What's on TV? Wednesday, September 6, 1961

At first glance, nothing seems to pop out from today's listings, but a deeper look gives us some gems. For instance, this afternoon's Science Fiction Theater features Vincent Price as a police scientist; Ian Hendry, one of the originals on The Avengers, is being blackmailed into treason on Kraft Mystery Theater; future Oscar winner Beatrice Straight is on Route 66; Naked City highlights Martin Balsam as the guest star; more powerful, and more disturbing, are the turns by Frank Sutton and Robert Blake as a pair of psychopath brothers who meet a bad end; and Rhonda Fleming is "The Woman in Gray" on Hong Kong. Not bad, hmm? The listings this week are from the Utah-Idaho edition.

 

This week in TV Guide: September 2, 1961

How to watch TV: 1. Walk over to set. 2. Turn on. 3. Watch.

Well, that's how I learned to watch television when I was a kid, anyway. Obviously, Leo Rosten has something a little more in mind. His idea, however, is even more radical: if you want better television, turn it off.

Rosten, political scientist, author and social critic, calls the current fare on television "dreary at best and ghastly at worst," but that doesn't make it much out of line from other forms of mass media; many newspapers are "sensational and shoddy," paperbacks "that are part of the alleged 'cultural revolution' are shallow and worthless," and "much of what appears on the Broadway stage is banal and unworthy of a civilized man's attention." In that sense, TV is no different. "The public appetite for the silly and the trivial, for sheer distraction, the national mania for "escape" and narcotic "fun"—these are so great and so widespread that one can only wonder how our schools and families and churches have turned out so many people whose taste is so abominable."

Just when you want to dismiss Rosten as another anti-television elitist, however, he confesses: "I love television. I do. I love it and I use it." It is a place to catch up with the news, to view superior dramas, to watch a sporting event without freezing. It gives him "access to a thousand things I could not otherwise experience." And that's the point: it's because Rosten loves television, and because it is here to stay, that he becomes outraged by bad programs. And that's why he says that "[p]arents can surely teach their children how to use TV—instead of letting TV use them." Television did not abolish parents, he notes, nor teachers, preachers and critics, "and I wish they would stop acting as if they were dead."

If you want better TV, Rosten says, vote by turning off the tube. "There is no swifter or more effective way of influencing Madison Avenue than by registering your vote for or against a program—that is, by listening to programs which are superior and by not listening to programs which are bilge." That we spend so much time agonizing over the quality of television programming is a direct indictment of—ourselves. "The chief trouble with television is nothing more or less than the lazy public which patronizes it with so little sense or taste or judgment." Networks would give us better shows, he concludes, "if enough Americans helped them by supporting excellence and throttling that venality which surrounds us." I wonder what he'd think of TV today?

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In the December 31, 1966 issue of TV Guide, Neil Hickey and Joe Finnigan wrote about a "TV disaster" called The Tammy Grimes Show. The reason I bring it up, and I'm counting on you to click on the link and check that article out for yourself, is because this week Edith Efron has a profile of "a truly unusual girl," none other than Tammy Grimes herself.

She's become a star, thanks to her turn in the Broadway hit The Unsinkable Molly Brown. "She drives critics and reporters into frenzied explosions of prose when they try to describe her appearance," Efron writes. One called her "a sexy little screwball," another described her as "sea spray in the Rockies, calypso in a New England cemetery, and Cinderella in a strip tease." And then there's that voice, that "grits like a key turning in a boudoir lock," that "combines froggy throatiness with an amusing squeak." "She talks in a stream-of-consciousness patter, appears to say whatever comes into her mind and almost never answers direct questions," according to a reporter who's interviewed her. There's an oversized quality to her, one made for the stage, that worked to her detriment on The Tammy Grimes Show.

However, says Efron, there's also a "savagely shy, withdrawn girl with wistful little eyes that nibble at one in sidelong glances, a girl with a twisted, crooked smile that looks more like a grimace of pain." She is a private person at heart, one uncomfortable talking about the things that mean the most to her. She admits that she's suspicious about people; "Sometimes I get terribly enthusiastic. I put them up on a pedestal. Then . . they fall down from the pedestal and I am disappointed." For a moment, as she tells Efron this, she seems to relax for the first time. Her desires are not the same as others; "They don't go after something because they want it. They're really not seeking pleasure for themselves at all. They just imitate each other blindly." When she says things like this, one wonders if she isn't talking about her ex-husband, actor Christopher Plummer, father of her daughter and future actress Amanda. ("I never saw a girl child who resembled her father so much. She looks like Henry the Fifth.")

