June 1, 2019

This week in TV Guide: June 5, 1965

When political satirist Art Buchwald was funny, there were few writers who could touch him. And his droll article on The Fugitive in this week's TV Guide is Buchwald at his best.

The Fugitive has just finished its second season, the most successful (ratings-wise) of the show's four seasons, and its success spelled the end of CBS' The Doctors and the Nurses, which I wrote about here. Buchwald relates a story about how The Doctors and the Nurses could have won back the Fugitive audience:

In the first show of the season, a man [is] wheeled into the emergency room of the hospital, and as one of the doctors took the sheet off him, the audience would discover he had one arm. Just before he dies on the operating table he would gasp, "I am the one-armed man the Fugitive is looking for. Richard Kimble is innocent and I killed his wife."

The network didn't take the suggestion, however, and so the show was doomed.

Buchwald is a faithful Fugitive viewer, but he has some hilarious problems with the show. For one thing, he thinks Kimble is guilty, and each week he bets his wife $20 that Kimble's going to be caught. He now figures he owes his wife $480, "which only adds to my determination to see Richard Kimble put behind bars." Kimble's nemesis, Lieutenant Gerard, is a bungler who ought to be taken off the case. "One of the things that makes me livid is that every time Gerard is close on the trail of Kimble, he never bothers to look in the kitchen," where the doctor is invariably hiding behind the door. "Sometimes I get so infuriated at Gerard I start screaming at him, 'Dope, why didn't you have the back door covered?'  This gets the neighbors pretty mad."

Buchwald has a simple solution for catching Kimble. For one thing, Kimble is a do-gooder, always stopping to help people in need. Therefore, the first thing he'd do is find the 100 neediest cases in every city he thought Kimble might be in, and have them staked out. The dramatic necessities of the show demand that he has to stop at one of these house, or the ratings will drop to zero. He'd then have NBC and CBS each put up $50,000 rewards for the capture of Kimble dead or alive. "It would be worth it to them to get The Fugitive out of circulation."

Most of all, he's mad at ABC. "It's obvious to anyone who watches the show that neither the producers nor [ABC] is making any effort to see that Richard Kimble is brought to justice. If they were sincere in their efforts, they wouldn't have a dummox like Gerard on the case." And Buchwald wouldn't be out $480 to his wife.

Funny, funny stuff.

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During the 60s, the Ed Sullivan Show and The Hollywood Palace were the premiere 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: musical-comedy star Tommy Steele, doing numbers from his Broadway show "Half a Sixpence"; Metropolitan Opera soprano Roberta Peters; singer Trini Lopez; Herman's Hermits, rock 'n' rollers; comics John Byner and George Kaye; Mr. Cox, magician; and the Malmo Girls, gymanists.

Palace: In a repeat, host Victor Borge introduces former motion picture star Alice Faye; pop singer Nancy Wilson; the Swingle Singers, French vocal group; Japanese comic Pat Morita; the tap-dancing Nicholas Brothers; bicyclist Rih Aruso; and De Mille, a 15-year-old high-wire performer.

Interesting week. The Swingle Singers, who are still around, are an incredibly talented a capella  group, as you can see here; and the jazz great Nancy Wilson just died last year. You'll remember Pat Morita* from Happy Days and his Oscar-nominated role in The Karate Kid. The Nicholas Brothers were without peer—"tap-dancing" doesn't seem nearly adequate enough. And of course, Victor Borge was one of the funniest comics around.

*I love the description"Japanese comic Pat Morita"presumably so the audience won't be shocked by his appearance. Seems very odd, doesn't it?

On the other hand, Ed has Roberta Peters, one of the greatest opera singers America ever produced—and his most frequent guest, appearing on his show 65 times.* She made her debut at the Met when she was 20 years old, which is just another little something to make you feel inferior. John Byner remains active and funny; Trini Lopez just did an album a while back with Andre Rieu. Herman's Hermits was a very big deal at the time, and they too remain active, albeit in two versions: one featuring lead singer Peter Noone, ("Herman's Hermits starring Peter Noone") and the other led by longtime member Barry Whitwam ("Herman's Hermits starring Barry Whitwam").

*You'll win a few bets with that information.

I'm calling this one a push, but for those of you who don't like ties, I'll give you an alternative winner: Thursday night's Jimmy Dean Show on ABC, which featured the Mills Brothers, Norm Crosby, and Buck Owens. And of course there's Rowlf the Muppet. The star wattage on this week's programs is immense.

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.Throughout the 60s and early 70s, TV Guide's weekly reviews were written by the witty and acerbic Cleveland Amory. Whenever we get the chance, we'll look at Cleve's latest take on the series of the era. 

