Around the dial

Now that's my kind of car!

We lead off the week at Comfort TV, where David reviews the TV career of the late Tony Roberts, who first came to my attention as one-half of the legal series Rosetti and Ryan, co-starring with Squire Fridell; I was a captive viewer from back in the days of the one-station in the World's Worst Town™. 

RealWeegieMidget is back on the TV-movie circuit with the 1984 teleflick Obsessive Love, which stars Yvette Mimieux and Simon MacCorkindale and carries with it more than a whiff of Fatal Attraction. It's part of the "So Bad It's Good" Blogathon, which perhaps tells you all you need to know. 

At bare•bones e-zine, Jack's Hitchcock Project continues apace with the seventh-season story "The Children of Alda Nuova," Robert Wallsten's adaptation of his own short story, with Jack Carson starring as a criminal who makes a wrong turn into a wrong town.

Let's continue with crime, as John wraps up his "Private Detective Season" at Cult TV Blog with 1967's The Big M, with all the requisite sleaze that P.I.s thrive on. John also looks at some additional series, including the very good Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, with Powers Boothe.

At The Saturday Evening Post, Bob Sassone's "News of the Week" includes two pertinent questions about the TV ratings system: is it accurate, and does it even matter? Read the story, and stick around for this year's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees.

Travalanche has an excellent look back at the ubiquitqious John Charles Daly, urbane moderator of What's My Line?, anchor of ABC's evening news program, and one of my absolute favorite television persons ever. I may be coming up on 65, but I still say that I want to be like him when I grow up.

It's only tangentially related to classic TV, but unless you've been under a rock for the last couple of years, you know about the disintegration of cable television. Variety has an in-depth look at the future of Comcast, including USA Network (which produced many an original show in the day), and what it may bode for the industry as a whole.

Speaking of, it looks as if the long relationship between ESPN and Major League Baseball is over at the end of the upcoming season. Did MLB undervalue its product? And what could this mean for a new television partner? Sports Media Watch has all the details, including what happens to ESPN.

Wrapping things up with The View from the Junkyard, Roger continues his episode-by-episode review of The New Avengers, with "The Tale of the Big Why," an example of how the series handles comedy with a deft touch—unlike, perhaps, the original. TV  

This week in TV Guide: July 29, 1967

This week we've got yet another article telling us how cable television is going to change the industry forever, and we'll get to that in a bit, but this must be the umpteenth time TV Guide has featured one of these stories, and to tell you the truth, there are only so many ways one can go through them and say, yes, this one came true, and no, this one didn't, and this one did but on your phone instead of your TV. And, seeing how I just read something about how more Americans now get their programs from streaming services than cable, it seems as if we're talking more about what was and what will never be.

So instead we're starting off with a look at a man who's always interesting, Steve Allen.

Allen, "the well-known producer, director, actor, comedian, musician, songwriter, sculptor, poet, political theorist, lecturer, biographer and novelist" (in Dick Hobson's words), is being wooed (along with Jackie Gleason and Jack Paar) to return to the late-night wars as host of a new CBS show. He's not enthusiastic about the idea, though, telling Hobson that "(1) I can make a lot more money doing an early-evening show, and (2) it would take too much of my time." Instead, he's content to host the summer replacement Steve Allen Comedy Hour, which gives him the chance to "do satire and social commentary on current events." 

In fact, Allen's focus now is on the bigger picture. Asked if he worries about his show's rating, he replies, "I am worried about mankind's rating." He likes the format of his show because it gives him the chance to touch on those issues; "My sketches almost always have a point of view; they're not just silly jokes. We've taken on political extremism, for example, and air and water pollution." He still remembers with distain the time back in 1960, when NBC's Broadcast Standards department "axed as 'too controversial' a serious roundtable discussion of crime and punishment with actors portraying St. Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Darrow, Dostoyevsky, Freud, Hegel, Montaigne and Socrates. 'NBC would have preferred that I function in an intellectual vacuum, restricting myself to making audiences laugh rather than think.'" Allen does eventually find someone to take on that idea, though; he's describing Meeting of Minds, which aired on PBS from 1977 to 1981 and rarely failed to fascinate. 

