This week in TV Guide: June 2, 1973

Among the many pleasures of classic-era television, few bring about as many warm memories as those of the local children's shows that so many of us grew up watching. In my neck of the woods, those shows included Lunch with Casey, Clancy the Cop, Dave Lee and Pete, and Carmen the Nurse; slightly earlier, it would have been Axel and His Dog and T.N. Tatters. Just about everyone has similar memories of those shows, and the local personalities hosting them. Those days are long gone, of course, and as is the case with so many things, we're left wondering How things got this way. 

Recently, 40 of these hosts gathered in Key Biscayne, Florida, guests of the Muscular Dystrophy Association as part of their "backyard carnival" planning sessions, heavily promoted and supported on local programs. The stories they tell Neil Hickey are not pleasant ones, and together they paint a picture of an America that has long since vanished. 

It all began with the new addition to the Television Code by the National Association of Broadcasters, prohibiting children's shows from airing commercials during or adjacent to their programming "that might imply any endorsement whatsoever of the advertised products." The assumption behind the rule was that the hosts of said kiddie shows exert an "oversided influence" on their viewers, thus inducing them to pressure mom and dad for that special toy, candy, breakfast cereal, or other product. (I'm shocked, shocked, to find that commercials could influence shopping habits.) This, sensibly, led many of the sponsors to pull out of their local TV advertising, which in turn led many of those hosts to quit. "When the rule became effective last January 1," said Rex Trailer of WBZ, host of the syndicated Earth Lab, "they were like waiters who were told they couldn't take tips any more. So they just quit." 

Compounding the problem is lobbying by the villain of the piece, Action for Children's Television, which is pressuring the FCC to ban all commercial advertising on children's programs. The result, says Hickey, could "bring down the curtain on local, live children's programming, and undermine network kidvid as well." Says Chuck Zink of WTVJ in Miami, who has been playing "Skipper Chuck" in the market for 17 years, "I think they're out of their minds. They rave about Sesame Street, but nobody ever mentions that Sesame Street is fantastically well-funded. I'd love to have its budget. Give me nine million dollars and I'd show you what kind of shows I could do." 

"It's a dangerous Big Brother kind of thing," adds Bill McClain, "Brakeman Bill" on KTNT in Seattle-Tacoma, who thinks this kind of pressuring could extend to news programming as well. "Many pressure groups are unhappy with TV news, and this is one way of getting at it." He also points to the elephant in the room: "If you look at who the organizers are behind the pressure groups, you see that they're very heavily infused with public-TV people. They'd love to get a lot more Government money into children's programming. But then you have a dangerous concentration of Government power. First, they're teaching kids how to read and write, and then they're telling them how to vote."

As an example of the chilling effect the rule has already had, look no further than WSYR in Syracuse. "For years, WSYR had no fewer than 11 local, live children's programs a week: morning and afternoon shows each weekday, and a two-hour extravaganza on Saturdays. Now there is only one; Salty Sam is tucked away in a 7-8 A.M. Saturday slot, with minimal ratings and practically no budget." 

No matter how good national shows, whether from PBS or the commercial networks, may be, there's one thing they can't replicate from local hosts: personal appearances. Bill McLain makes a telling point about the loss of local kid shows: "One day the public will wake up and discover all the TV kid entertainers gone. Who's going to visit the hospitals, the schools, the shut-in children—Daffy Duck?"

Now, you can't lay the blame for this entirely on ACT, no matter how sanctimonious they were with their pseudo-altruistic rhetoric about the dangers of children's television. Over the decades the family home has changed completely; children don't come home for lunch, they're more active after school, they watch less TV and more video games, and the like. As I said, it's a lost world we're talking about, a way of life that no longer exists. But the demise of local children's programming certainly didn't help matters, and McLain's warnings about government involvement in children's programming are well-founded. And we haven't even begun to discuss the role that hyperactive programs such as Sesame Street may have played in shortening the attention span of children, which has shrunk to microscopic levels over the years. (True, nobody ever accused Howdy Doody of being sedate, but still.) Through the years, Fred Rogers was a welcome respite from such busyness, but now we don't have him. And we don't have those local hosts, either; more's the pity.

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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. 

As yet another television season comes to a close (most of this week's programs are reruns), Cleveland Amory takes his annual look at the second thoughts he might have had during the season. The four reviews that provoked the most comments from you, the readers, were his takes on M*A*S*H, The Little People (later to become The Brian Keith Show), UFO, and Banacek. To those who wrote in, he replies that he "found M*A*S*H a little better, The Little People a little worse, UFO a lot worse and Banacek better." As he adds, "see, we can admit we were wrong."