Her desires are simple: the theater, one man, and children. She goes through two more marriages: one to actor Jeremy Slate, which lasts less than two years, and another to composer Richard Bell, which lasted until his death in 2005. Efron notes that once she broached the subject of happiness, she went back into her protective shell. Reading all this, it's easy to picture how this fits in to the disaster of The Tammy Grimes Show. Whether she was "let down" by people who convinced her they knew best about the show, if her personality wasn't suitable for the small screen, or if it was just a lousy show—we'll probably never know this for sure. What we do know is that Tammy Grimes is, as Efron puts it, an "unusual girl," or, as the press calls her, "a kook."

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Care for some morning baseball? Of course you do, and why not, thanks to the Mountain time zone. At 10:55 a.m. Saturday and Sunday, the Detroit Tigers face off at Yankee Stadium against the New York Yankees, with the American League's three top candidates for MVP: Norm Cash of the Tigers (who wins the batting title this season), and Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle of the Yanks. CBS brings you the games, with Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese (◄) behind the microphones. Meanwhile, on NBC the action begins at 11:00 a.m. both days, with Lindsey Nelson and Joe Garagiola calling the play-by-play. Saturday it's the Los Angeles Dodgers at the Milwaukee Braves; Sunday it's the Cleveland Indians in Baltimore against the Orioles. If baseball's not your thing, Wide World of Sports has the World Water Ski Championships from Long Beach, with Jim McKay and Jim Simpson reporting. (3:00 p.m., ABC)

It is indeed a really big shew for Sunday's Ed Sullivan (6:00 p.m. MT, CBS), a rerun from last year with headliners Bobby Darin, Edith Piaf and Trude Adams, plus comedians Wayne and Shuster, Jackie Kannnon, the late Lord Buckley (who died in November, 1960), impressionist Rex Ramer, and the Pompoff Thedy Family of clowns. It's too bad I don't have anything to put up against it, because Ed would be a sure winner.

We've got an article about the resurgence of interest in the Glenn Miller Orchestra, led for the last five years by Ray McKinley, who calls it "real music"; "The kids, brought up on a diet of rock 'n' roll, sit there bored until they begin to listen to the music. Then they join their parents on the dance floor. I guess they find the old folks are right, that our music is pleasant and danceable." Find out for yourself Monday on Glenn Miller Time (8:00 p.m., CBS)

Playhouse 90 has a provocative offering on Tuesday night (7:30 p.m., CBS). "Journey to the Day" shows us what takes place in a group psychotherapy session through the eyes of six patients in a state mental hospital and their doctor. John Frankenheimer directs a stellar cast including Janice Rule, Mike Nichols, James Dunn, Vivian Nathan, James Gregory, and a rare TV appearance by Mary Astor, with Steven Hill as their doctor. A half-hour later, NBC presents a drama about the famed news photographer Margaret Bourke-White (who was played by Farrah Fawcett in a 1989 TV-movie), focusing on her dramatic battle for recovery from Parkinson's disease. Teresa Wright stars as Bourke-White, with Eli Wallach as fellow photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Jack Paar's in Berlin the latter part of the week, so his seat in New York is being filled by Orson Bean on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Fortunately, as far as I know there were no international incidents as a result of Jack's trip.

Thursday at 9:30 p.m. KCPX, the ABC affiliate in Salt Lake City, has Tightrope, the police drama starring the pre-Mannix Mike Connors as an unnamed undercover agent who assumes a different persona in each episode; while KTVB, the ABC affiliate in Boise, has The Case of the Dangerous Robin, a ZIV-produced crime drama starring the pre-Combat Rick Jason as an insurance investigator. It's the time slot that, until February, was the home of Take a Good Look, Ernie Kovacs' bizarre panel show, co-starring wife Edie Adams. Ernie and his wild sense of humor (he says he's 10 5/8 years ahead of his time) are the subject of an article by Dwight Whitney. The show was not terribly successful in its two-year stint; Kovacs insists it was a satire of a panel show, but Whitney says the problem was that "he tried to pull his punches, to kid himself and his audience into thinking they actually were watching a panel show." It is a given by now that Kovacs has the most, well, unique sense of humor in the business; Jack Benny once told him that "Normally I hate what I don't understand, but I love this." He is said to have spent $3,000 on one three-second gag ("the used-car salesman whose car dropped through the concrete."). Studio crew members have been known to fight for the privilege of working on his shows. Dutch Masters, his loyal sponsor (even though he smokes only Cuban cigars), loves him; they even liked Take a Good Look. Even though that show is now history, ABC has signed him for a series of specials—three this year, six next year, which he, sadly, will not live to complete. He's not for everyone, but I think Ernie Kovacs is one of the funniest men ever born, and while you can see his influence in many shows over the years, I've yet to see anyone succeed him. And speaking of influence: tonight's Tightrope features a character named "Emile Kovacs." Coincidence?