Despite his unwillingness to go back to late-night, he does offer a few ideas on what makes a good host. "There may be only four or five guys in the world who can do it," he says (apparently in contrast to the current television fad of thinking that anyone can host a late-night show, and then going on to prove that Allen was right all along). He says there are five keys to success: first, the host has to appear as if he's a non-show-biz type. "The viewer thinks we're just plain folks, just like himself." Second, the audience needs to see you as a good guy. "They should feel toward you as toward a friend. Fast wit and repartee is less important than being likable." Third, "You have to be good at interviewing others and develop the ability to be interested in the person interviewed." Fourth, the host should "be at ease." Bishop, he thinks, isn't there yet. Paar never was, but he was never boring; "his keyed-up-emotionalism made him interesting." Finally (the lesson today's hosts seem to have the most trouble learning), "We shouldn't compete with our guests. I never try to top anybody, especially another comedian."

In the end, Allen successfully wards off CBS's interest in him as a late-night host; they wind up going with Merv Griffin. He does return to the talk wars with a syndicated series in 1968, which ran for three years and was shown at various times of the day in different markets. He writes a successful series of mystery novels in which he and wife Jayne star as fictional versions of themselves, and becomes a vocal opponent of obscenity on television. As I say, always interesting.

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While The Hollywood Palace is on summer break, ABC fills the Saturday night time slot with Piccadilly Palace, a London-based variety show starring the iconic British comedy duo of Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise. We'll stop in from time to time during the summer months to see who has the best lineup..
Sullivan:  In this rerun from Expo 67, Ed welcomes operatic soprano Birgit Nilsson; comic Alan King; singer Petula Clark; the Seekers, vocal group; and choreographer Peter Gennaro, who leads a dance-tour of the fair. Canadian artists: pianist Ronald Turini; singer Claude Leveillee; Les Feux Follets, dance group; and the Montreal Symphony.

Piccadilly: The rockin’ Kinks and singer Engelbert Humperdinck storm the Palace tonight. Hosts Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise take to the air in scale model planes, and perform a slapstick ventriloquist act. Millicent Martin, Michael Sammes singers.

To be honest, I was seriously considering dropping the Sullivan/Piccadilly segment, or at least putting it on pause. Piccadilly Palace is much more like, say, The Dean Martin Show than it is The Hollywood Palace, which makes it difficult to get a true matchup with Sullivan. And then I looked at this week's lineup, and decided I owed it to everyone to include a show that has the unlikely combination of Engelbert Humperdinck and Ray Davies and the Kinks! For that reason alone, even though Ed has some big name talent, I'm calling the week a Push.

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I'm not sure we've ever had a Eugene Burdick week here at the blog, but it just goes to show you there's a first time for everything. And before the puzzled expressions you usually have when reading the material here become permanently frozen like some character on The Twilight Zone, I'll explain it all to you. 

The feature on Saturday Night at the Movies (9:00 p.m., NBC) is The Ugly American, an adaptation of the novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer outlining what they saw as failed U.S. policy in Southeast Asia (remember, this was written in 1958); the movie stars Marlon Brando as an American ambassador who fails to understand the complexity of the situation in the region until it's too late. 

Skip ahead to the end of the week, and the CBS Friday Night Movie (9:00 p.m.) is based on yet another Eugene Burdick novel, Fail-Safe, this one written with Harvey Wheeler. The story of an accidental nuclear war stars Henry Fonda as the president, Walter Matthau (in a very nasty performmance) as a neocon political scientists, and Dan O'Herlihy (in a very sensitive performance) as the Air Force Chief of Staff. 

Judith Crist calls the pairing "serious melodramas, topical in theme and honorable in intent," but adds that they "give unconventional themes purely conventional treatment." Despite that (and I haven't seen The Ugly American, but I think Fail-Safe is very good), what I wouldn't give to have more theatrical films of a serious bent like these, rather than a steady diet of action adventure and superhero movies.

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Since we've gotten a head start on the week's activities, let's just keep on going. 

Remember a couple of weeks ago TV Guide featured the cast of the ABC series The Big Valley on the cover? Well, on Saturday, the seventh annual Captain Weber Days Parade (held in honor of Captain Charles Maria Weber, the founder of Stockton, California) has a trio of stars from the show serving as grand marshals: Lee Majors, Richard Long, and Peter Breck. (6:30 p.m. PT, KOVR in Sacramento) KOVR, by the way, happens to be an ABC affiliate. Coincidence?