Going deeper into the season, he concedes that he's "grown to like" both McMillan & Wife and The Streets of San Francisco, both of which suffered from weak starts. And he thought he'd given a positive review to Kung Fu, but apparently it wasn't positive enough. He also wants to reassure the person who suggested that he was jealous of Kaine that he, Amory, has "lots more hair than he has." To those who felt he disliked Bridget Loves Bernie, he didn't dislike either of them; just the show. One writer clucked that Amory seemed to have a predisposition against the old jokes that appear in both The Little People and Banyon, to which Cleve replies that "We don't mind old jokes. As our readers know, we even love making up old jokes. We just mind when a whole show is an old joke."

He saves some praise for PBS's landmark documentary series An American Family, which I wrote about here. While he thought it "technically mediocre, pointlessly overlong and poorly edited," the fact was that "here was a dramatization of the decline and fall of the American dream. It was the most talked-about show of the year, and just exactly what public television should be doing and should not be cut off from doing." Comparing and contrasting it with his favorite show of the year, The Waltons, Amory concludes, "Look at both these series. A Depression family with nothing. An affluent family with everything. And then ask yourself: which one had nothing and which one had everything? Ask yourself, in other words, not what the country has gained in the past 40 years, but what we have lost."

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Two of television's definitive rock music shows, NBC's The Midnight Special and ABC's In Concert, faced off on Friday nights in the early '70s. Whenever the two slug it out, we'll be on hand to see who's better, who's best.

Midnight: Soul artist Curtis Mayfield hosts. Guests include Ravi Shankar, Jose Feliciano, Canned Heat, the soul singing Spinners, and pop duo Tufano and Giammarese. 

Concert: A lot of rock from groups T. Rex; Grass Roots; Beck, Bogert and Appice, and singer John Kay. Plus a little pop from Johnny Nash and the Sons of the Jungle.

I probably saw this week's Midnight Special; it would have been the only thing on television in the World's Worst Town™ on a Friday night, and when you're in high school, Friday and Saturday nights are a major occasion to be able to stay up late. (Oh, for the days when I could make it to midnight on any night of the week.) Anyway, I don't have a lot to go on as far as opinions, so for old times' sake, we'll give the edge to the Midnight Special.

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One of the treats of the week is Peter Ustinov's portrayal of King George III on the CBS News special "The Last King of America" (Wednesday, 8:00 p.m.), part of their American Revolution series leading up to the Bicentennial. If you're too young to remember, the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was a big deal in this country, even though it was somewhat stained by the aftertaste of Watergate; still, the leadup to 1976 was tremendous, and this series on the Revolution was just one of the ways CBS, and all the other networks, sought to join in. The premise gives us newsman Eric Sevareid interviewing Ustinov's George, who improvises his answers based on history and his knowledge of George's politics.

Accompanying the program is a TV Guide Background article written by James Thomas Flexner, who authored perhaps the definitive George Washington biography, which was itself turned into not one, but two TV miniseries (1984's George Washington and 1986's George Washington II: The Forging of a Nation), both of which starred Barry Bostwick as Washington. In his article, Flexner provides a genuine insight into George III, explaining his family background and how, at first, George was well-liked both in England and the colonies. There are, in fact, several parallels between the Revolution and the American war in Vietnam, including how support for the war was initially quite strong in England, and how George was laid low by increasing public damands for peace, which would haunt George for the rest of his life (he reigned for 37 years after the Revolution). Flexner doesn't make a point of emphasizing these similarities; he doesn't have a political axe to grind, he doesn't want to score points with any particular ideological group: he just leaves readers to see these similarities for themselves. 

It's a popular belief that George was insane; Flexner points out that he likely suffered from porphyria, "an error of metabolism," which he inherited from his ancestors, including Mary, Queen of Scots. It is true, however, that he often behaved in an erratic, if not insane, manner. It's a tragic story, in many ways. As Flexner says, "No king ever had better intentions than George III. It was his misfortune to have been misaimed by his peculiar childhood and then to have stumbled into the American Revolution, a world-shaking event far beyond his competence to control."

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How many of you remember watching an ABC miniseries called The Strauss Family? It goes without saying that I don't, given that I was stuck in the World's Worst Town™, but if you didn't suffer that handicap, it might ring a bell. It was a British Associated Television production, aired in 1972 over there, and in 1973 ABC carried it for eight weeks on Saturday nights at 9:00 p.m. PT. (I'm a bit surprised it didn't find its way to Masterpiece Theatre.) The Strausses wrote some lovely music, but I can't see the appeal that this series would have had in America, unless the thought was that we'd eat up anything British, and they might well have been correct. The biggest names in the series (not necessarily the stars) are probably Derek Jacobi and Jane Seymour, although many of the actors are probably well-known to Anglophile viewers. 

