tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6042603612494762084.post5016548599296166267..comments2024-03-27T22:27:16.556-04:00Comments on It's About TV: What's on TV? Sunday, July 29, 1962Mitchell Hadleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08695771505209080030noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6042603612494762084.post-6754700346861077822015-07-28T12:49:20.091-04:002015-07-28T12:49:20.091-04:00Random observations (because I don't have this...Random observations (because I don't have this issue):<br /><br /> - CBS's weekend baseball games:<br />Remember that network baseball was blacked out of Major League cities, so as not to compete with local team telecasts, such as they were (outside of New York, Chicago, and a couple of other cities, there weren't that many of those).<br />Also remember, this was when CBS's ballgames featured Dizzy Dean at the mike.<br />If you didn't have a rooting interest in the teams involved, you watched to hear Ol' Diz mangling the King's English and selling Falstaff beer.<br /><br /> - ABC started <i>Issues And Answers</i> late in 1960, just after John Daly quit the network.<br />Up to that point, Daly had <i>been</i> ABC News, going back to radio days; he was the nightly anchorman, but also ran a bare-bones news operation: few correspondents, but a number of name commentators for conventions and elections.<br />When Daly quit, ABC decided to get serious about news, hiring Elmer Lower away from CBS and charging him with building an operation from the ground up. This meant hiring reporters and film crews (mainly away from other networks) and that took time.<br />Lower bought time by using ABC's sole journalistic asset at that time, the commentators - thus <i>Issues And Answers</i>.<br />ABC's long catch-up to the bigger nets took many years, but this is how it started.<br /><br /> - <i>Story(?)</i>:<br />This is just a guess: this show might have been <i>Favorite Story</i>, a Ziv syndie series from the '50s.<br />It was sort of like <i>Science Fiction Theatre</i> only without the science fiction (the format and presentation were identical).<br /><i>Favorite Story</i>'s host-narrator was Adolphe Menjou, whose movie career had faded, along with his wardrobe.<br />This was my introduction, at an early age, to the wonders of foreign pronunciations: hearing Menjou (a native of Pittsburgh, PA) identify himself as <i>ah-dolf mon-<b>zhew</b></i> threw the six-year old me at first, fortunately I learned fast.<br />(Side note: <i>Issues And Answers</i>'s long-time announcer was an ABC staffer named John Causier (<i><b>kaw</b>-see-ay</i>). Thus a lifelong curiosity is born.)<br /><br /> - I suppose I ought to go back and put this at the older post, but I'm lazy.<br />Your casual reference to Ellery Queen "farming out (the books) to ghostwriters" is something I snag on when people who don't know the whole story try to sound like experts.<br />Very briefly:<br />The EQ stories (the ones with Ellery as a character) were always plotted out by Frederic Dannay and converted to prose by Manfred Lee.<br />Sometime around 1960, Lee developed a writer's block and was unable to fill his role in the collaboration. Dannay was still doing the plotting, but other writers (notably Theodore Sturgeon and Avram Davidson) were brought in to finish the books.<br />Since Dannay was still participating, I think that "ghostwriting" isn't an accurate description of the result.<br />On the other hand ...<br />There were those original paperbacks with the EQ byline (in which Ellery <i>did not</i> appear); these were supervised and edited by Manny Lee, as an effort to keep the Queen brand going (as Fred Dannay was doing with the mystery magazine).<br />These paperback originals were "ghostwriting" of a sort (Dannay took no part in their writing). The books themselves, by competent pros who'd contributed short stories to EQMM, are variable, some better than others, but they filled a function.<br />All of the above was probably the worst-kept secret in the mystery field, at least among professionals in the field.<br />The foregoing is a major compression of a far more complicated story, which I have cribbed from the work of Francis M. Nevins, the leading expert in all matters EQ.<br />So there too.Mike Dorannoreply@blogger.com