Another thing on Thursday: Rocky Marciano, the former heavyweight champion, is one of Groucho's guests on You Bet Your Life (8:00 p.m., NBC). His mother was a guest on last week's episode. Friday, KBOI has a classic episode of The Twilight Zone (10:00 p.m.) starring Keenan Wynn and Phyllis Kirk; besides being a humorous episode, it marks the first on-screen appearance of Rod Serling, who actually gets sucked into the story.

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There's an unbylined profile of Dwayne Hickman, star of Dobie Gillis. It's a standard look at a young, level-headed man who's become an accomplished young light comedian, but there's a quote in here I think is worth noting. Rod Amateau, producer-director of Dobie Gillis, says, "I will surprise you. There is Steve McQueen, who has a cute little personality and could be a very fine young light comedian. With that single exception, Dwayne is all alone. Jack Lemmon? He's not young any more." Now there's a thought—Steve McQueen? True, he does have a nice light touch that he displays from time to time, but the King of Cool as a light comedian? The star of Bullitt, The Sand Pebbles, The Magnificent Seven, The Towering Inferno, The Thomas Crown Affair? Yes, a very interesting thought.

Henry Harding's "For the Record" feature at the beginning of the programming section has some notes worth mentioning. There's Robert Wood, the manager of broadcast standards for NBC, i.e. the network censor, talking about the challenge he faces from the myriad number of complaints his office gets from "people or groups "who feel they have been maligned"—anyone from plumbers to milliners. "I don't blame them," he says, "but it sure makes things difficult. If we paid attention to all the complaints, our villains would be faceless, formless, backgroundless and with no visible means of support." And he's not even talking about sponsors, who've been known to meddle a time or two in the details of a story.

Rhode Island Senator John Pastore*, who's had more than one run-in with the television industry, has issued a stern warning to broadcasters about liquor commercials on television. Along with Washington Senator Warren Magnuson, Pastore has said that it would be "foolhardy" for the industry to try and get liquor commercials on television "in these trying times with criticism of the broadcasting industry mounting." The dividing line traditionally has been whiskey; beer and wine are OK to advertise, but nothing harder. Such commercials "would certainly be taken into consideration" when time came for a station's license renewal. The National Association of Broadcasters promises they'll keep their members in line. Pastore, you may recall, was the senator in front of whom Fred Rogers famously testified on the need for funding for public broadcasting back in 1969.

*Fun fact: Pastore won reelection to the Senate in 1970 by defeating an anti-war Catholic priest named John McLaughlin. McLaughlin would later leave the priesthood and become a political pundit and television host. His show—The McLaughlin Group.

I mentioned the New York Yankees earlier; well, WPIX, Channel 11 in New York City, is delirious about its ratings for Yankees baseball this season. They're up 16 percent, not because the Yanks are headed for another American League pennant (they are), but because the M&M Boys, Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle, are both threatening Babe Ruth's storied single-season record of 60 home runs. "Even former Brooklyn Dodger fans are watching, pulling against them, natch!" Maris breaks the record on the final day of the season, finishing with 61, while Mantle, hobbled by an injury, winds up with a mere 54.

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Finally, it's always good to catch up with the Letters section, to find out what the viewers of America are thinking.

Mrs. E. Schlenger of Stamford, Connecticut is one of a number of letter writers who thought to invoke Dorothy Parker in commenting on last month's article about Joyce Gordon, the glamour girl who wears glasses. She says, "As one of the many who wear glasses, I have come to realize that: "Men who make passes seldom stop at glasses!" Speaking as a man, I have no quarrel with this.