Sunday's highlight comes on The Wonderful World of Disney (7:30 p.m., NBC), a 50th-anniversary celebration. Included is the evolution of Mickey Mouse, highlights of past Disney TV shows and movies, and something I can guarantee you wouldn't see today: a clip from Uncle Remus singing "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" from Song of the South, which the company has shamefully tried to purge from its history. If they ever reran this show today, they'd probably make sure to clip that scene out. And does anyone out there recall Reverend Ike? If you'd seen him, you'd remember; anyway, tonight his show premieres on WMUR in Manchester at 11:30 p.m.

The must-see TV on Monday comes later on; you'll read about it at the very end. But in the meantime, you might check out a pair of local movies, which are about as different as you could ask for: The Band Wagon (9:00 p.m., WCBV), starring Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, and a scene-stelling performance by Oscar Levant; or The Fountainhead (9:00 p.m., WKBG in Boston), a faithful adaptation of Ayn Rand's controversial novel (adapted by Rand herself), with Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, and Raymond Massey.

One of the lesser Peanuts cartoons leads off Tuesday: He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown (8:00 p.m., CBS), with Snoopy being sent off to obedience school. The series of strips on which this cartoon was based was funny enough, but let's face it: after A Charlie Brown Christmas and It's the Great Pumpkin, a lot of those cartoons really don't make much of an impression. Making a much greater impression is ABC's movie of the week, a repeat of That Certain Summer (8:30 p.m.), which discussed homosexuality in a far more frank way than television was accustomed to doing. Hal Holbrook, Martin Sheen, Hope Lange, and Scott Jacoby head an outstanding cast.

In addition to Peter Ustinov's bravura performance in "The Last King of America," Wednesday offers an ABC Theatre repeat of ◀ "If You Give a Dance You Gotta Pay the Band" (9:00 p.m.), a look at life in the black ghetto, produced by David Susskind, directed by Fred Coe, and written by ex-convict and former drug addict Stanley L. Gray, and stars Donna Bryan and a very, very young (11 years old) Laurence Fishburne. That's followed by an ABC News Special that stays on the mean streets: "The Methadone Connection" (10:30 p.m.), which investigates the growing use of the opiate to treat heroin addiction. 

On Thursday, we've got another one of those crossover episodes that tries to convince us that different series on the same network share the same universe: It's a special two-hour Ironside featuring the doctors from The Bold Ones, E.G. Marshall and David Hartman, treating a critically-injured Ed for a bullet wound that closely resembles the kind that paralyzed Ironside (8:00 p.m., NBC). I suspect this was originally one of those storylines that began on Ironside and ended on The Bold Ones.

The CBS Friday Night Movie is a three-hour epic, The Shoes of the Fisherman (8:00 p.m.), an overblown adaptation of Morris L. West's novel about the election of a new pope from the Soviet Union. Judith Crist calls it "mostly Hollywood with little true reverence," and, having both read the book and seen the movie, I'd agree with that, although the movie did take on added significance after the Church elected an actual pope from the Soviet bloc: John Paul II. Anthony Quinn does the honors; his Soviet adversary is Laurence Olivier.

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One of the provisos in this week's programming is that live, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings could result in schedule changes or preemptions. In the early days of the hearings, all three networks carried the hearings live, with PBS showing taped replays in primetime for those unable to watch during the day So far, according to Richard K. Doan, the reviews have been mixed; in Chicago, ABC's affiliate WLS received just over 300 calls during the first two days of coverage supporting the coverage, while 450 were angered that their favorite soaps and game shows were gone. CBS says their feedback has been about 50/50, while NBC reports calls were running "more heavily to beefs." 

Networks are said to be losing about $1 million a day in revenue due to the coverage, and they're not sure how long they'll continue to provide it on a start-to-finish basis. As I recall, the nets wound up rotating coverage, which is what people have been calling for on major news coverage for years. Today, this would dominate the news channels, but I wonder how much of it would bleed over to over-the-air? In turn, would coverage that was exclusively cable-based have put as much pressure on President Nixon to resign? All speculative, of course, but one can't help but wonder, even as one marvels at how much things have changed over the years.

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MST3K alert: Girls Town (1959) Unconvincing story of a wayward girl (Mamie Van Doren) sent to a reform school run by nuns. Fred: Mel Torme. Dick: Ray Anthony. Jimmy: Paul Anka. Vida: Gloria Talbott. Mother Veronica: Maggie Hayes. Serafina: Gigi Perreau. Sister Grace: Sheilah Graham. Stan: Dick Contino. Mary: Elinor Donahue. (Monday, 11:00 p.m., WSBK in Boston) There's really not much more to add to this one; despite Mel Torme, Ray Anthony, and Paul Anka (who plays a thinly-disguised version of himself), this is about what you'd expect. Which is to say: a perfect movie for MST3K. TV