Around the dial

We'll start the week off at bare-bones e-zine, where Jack has an entertaining look at Harlan Ellison's only contribution to the Alfred Hitchcock oeuvre: the tenth-season episode "Memo From Purgatory, based on his own non-fiction story of life in a street gang, with the young James Caan as Ellison.

If you've been following along the last few weeks at Cult TV Blog you've seen John look at The Prisoner as a series of episodes paired together into feature-length films. Having run through the possibilities, John arrives with his conclusions as to just how successful the experiment might have been.

At Comfort TV, David continues his quest through 1970s TV, attempting to watch one episode of every 1970s series, and we're now up to Thursday, 1971. A collection of interesting shows, some better and longer-lasting than others, but none of them as cool as The Dean Martin Show.

It can be hard to envision Jack Webb as anyone other than Joe Friday, but the Dragnet star could be found on old-time radio in other roles; this week, Martin Grams looks at one of them, Pete Kelly's Blues, in which Webb plays a jazz musician who solves crimes on the sleazy side of the street. The scripts of the 13 programs in the series have now been collected into a book—read all about it.

I've often lamented the loss of the traditional late-night talk show which was built around conversation rather than, you know, self-serving plugs by ersatz celebrities. Herbie J. Pilato revisits those days, and how they provided "decades of entertainment and information with class, sophistication, and elegance."

Finally, here's the solution to last week's crossword puzzle. How well did you do?

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