hristmas may be five days away on the contemporary 2025 calendar, but in the world of 1965, which is where we are this week, we're right smack dab in the middle of the Big Day itself, and we've got plenty to see over this festive weekend. Our first clue comes with the conclusion of the all-night movie,
(5:00 a.m. or so, KGO in San Francisco), starring Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien, which introduced the world to the classic, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," not to mention the non-Yule "Trolley Song." By 8:00, the kids are probably up and ripping the paper off packages; what better time to tune in to
(CBS) where everyone celebrates Christmas by exchanging presents. At noon, conductor Carmen Dragon (father of Daryl, the former husband of Toni Tennille) leads the Glendale Symphony Orchestra in a program of Christmas music; the show won an Emmy when originally broadcast. At the same time, NBC offers the traditional Christmas Day service of Lessons and Carols, from Washington Episcopal Cathedral in the nation's capital; the network carried this live broadcast for many years, and I always enjoyed the music.
As morning turns to afternoon, it's Alastair Sim in what is for many people the definitive adaptation of A Christmas Carol (1:30 p.m., KCRA in Sacramento, 5:00 p.m., KRCR in Redding), while a 1962 operatic adaptation of the Dickens classic, composed by Edwin Coleman to a libretto by Margaret Burns Harris, premieres at 5:30 p.m. on KGO. Judy Collins, Ozzie Davis, and Chad Mitchell appear in "a contemporary statement on the meaning of Christmas" called Tell It on the Mountain (4:00 p.m., KPIX in San Francisco) KOVR has an hour of Christmas music from local church and school choirs at 4:30 p.m., and at 5:00 p.m., it's Miracle on 34th Street on KCRA.
But wait! Just because Christmas is past (although in reality the Christmas season is just starting), we've not done yet! On Sunday,
Discovery '65 presents "The World of Charles Dickens" (11:30 a.m., ABC), in which host Frank Buxton tours London with the "ghost" of Dickens, looking at the settings of some of his stories, and "meeting" some of his most famous characters. Sunday afternoon, it's
The Bells of St. Mary's (2:00 p.m., KTVU), with Bing Crosby reprising his Oscar-winning role as Father O'Malley, aided by a group of nuns led by their superior, Ingrid Bergman. KPIX carries
A Ceremony of Carols (3:30 p.m.) from the Dominican College of San Rafael, featuirng music by Benjamin Britton. Aftert that, it's the drama
A Star Shall Rise (4:30 p.m., KSBW in Salinas), the story of the Three Wise Men, with Raymond Burr as Balthasar. At 5:00 p.m., Bing is back, joined by Fred Astaire in
Holiday Inn (KPIX). And, in what may be the final Christmas movie of the season, Fred MacMurray, Valli, and Frank Sinatra star in
The Miracle of the Bells (11:35 p.m., KPIX).
Not a bad weekend, wouldn't you agree? And there's more on tap with other highlights of the week, which we'll see shortly.
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During the 60s, the Ed Sullivan Show
and The Hollywood Palace
were the premier variety shows on television. Whenever they appear in TV Guide together, we'll match them up and see who has the best lineup..Scheduled guests: Brigitte Bardot, who comes on stage to chat with Ed; singers Leontyne Price and Sergio Franchi; comedian Jack Carter; Manitas de Plata, Spanish guitarist; the Remains, British rock ‘n’ rollers; the comedy team of Stiller and Meara; choreographerdancer Peter Gennaro; Topo Gigio, the Italian mouse; and Japanese top spinner Komazuru Tsukushi. (In reality, the guest lineup also included French pantominist George Carl, while Bardot's appearance is noved to the following week.)
Palace: Host Bing Crosby welcomes Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, songstress Dorothy Collins and puppeteer André Tahon. Joining Bing in a sketch are
Hogan's Heroes regulars Bob Crane, Werner Klemperer, John Banner, Robert Clary, Richard Dawson, Ivan Dixon and Larry Hovis.
Bing's annual Christmas show, the last before he begins to include his family, is certainly one of the oddest of his shows. In addition to more conventional Christmas guests such as Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians and Dorothy Collins, the show features the classic cross-network appearance by the cast of Hogan's Heroes, in a historically anachronistic sketch that not only operates out of time, it includes an overt reference to Bing's production company being the producer of Hogan. The way it falls depends on how you feel about Hogan; as a fan, I think it's a delightfully oddball moment that avoids coming across as stupid. They reappear later in the show to take part in the Christmas singalong, and it makes a nice endpiece to another of Bing's Yuletide clambakes. With or without Bardot, Ed doesn't have a chance. There's no escaping that this week, Palace wins the day.