Diane Read Haeselbarth of Maywood, New Jersey, noticed that last month's article on "The Working Mother" was written by a man (George Lefferts, "unless we have another George Sand"), and has a bone to pick with him. "I am a college-educated, ex-newspaper reporter, but according to apparent Lefferts-Margaret Mead standards, I am now a simple, bored housewife." She concludes with an opinion that, a scant ten years later, would be quite unfashionable: "Let us hope for the sake of our own and future generations that the American woman has the sensitivity to recognize challenge in the world, wifehood and motherhood, if she is lucky enough to be so blessed." Hear, hear!

We end with a couple of anonymous letters on "Is Television Aimed at the 12-Year-Old Mind," from the August 19 issue. (You can see that kids and TV was a continuing topic in TV Guides of the time.) A writer in Kimberly, Wisconsin speaks up for the kids who aren't fooled by the pablum that television gives them: "They know what they want even if they put it forth in a childlike manner. The article proves that kids today won't be satisfied with shows that are mediocre, repetitious, uninteresting and unbelievable." Would that I had so much confidence it today's youth—but, of course, they don't watch TV.

The letter of the issue, however—if not of the year—comes from someone signing his/herself as "A 12-Year-Old" in DeWitt, New York, who offers a contrary opinion. "Where did you pick up those oblong 12-year-olds? All the kids around here love bank-bang, shoot-'em-up type of TV shows. As for classics, they're the squarest." And then: "P.S. Please withhold my name for certain personal reasons. Namely my mother." There's not much else one can say after that, is there?  TV

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Around the dial

We're into the "Patricia Hayes" season at Cult TV Blog, in which John assembles a season's worth of performances from an individual actor who's appeared in various shows he's watched. Hayes was a familiar face to British audiences for her various roles, none more so than her 1971 BAFTA-winning role as "Edna, the Inebriate Woman" in Play for Today.

At RealWeegieMidget, Gill treats us to reviews of three movies featuring the late, great Tim Curry: the TV series The High Fructose Adventures of Annoying Orange (2012-14), the horror movie The Shout (1978) and an episode of Tales from the Crypt (1993) in which he plays not one, not two, but three family members.

And speaking of Curry, at A Shroud of Thoughts, Terence has a look back at the gloriously eclectic career of Curry, which stretches from Rocky Horror to Clue, and which featured turns with the Muppets, an outstanding career on stage, and more credits than you can shake a stick at, as people my age might say.

The trip through 1970s television continues apace at Comfort TV, and this week David brings us to Wednesday night, 1978: as he says, it's yet another night of primetime dominance by ABC, with Eight is Enough, Charlie's Angels, and Vega$, but there's more, including a show even worse than Supertrain!

At Cult TV Lounge, it's a look at a series I've watched in the past, Firefly, Joss Whedon's sci-fi Western, starring Nathan Fillion in a rare non-crime figher role, and a cast of characters headed by Ron Glass's insightful performance as a man of faith. It's an intriguing premise, but I agree with our fearless author that it doesn't grab me enough to watch again.

How is it that, in all the things I've remembered and forgotten in my long life, I still recall Help! It's the Hair Bear Bunch!?  I don't think I ever saw a single episode of this animated series, but I sure remember the title. Fortunately, we have Paul at Drunk TV to remind us of this 1970s animated Saturday morning Hanna-Barbera series.

We've been reading a bit about Dick Tracy at Martin Grams's site, and this week he looks at the 1991 novel Dick Tracy Goes to War, one of three Warren Beatty-era Tracy novels to be written by Max Allen Collins. Considering the first book was an infinitely superior adaptation of the Tracy movie's screenplay, I think it safe to say we're in good hands.

After all this, there's no 0ther way to end the week than at The View from the Junkyard, and Roger's review of The A-Team. This week, the Team actually try to settle down in a house they own, but as the title might tell you, "There Goes the Neighborhood" has ideas of its own. TV

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Isn't it Devine, or, I've got a Froggy in my throat

I hope you'll indulge me this repeat piece from 2019, but I'm in the middle of a busy couple of weeks, and I'm afraid I don't have the time I'd like to prepare what I wanted to write, so I trust this will do. The friend to whom I refer has since passed away, but we discussed this show the last time we saw each other in person, and it gives me great pleasure to repeat it today. 

One of the pleasures that comes about from getting together with old friends after a long absence (aside from them picking up the check if they're not only old friends but also generous ones) is that you're apt to learn something new—not just what's new in their lives, but things that are new to you in general. And so, when we recently had breakfast with a friend whom we hadn't seen in six or seven years, and he found out about my interest in the minutiae of classic television, he shared his memories of a program I'd seen mentioned in TV Guides but knew nothing about: the children's show Andy's Gang.