And speaking of coincidence, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (Sunday, 7:00 p.m., ABC) has a plot that sounds familiar, at least if you read my recent piece on The Outer Limits episode "A Feasibility Study": "An army of rock men attacks the Seaview. The lumbering creatures are commanded by a half-human, half-fossilized madman bent on conquering the world." Frankly, had I seen this earlier, it might have changed my entire understanding of "Feasibility Study." Hmm. . .

On Monday, we have a most interesting cast of guests this week on The Match Game (2:30 p.m., NBC): sportscasters Sandy Koufax, Mel Allen, Curt Gowdy, Kyle Rote and Paul Christman; and former football great Y. A. Tittle. Recognize all of them, and I enjoyed listening to them all. Later in the evening, the same network presents an encore showing of the NBC News Special "Khrushchev in Exile—His Opinions and Revelations" (8:00 p.m.), as host Edwin Newman talks with the former Soviet premier about world events during his time as leader, and the "loneliness and boredom of being banished to oblivion." The documentary was originally shown on July 11, but was pushed out of prime time due to the length of the baseball All-Star Game, a 15-inning affair that ran for more than three-and-a-half hours. By the way, two of the announcers on that game were Curt Gowdy and Sandy Koufax.

Also on Monday, Coronet Blue continues on CBS (10:00 p.m.), which reminds me of a Letter to the Editor this week from Eileen S. Macdonald of New York City, who complains about the network's cancellation of the show without a concluding episode. Her letter, which begins, "I'm so annoyed I can hardly type this letter fast enough," says, in part, "All I can say is that I think it’s a good show, and so does my teen-age son. In fact, we seldom agree on programs and I consider that most of what he watches is junk—that’s why we're a two-set family. Isn’t it time that advertisers woke up and stopped letting the networks push the audiences around?" To that I would say two things: 1) I agree; and 2) Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny aren't real, either. Of course, the story is more complicated than what Ms. Macdonald suggests, but it's certainly unfortunate all-around.

Peter Graves did a lot of B-movie sci-fi before Fury, Court-Martial, and Mission: Impossible, and Tuesday's episode of The Invaders (8:30 p.m., ABC) sounds like it could have been right out of one of them: "The murder of two astronauts prompts David and an Air Force security officer (Graves) to investigate the invaders' interest in the manned lunar program." Joanne Linville and Anthony Eisley guest-star; I'm just sorry we don't get a chance to see Graves's character, wild-eyed, shouting, "You've got to believe me!"

Hands-down, Wednesday's highlight is the KOVR 9:00 p.m. movie, The Third Man, starring Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Ailda Valli, Trevor Howard, and Bernard Lee. It's a terrific movie, which spawned both a radio series, also starring Welles, and a television series, with Michael Rennie playing as a reformed Harry Lime after the war. This means that Lime survived that shootout in the sewer at the end of the movie, which might be a stretch, but on the other hand, we never did see Lime actually get shot, did we? And as Welles himself once said, "If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."

Continuing on to Thursday, it's a good night for comedy. At 7:30 p.m., the only regularly-scheduled black-and-white program left on television, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (repeats of the 1957-58 series of specials) airs an episode featuring Lucy's new neighbors, Ernie Kovacs and Edie Adams, and immediately starts wooing Edie to get a spot for Dezi on Ernie's TV show. If you're not a fan of Lucy, then I'd recommend an F Troop repeat (8:00 p.m., ABC) in which Larry Storch plays a dual role: Corporal Agarn and his visiting Russing cousin Demtri Agarnoff. I can imagine just how over-the-top Storch was in this episode, which is why I think it's worth watching. I wonder what Hal Horn thinks of this one?

One of the things I really miss from my youthful sports fandom is the College All-Star Game, the football game that matched the defending NFL champions against a group of college all-stars, played at Soldier Field in Chicago. (Friday, 6:30 p.m., ABC) This game, along with the Coaches All-America all-star game earlier in the month, signaled the unofficial start of the football season. I've written about it before so I won't bore you with the details, but as the Green Bay Packers were my team, you know I was rooting for them here. They'd beaten the Stars 38-0 the year before, and even though this year's All-Star team features Steve Spurrier, Bob Griese, Floyd Little, Bubba Smith, Alan Page, and others, the Packers crush them again, this time 27-0.

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And now that story about cable TV. 