This week we have one of the most interesting columns of the year, when Cleveland Amory looks back at his own reviews and gives us his second thoughts: which shows have grown in stature since he first looked at them, and which might be, to put it delicately, something of an embarrassment.

For example, Profiles in Courage, based on the book by the late President Kennedy. Not that it wasn't good, "it was, and at times great—but much of the time it was also unnecessarily heavy and pontifical, and we think that was one of the reasons for its demise." Wendy and Me, the series with George Burns and Connie Stevens, was one of those cases where "a second look was one too many." On the other hand, in the case of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., "either has improved or we were too hard on it—our guess is both." The Rogues, which still doesn't have enough of star David Niven, "was at least a comedy which deserved another year." And The Munsters "seems more amusing than we originally thought it was."

He saves a long section for the end of The Jack Paar Program, which he regrets not having been able to review this year. "For all his pettiness and petulance, he put on a show which did have an inimitable touch—his touch." His going "is a loss to television, make no mistake about it." Amory didn't get to The Alfred Hitchcock Hour either, which is probably a good thing: Cleve finds it preoccupied with "teen-age hoodlums, women alone in houses at night, etc."—problems that "deserve more than the thrills-and-chills approach."

Finally, input from the viewers, who share with Amory their irritation over (1) commercials, (2) canned laughter, (3) two good specials on at the same time, (4) the same celebrities appearing on talk shows over and over again ("Do those networks honestly believe," writes one reader, "we are still thrilled with these overexposed, often rude, egotistical bigwigs?"), and (5) that Amory only reviews network shows, ignoring viewer favorites such as Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas, as well as Alan Whicker's interview of "The Solitary Billionaire," J. Paul Getty, which appeared on public television. Ah well, there's always next year, wouldn't you say?

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Gemini IV was the second manned Gemini spaceflight and the first American spacewalk, and was a crucial step in the American race for the moon. As each phase of the space program became more successful, the public became more blase about it, but the early flights were filled with excitement and drama. The networks have extensive coverage throughout the mission, which began with the liftoff the previous Thursday and is scheduled to end with live non-stop coverage of the splashdown Monday morning. ABC plans 60-second updates on the hour; CBS counters with five-minute reports throughout the day; and NBC has a one-minute report prior to the start of each prime time program. In addition, all three plan half-hour daily progress reports. Undoubtedly, I watched as much of this as I possibly could.

Here's Peter Jennings anchoring ABC's coverage, including simulation of Ed White's spacewalk.


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Teletype highlights: The new CBS series originally entitled Country Cousins is now The Eddie Albert Show. But you probably know it by its final title—Green Acres.

Screen Gems is working on a pilot for a Western called Lazarus, which would be the first dramatic series to star a Negro. Some additional research turns up a quote from actor Jackie Cooper, who is also a Screen Gems executive, that "The Old West had lots of Negro gunslingers," and that this series would be based on the real-life Negro gunfighter Lazarus Benjamin.* However, if the pilot ever made it to air, I've yet to find it, unless it morphed into the 1968-69 series The Outcasts—which, coincidentally (?) happens to be a Screen Gems production.

*As our reader Paul Duca pointed out, Cooper was correct...it's not common knowledge, but some accounts say as many of one-fourth of the cowboys in the post-Civil War West were black.

And ABC has big plans for the new Early Bird satellite, including live coverage of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, which would be won by Masten Gregory and Jochen Rindt. More important, the 1965 race marks the beginning of Ford's challenge to Ferrari, and although the GT40s would fail in 65, they would be back the next year, and would finish 1-2-3. For all you racing fans, here's some vintage footage of the live broadcast from French television. I watched this as well—this footage brings back vivid memories for me.


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We're No Angels, starring Humphrey Bogart, Aldo Ray, Peter Ustinov and Basil Rathbone,  is NBC's Wednesday night movie, and I find that strange, since it takes place at Christmas and, just a couple of years ago, was run during Christmas pre-week by NBC. It's kind of like watching It's a Wonderful Life on the 4th of July—which, come to think of it, is just about the time of year when I first watched it. But that's a story for another day.

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We've talked about both game shows and soaps in the past. Many of them are legendary: General Hospital, As the World Turns, Another World, Password, Jeopardy, Match Game. But what about the rest, the ones that don't stick in the memory, that aren't readily available on YouTube, that produce not fond memories but puzzled looks?

In the midst of their legendary game shows Truth or Consequences, Jeopardy, You Don't Say! and Concentration, NBC has three games that don't mean much to me: What's This Song? (9:30 a.m. CT)which runs for one year and is the first game show hosted by Wink Martindale (known then as Win); Call My Bluff (11:00 a.m.), hosted by Bill Leyden, which is in the middle of its six-month run; and I'll Bet (11:30 a.m.), hosted by Jack Narz, which started and was cancelled on the same dates as Call My Bluff. As for "daytime dramas," NBC has some heavyweight soaps like Another World and The Doctors, but they also have lesser-knowns like Moment of Truth (1:00 p.m.), a Canadian soap that ran on NBC for most of 1965*. Of the three networks, only NBC stays away from including reruns of their prime-time shows as part of their daytime lineup.

