results weren't always good. But what better place to read about it than in the Northern California edition?