CATV, according to Albert Warren, represents "the four letters that have rocked broadcasting." Until recently, cable has mainly brought TV to rural and isolated areas not able to otherwise get a decent signal. (Average cable bill: $5 per month.) But now, it's being rolled out in more metropolitan areas as a kind of test—New York City, for example—where skyscrapers can interfere with clear signals. "The facts are that scarcely anyone in New York can get all nine with the consistently high technical quality CATV [especially color broadcasts] would provide." 

One of the beauties of CATV is that there's no technical limit to the number of channels you can transmit through the cable. Most have space currently for 12, but "engineers are working on systems providing 20, 30 or more." The growth of cable is limited for now by the FCC, which narrowly voted to maintain severe restrictions, such as not bringing in stations from distant cities, and not originating its own programming. The rationale is that since local stations require both large viewing audiences and sponsor advertising in order to maintain free program, it would be unfair for them to have to compete with cable. There are also questions about copyrighted material, for which CATV operators say they're willing to pay a "fair rate," but a couple of recent conflicting court cases have suggested Congress will probably have to get involved eventually.

There's plenty of speculation as to what the CATV system of the future will look like: "electronic newspapers, shopping, teaching, voting, surveying, gas and electric meter reading, library research, mail delivery, emergency warnings—you name it. Even now, CATV provides news, weather services and even stock quotations on channels not occupied by local TV stations." (I noticed there was nothing about 24-hour sports networks, but then who could possibly be interested in that?)

There's more, but I think you get the gist of it. One of the intriguing footnotes is that all three broadcast networks have "dipped their toes" in the cable pool; "ABC was hot about CATV for a while, but it marked time while the FCC considered its merger with ITT. CBS has been quietly buying systems—but all in Canada, to gain operating experience while avoiding the complications of U.S. ownership. NBC has bought a couple of small systems, also for toe-dipping purposes." Today, of course, NBC is owned by a cable system, Comcast, and each network is involved, in one way or another, with streaming services. We've already passed throught the expansion of cable and now we're seeing its contraction. As for what comes next, I think one would be a fool to even try and predict what even the next few months have in store. But it's safe to say that those four letters rocking broadcasting have been replaced with three words: Cut the Cord.

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Some assorted notes to round out the week: this week's "As We See It" concerns CBS's recent inquiry into the Warren Report on the assassination of President Kennedy. Running for an hour each night for four consecutive nights, June 25 through June 28, the editors call it "a major journalistic achievement," revolutionizing the way such information is presented by spreading it out over multiple evenings rather than telling it all in a three- or four-hour documentary. The content was "supurb" as well, "a masterful compilation of facts, interviews, experiments and opinions—a job of journalism that will be difficult to surpass." Most important, the shows were a ratings hit, beating almost every show that was scheduled opposite it, and proving that "[w]hen serious programs that interest them are scheduled during prime time, viewers will tune in." Would they do so today? Well, it depends on whether or not you think we're still a serious people. I remember my seven-year-old self being fascinated by this, but then I always was precocious.

A sign that cooler heads have prevailed is evident in the Hollywood Teletype, which reports that "the idea of having a girl for Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek has been abandoned." It's also a sign that there was some level of insanity in the NBC executive offices to even consider such a thing. I guess not everyone back then was "serious."  

Finally, there's that cover picture on the stars of The Rat Patrol. As you may recall, that show was a favorite of mine when I was growing up, but took a severe dive upon rewatching last year, enough so that it's now on the resell pile. But it's worth a mention that the feature is a profile of Gary Raymond, the English actor who plays Sergeant Moffitt, the most likeable of the four members of the team. And, according to Leslie Raddatz's story, he seems like a pretty good guy. Glad to hear it!

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MST3K alert: Night of the Blood Beast (1958) An alien entity takes control of an astronaut’s body. Is he friend or foe? Michael Emmet, Angela Greene, Ed Nelson, Tyler McVey, Ross Sturlin. (Saturday, 2:00 p.m., KGO in San Francisco) Yet another science fiction movie involving aliens and self-sacrifice, but not quite as good as "A Feasibility Study." In other words, the kind of movie Ed Nelson did before he wound up on Peyton Place. The MST3K version is combined with a really bad short, "Once Upon a Honeymoon," which features Virginia Gibson before she wound up on ABC's Discovery. Well, I guess everybody has to start somewhere. TV  

This week in TV Guide: August 24, 1974

The late summer isn't usually a time when one thinks of pro football - at least not in 1974, unless you're talking about NFL exhibition games. But amidst the preseason hoopla, on Thursday night we have a game that actually counts: the Birmingham Americans vs. the Chicago Fire. And if those team names don’t sound familiar to you, there’s probably a good reason why. They’re franchises playing in week 8 of the inaugural season of the World Football League, with games broadcast via syndication on TVS, the network primarily known to that point for college basketball (including the epic Houston-UCLA game of 1968). (Birmingham wins this game, 22-8.)