*Sample listing: "Lila embarrasses her daughter." With plotlines like that, it's no wonder it only ran a year.

Bill Cullen, who had polio as a child,
was seldom seen from the waist down



ABC, which was not much of a daytime presence in the mid-60s and filled much of their time with reruns of Father Knows Best, Donna Reed, and Wagon Train (aka Trailmaster), has a pair of soaps you might not have heard of: A Flame in the Wind (1:00 p.m.), which actually runs for two seasons; and The Young Marrieds (2:30 p.m.) also a two-year runner. They have a Concentration-wannabee hosted by Art Linkletter's son Jack called Rebus (12:00 noon), and a game show with a very familiar name, but a much different format: The Price Is Right (10:30 a.m.), hosted by Bill Cullen, which in its ABC incarnation includes a celebrity player.

Only CBS has a thoroughly familiar look, but even there you can see differences if you know where to look. Their soap schedule is a heavyweight one: Love of Life, Search for Tomorrow, The Guiding Light, As the World Turns, The Edge of Night and The Secret Storm, but Search and Guiding Light run for only 15 minutes each (in the half-hour prior to noon), a carryover from their radio days. CBS rounds out its daytime schedule with more familiar faces: I Love Lucy, Andy Griffith, and The Real McCoys (renamed The McCoys for daytime) in the morning, and Password, To Tell the Truth and Art Linkletter's House Party in the afternoon. 

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Finally, here's another of those "news quizzes" that double as ads for KSTP, Channel 5. It's another fascinating look at how times have changed—at least in the case of Question #1, literally.


Question #3, regarding the 1965 tornado, hits home on a number of levels.  I remember that storm vividly, one of the most famous ever to hit the Twin Cities, although the tornado didn't touch down in our part of Minneapolis. It did hit Fridley, a Minneapolis suburb, where my best friend lived at the time. She remains somewhat traumatized to this day, remembering how she and her family huddled in the basement while the tornado mowed through their neighborhood. This is how it sounded, and it looked like this:


As for the other two questions—yes, it's true that in 1965 Minneapolis and St. Paul didn't observe the same rules on Daylight Saving Time. I've written about how in the 1950s Minnesota was considering allowing the Twin Cities and Duluth to go on DST while the rest of the state remained on Standard Time. In 1965 St. Paul started "early," with the rest of the country, while Minneapolis started "late," per state law. This meant that, at least for a time, it could take you an hour to cross the street.

And it's also true that there was no sales tax in Minnesota in 1965. It started in 1967, at 3%. It's now the sixth-highest in the country, at nearly 7%. Ironic also that Governor Rolvaag, a Democrat, vowed to veto the tax; it was Republican Harold LeVander who pushed it through. I guess some things actually do change. TV  

6 comments:

  1. I read someplace that the FUGITIVE finale had a follow-up later that night on ABC. David Janssen appeared live on THE JOEY BISHOP SHOW after the local news. In a mock interview, "Richard Kimble" admitted that, yes, he killed his wife because she wouldn't shut up.

    NBC cancelled MOMENT OF TRUTH just months later, replacing it w/ that network's only surviving soap today, DAYS OF OUR LIVES.

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  2. Besides General Hospital, As the World Turns, Another World, Password, Jeopardy, Match Game, there was Sale of The Century, Wheel of Fortune, Somerset, Bright Promise, Santa Barbara, Concentration, and many other.

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  3. There's an upcoming movie called Ford vs. Ferrari with Matt Damon playing Carroll Shelby. One of the sponsors of the ABC telecast was Hughes Aircraft which I think built the Early Bird satellite.

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    1. For those who don't understand, Ford wanted to buy Ferrari, but Enzo refused to sell. That's the reason for all of Ford's racing efforts, culminating in the original GT40, that dominated LeMans in the mid and late 60's.

      Paul

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    2. Some years later, Mark Goodson was in England, and saw a game show that he loved, and wanted to bring to America...titled CALL MY BLUFF. However, he had forgotten that it was his company's product, licensed to British television.


      Paul

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  4. That fall, RAWHIDE added Raymond St. Jacques as a regular...and while its intended cancellation was one of those decisions of James Aubrey that was reversed after he was fired as president of CBS Television, the story is that William Paley was not happy about having an African-American cowboy.

    Paul

    Paul

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Thanks for writing! Drive safely!