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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.
However, all you fans of the show, be prepared for a pleasant surprise: Hogan's Heroes, says Amory, "seems to provide week after week a fuller half-hour of fun than almost any other on the air—all the way from the fun tunnels to the friendly police dogs." The opening theme, he says, is "the best theme song we've heard," the writing is "fine fun," and overall the show is "fast and funny and, far from being limited, as might have been expected—after all, there would seem to be just so many possibilities in a POW camp—is, in fact, the opposite."
This isn't to say that the show is perfect; after all, what show is? He finds Hogan "a little too satisfied with himself for our taste" (given that the character, and Bob Crane's interpretation of it, grows as the series goes on, this is a fair, if not entirely accurate, criticism), and he finds both Werner Klemperer and John Banner a little over the top. (Banner was famous for being a scene stealer, and Klemperer, like Crane, really finds his stride as the show goes on.) Richard Dawson, as the British prisoner Newkirk, is Cleve's favorite, which is an acceptable position to take, but overall, Amory would prefer that the actors play it just a bit straighter than they have been; "This is a funny show, fellows— but, please, let us be the ones who are most amused." And I do honestly think they get the point.
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Are you ready for some football? I hope so, because this week has some big ones, starting with the NFL's Western Conference tie-breaker between the Green Bay Packers and Baltimore Colts (Sunday, 11:00 a.m., CBS). The game was necessitated when the Packers and Colts finished the regular season tied with records of 10-3-1; the winner will go on to host the defending champion Cleveland Browns (yes, you read that right) next Sunday. And the winner of that game? The Pack, after tying the game on a controversial fourth-quarter field goal, win in overtime, 13-10.
In the AFL, the defending champion Buffalo Bills, led by quarterback Jack Kemp, travel to San Diego to take on the Chargers (1:00 p.m,. NBC). The Bills take their second consecutive title (yes, you read that right, too), dominating the Chargers, 23-0. Unfortunately for Buffalo, this is to be the last year before the Super Bowl, and the following season, when the Bills make their third straight championship game, they lose to the Kansas City Chiefs; as if this writing, they remain one of three original AFL teams never to win the Super Bowl.*
*Mathematically, with 32 teams in the NFL, at any given time, there will be at least one team guaranteed to have gone at least 31 years without winning a championship. While this seems of interest only to statisticians, it ultimately points to a built-in futility in being a fan in the first place. Which has nothing to do with television, unless you stop to think of it while you're paying your Sunday Ticket subscription.
On the college side, we've yet to enter the era of insatiable bowl games. There are only nine, but we do get to see one of them, the Gator Bowl (New Year's Eve, 11:00 a.m., ABC), with Texas Tech playing Georgia Tech (Georgia Tech 31, Texas Tech 21). There are, however, three all-star classics, which were far bigger showcases for college stars back when there were fewer bowls. Christmas Day sees two, beginning with the Blue-Gray Game from Montgomery, Alabama (1:00 p.m., CBS), and continuing with the North-South Shrine Game from Miami (1:30 p.m., ABC). Friday isn't limited to the Gator Bowl; the East-West Shrine Game, perhaps the most prestigious of the all-star games, rounds out the week's games (1:30 p.m., NBC); among the stars in the game are Heisman Trophy winner Mike Garrett of Southern California.
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John Forsythe is the subject of a charming profile this week by Arnold Hano. The hook is that Forsythe is the star who keeps forgetting he's a star—who, in fact, is about as far from the stereotype of a star as one can get. Despite the five-season success of Bachelor Father, despite his new series The John Forsythe Show (the title of which makes him extremely uncomfortable), despite the fact that he lives in Bel Air, is on the board of trustees of the exclusive private school his daughters attend, despite his even having a mild ulcer—all of which qualifies him for stardom—he can't even get a hamburger done the way he wants, rare. The best he can get is medium rare, and, as Hano notes, he's apparently unaware that a star of his status can pretty much have his hamburgers any way he wants them; all he'd have to do is insist on it. But then, not only does he forget that he's a star, everyone else does, as well. Says the producer of his show, Peter Kortner, "The biggest compliment I can pay John is that after five minutes you forget he is an actor."