The World Football League was the brainchild of Gary Davidson, who had played a part in the formations of the American Basketball Association and the World Hockey Association. The idea behind the WFL was to liven up the pro game which, in the wake of the NFL-AFL merger (remember, that happened only five years before), had grown a bit stale. The league placed teams in cities such as Birmingham, Memphis, Jacksonville, and Anaheim – thought to be strong football areas – and places like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit, NFL cities that had suffered from bad football teams for too long. The WFL introduced new rules that they hoped would make for a more open, high-scoring game: kickoffs from the 35 to encourage more returns (the NFL at the time kicked off from the 40), goalposts at the back of the end zone a la college football to discourage field goals (the NFL would follow suit there as well), an instrument called the "Dickerod" to measure for first downs (I'm not even going to touch that one), and an “action point” to replace the perfunctory extra point (which the NFL never did adopt). Overtime would be adopted for tie games (which the NFL also incorporated). They planned a 20-game season (it would be a few more years before the NFL expanded to 16 games), and launched successful raids on NFL rosters, luring players who, since the merger, lacked the leverage to get higher salaries.

SOURCE: HADLEY TV GUIDE COLLECTION

With a players strike delaying the start of NFL training camps (and cancelling the annual College All-Star Game), the new league hoped to attract fans who were increasingly disgusted with labor unrest in the pros. And, in fact, the WFL had a marvelous rollout. Through two games the Jacksonville Sharks had averaged over 50,000 fans, while the Philadelphia Bell, playing in venerable JFK Stadium, averaged over 60,000. And then—Ticketgate. Turns out most of the attendance counts were padded by freebees—the Bell had given away 100,000 of the 120,000 tickets for those two games, and only about half of the Sharks fans had paid. The Detroit Wheels, playing in a decrepit high school stadium in Ypsilanti, had hoped to hang on until the Lions moved into their new domed stadium in Pontiac, at which time the Wheels could take over Tiger Stadium. They couldn’t hang on, and folded in September. The New York Stars became the Charlotte Hornets, and the Houston Texans moved to Shreveport, LA. Birmingham players went without pay for the last five games of the season. Most of the NFL stars who’d signed contracts would have to wait until the 1975 season before they could play for their new teams.

Somewhat surprisingly, the league actually made it through that first season, with Birmingham defeating the Orlando-based Florida Blazers in the World Bowl (Birmingham’s uniforms were confiscated after the game to take care of unpaid bills). The league did attempt a second season in 1975, but folded halfway through.

And yet this wasn’t really such a foolish idea. Had the WFL come along a few years later, it could have taken advantage of cable TV to get more exposure. The idea of summer football would be copied by the USFL, with some slight degree of success. The rules changes, most of which were copied by the NFL, did in fact open up the game. Had the league survived, it would have had a very good roster of players for upcoming seasons (including Memphis’ trio of Miami Dolphins stars: Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick and Paul Warfield), and new NFL stadiums in Detroit and New York would have opened up better home fields for those teams.

As they say, if ifs and buts were candy and nuts,…

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Speaking of cable TV, it’s been predicted as the wave of the future in many of the TV Guides of the era, but this week we see that the future of television has hit a stumbling block.

Cable had started out as a way to provide clear pictures to rural areas that suffered from poor reception (or no reception at all in certain places), but everyone knew the real money lie in cable’s spread to large urban markets, which comprised 70 percent of the nation’s viewers. However, as New York City is demonstrating, there doesn’t seem to be all that big a demand for more stations, clearer reception, or some of the extra services that went along with cable: access to banking and other financial services, being able to get advice from their doctors, casting votes in elections, and fire and burglar alarms. Dayton, Newark and San Antonio have given up on cable, while Chicago and Detroit debate the issue, and Boston recommends against it.