(By the way, I know that headline above sounds like the title of a Rocky & Bullwinkle episode, and I don't even have anyone to blame for it, since, unlike writers for major publications, I have to write my own headlines. I'm not going to apologize for it, though, because to do so would undermine my confidence—and perhaps yours, too—in my ability to write headlines.)

The first year of my existence was the last year of Andy's Gang, which had begun on NBC in 1955, but actually traced its roots back much further, to 1944 and a radio program called Smilin’ Ed McConnell and his Buster Brown Gang that transitioned to television in 1951. Smilin' Ed was a genial, homespun man who'd been on radio since 1932 in a variety of roles before starting the Buster Brown Gang. The show's format was simple: an adventure story for openers, commercials for Buster Brown shoes, a novelty song or two, and a recurring gang of human and puppet characters, including McConnell's most famous creation, Froggy the Gremlin.

Ed McConnell died of a heart attack in 1954, and in 1955 the show was reborn as Andy's Gang. The new host was Andy Devine*, the lovable, raspy-voiced character actor who served as a sidekick to Roy Rogers in the movies, Wild Bill Hickok on the radio, and Jack Benny's "Buck Benny Rides Again" Western skits. The format remained basically the same as under McConnell, with Andy seated in a large easy chair, telling a story from his giant "Andy's Stories" book. There was no live studio audience; there had been one during McConnell's first few years, but as his health failed, producers used previously filmed reaction shots from kids, which were then intercut into the studio scenes to give viewers the sensation of a live audience, and this continued throughout Devine's years.

*Interesting fact: Ken Curtis, who played Festus on Gunsmoke, sang at Andy Devine's funeral in 1977. Curtis actually had a very nice voice, nothing at all like Festus's hillbilly twang.

The show retained the large cast of characters, now known as "Andy's Gang": Shortfellow the Poet, Alkali Pete the Cowboy, Midnight the Cat, Squeeky the Mouse, Grandie the Talking Piano, Gunga Ram, and Pasta Fazooli. The star of the show remained the irrepressible Froggie, who was summoned by Andy with the magic words, "Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!" There would be a puff of smoke, and then Froggy would appear, saying, "Hiya, kids! Hiya hiya hiya hiya!" In the great tradition of children's show puppets, Froggy was the nemesis of the show's adult characters: an irreverent troublemaker, disdainful of authority, prone to practical jokes, interrupting other guests, and in general acting as a conduit of mayhem. Naturally, kids loved him, and he soon became the subject of all kinds of toys and other marketing tie-ins.

Here's what an episode of Andy's Gang looked like, complete with the Buster Brown intro.

And this is a typical scene of Froggy torturing one of his human foils, in this case Pasta Fazooli, played by the great Vito Scoti:

Andy's Gang was in the great tradition of such live-action kids' programs as Howdy Doody, Soupy Sales and Shari Lewis, certainly more anarchic than Captain Kangaroo or Watch Mr. Wizard, but no less warmly remembered by those who grew up with it. At breakfast that day, when our friend asked if I remembered it, he pulled out his cell phone and started showing YouTube clips like the one above, laughing and smiling all the time. There was, I think, a human connection between the kids' shows of then and their audiences, a connection made possible by the human host of the show, willing to lower himself to the level of a child, to allow himself to be one-upped by a child, in order to make that child feel a little taller. Not Fred Rogers, perhaps, but then it goes to show that there's more than one way to form that connection.

There aren't shows like this on Saturday morning TV anymore, because kids aren't watching Saturday morning TV anymore. If they're not spending time on the road in travel soccer leagues, they're playing video games on their phone. And what was that we were saying about human connections? TV

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What's on TV? Thursday, September 4, 1980

We've talked about half-hour shows, hour shows, 90-minute shows, and even 45-minute shows, but here we see an example of the 70-minute show. What's that, you say? You don't remember 70-minute programs? Of course not, because there aren't any. In reality, they're nothing more than hour-long shows with ten extra minutes of commercials! As if some of these shows weren't already long enough, the late-night timeslot has become dominated by bonus commercials. Look at WCCO and KMSP, for example, or the ABC affiliates, in the 10:30 p.m. timeslot. All of a sudden, instead of programs starting on the hour or half-hour, they begin at 11:40 or 12:10. Yes, just what we need: more commercials. Well, never mind me; enjoy these listings from the Minnesota State Edition. Meanwhile, I have to tell some kids to get off my lawn.