 |
With co-stars Elsa Lanchester
and Ann B. Davis |
He disciplines himself. He'd like a sports car, "But it would look so show-offy," so he settled for a Thunderbird. He doesn't need to diet, at six feet and 180 pounds, but his wife of 22 years is always dieting—"You know women. So I find myself dieting, too. No potatoes with that hamburger, please." And, by the way, he loves potatoes. He also loves sailing, but his wife doesn't, which led to her ultimatum regarding his 30-foot sloop: either it goes, or she goes. "Forsythe sold it to a close friend. 'Now I sail with him,' he says, in some small triumph. Very small."
As a young man, he was the public address system announcer at Ebbets Field, where he met his idol, Babe Ruth, who told him that "he rarely showed up at the Yankee Stadium unless he had six or seven belts of booze. 'I was crushed,' says Forsythe." But then, Ruth never had the discipline that Forsythe has. He moved from the diamond to the radio studio, where he acted in soap operas. "I played the weak young brother who was always killed in auto accidents," he remembers dryly. Following the war, he moved to Broadway, where he replaced Arthur Kennedy in "All My Sons" and Henry Fonda in "Mister Roberts," before starring in "Teahouse of the August Moon" for two years. That brought him to Hollywood, where he starred in Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry, which allowed him to indulge in his true acting love, comedy. "Doing tense emotional scenes sets my teeth on edge. Comedy exhilarates me." In fact, what John Forsythe really wants is to become a sportscaster. "ABC offered me a job doing color broadcasts of sporting events—golf tourneys, skiing, track meets. That’s what I want to do." He was forced to turn down the job when The John Forsythe Show made it to the schedule.
And think of what's ahead of him: years on the campy soap Dynasty, years as the unseen voice of Charlie on Charlie's Angels. As "a star who lacks the bigness of stardom, the expansiveness, the sweeping gesture, the carefree manner, the flamboyance, the zest and gusto of a star," who desired comedy more than angst, and really wanted to be doing play-by-play, I suspect it suited him just fine.
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This is, of course, the final TV Guide of 1965, which means it's time for news organizations to assess the year just past; KPIX was scheduled to air CBS's year-end review, 1965: A TV Album at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday, but it was pre-empted by the Packers-Colts playoff game. Two that weren't pre-empted were Projection '66 (Sunday, 11:00 a.m., NBC), with Frank McGee anchoring a two-hour evaluation if the past year with NBC's correspondents. And at 10:15 p.m. on Sunday (following the Sunday Night Movie), ABC follows suit with Year Out—Year In, with Howard K. Smith doing the anchoring and the network's correspondents doing the talking.
On Friday evening, Lorne Greene narrates highlights of Miami’s King Orange Jamboree (8:30 p.m., NBC), featuring Michael Landon as grand marshal. (Imagine that, a parade on NBC, hosted by a star of an NBC show, featuring another star of that same NBC show as the grand marshal. Well done, cross promotion!). I always enjoyed this, as a warmup to the next day's festivities; there's a note that taped coverage of the parade will be shown tomorrow morning. If you're looking to ring out the year with a bang, though, you'll have to find something other than television to help you along. There's no Guy Lombardo, no Dick Clark, no late-night celebrations with balloon drops. There
is, however, this wonderful relic
available on YouTube: the complete broadcast of the December 31, 1965
Tonight Show, featuring Ben Grauer reporting live from Times Square for the ball drop (11:15 p.m., NBC). And if that isn't a grand way to ring out the old, I don't know what is.
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MST3K alert: The Sword and the Dragon (Russian; 1960) A legendary Russian hero sets out to rescue his wife. Boris Andreyev, Andrei Abrikosov, Natalia Andreyev. (Sunday, 11:00 a.m., KSBW in Salinas) The movie itself is nothing to write home about; it's most notable for the voiceover narration being provided by none other than Mike Wallace! Not that unusual, given that Chet Huntley provided the narration for
The Day the World Ended, a movie that
should have been on
MST3K. The highlights, however, are the interstitials, including what is probably the
greatest-ever Ingmar Bergman joke. Granted, that may not be a huge category, but even so, it's a classic.
TV
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