The costs of installation, as it turns out, are enormous, and construction has been delayed time after time. Illegal taps into the system are decreasing subscriber numbers, and the service itself continues to get more expensive. Manhattan Cable reported a net loss of $1.3 million in 1973, even though they raised monthly rates from $6 to $9.

What can be done? Well, some think that sports might eventually migrate to cable, even though surveys show only about 20% would subscribe to cable for sports alone. FCC action to allow cable systems to carry local stations and syndicated programming will be required to broaden cable’s appeal. A pay channel showing first-run movies would help a system that’s already profitable, but probably can’t save one that wasn’t. As for home shopping services? It will be tough to make them work when only 12.5% of homes are wired for cable.

TV Guide’s conclusion is not an optimistic one. The rush to cable is, for now, stalled. “No one talks of ‘the wired nation.’ Potentially, it still exists. But today it is still short-circuited.”

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TV's two definitive 70s-era rock music shows, NBC's The Midnight Special and ABC's In Concert, faced off on Friday nights.  Midnight Special was a weekly show, airing after Johnny Carson, while In Concert was an every-other week part of Wide World of Entertainment.  Whenever the two slug it out, we'll be there to give you the winner.

Well, we have a match this week! In Concert was not a weekly series, so it’s always nice when we get the chance to compare lineups. And what do we have this week? Hmm.

In Concert: Rock musician Don E. Branker welcomes guests including ‘50s style group Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids, the Hues Corporation and O’Jays soul groups, and the Chris Jagger (Mick’s brother) Band rock artists.

Midnight Special: An all-blues show with B.B. King (host), and guests Jimmy Witherspoon, Papa John Creach, Paul Butterfield’s Better Days, Big Mama Thornton, John Lee Hooker, Joe Williams and Bobby “Blue” Brand.

Okay. I think I’ve heard of the O’Jays, and I do recognize the song “Rock the Boat,” though I wouldn’t in a million years have known that it was sung by the Hues Corporation. Other than that, the only thing I can say about In Concert’s lineup is that Chris Jagger’s name reminds me of a story that Arrowsmith’s Steven Tyler told about having once passed himself off as Mick Jagger’s brother, and how the adulation he received from the girls made him want to be a rock star. I’ve never been a big blues fan, but I know who B.B. King, John Lee Hooker and Joe Williams are, and I know just how big they were. Ultimately, that’s what makes this week’s decision so easy. The verdict: Midnight Special.

As a note, Channel 4 presents Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert at 2:30 a.m. CT Saturday, but with no description of who was on, it’s pretty hard to say how it compared to the others. It would have been a rerun from the show’s first season; the new series wouldn’t begin until September. Maybe we’ll have better luck next time.

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I’ve talked before about the Saturday morning cartoon graveyard so I won’t belabor the point here except to illustrate just how vapid and derivative kids programming was in the mid-70s. For one thing, a startling number were merely animated versions of past live-action shows: Emergency Plus 4, The Addams Family, My Favorite Martians, Lassie’s Rescue Rangers, Jeannie, Star Trek, The Brady Kids. On top of that, CBS also has an “animated” movie entitled “Guess Who’s Knott Coming to Dinner,” which features a cartoon version of Don Knotts.*

*Is that redundant?

I’ll grant that not all of these ideas are ridiculous. The Addams Family started out as a cartoon, of course, and the animated Star Trek did offer producers a greater leeway in some of the special effects and creatures that the crew of the Enterprise encountered. But by and large, these cartoons could be taken as dumbed-down versions of adult programs that weren’t all that smart to begin with. It could have been worse, I suppose. Goober, which was a Scooby-Doo clone about a crime-fighting bunch of kids and their dog, could have been referring to him.

Other cartoons were merely spin-offs of previous cartoons, such as Sabrina (Archie) and Pebbles and Bamm Bamm (The Flintstones, which started out as an adult show), and then there’s another movie-length animated special, “The Red Baron,” in which all the characters are dogs, and the Red Baron himself is a heroic character trying to rescue the Princess of Pretzelshtein. Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as World War I goes, wasn’t the Red Baron one of the bad guys?

There’s just a stunning lack of imagination to these programs, and it’s kind of sad considering the time period. In the last ten years, the nation had come through riots and assassinations, the Vietnam War and Watergate. It was a dark and cynical time. The least we could have done was to give kids something that would stimulate their minds, instead of the escapist junk food they got.

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Back in the day, PBS would make the occasional foray into sports programming, and this Monday night sees the network bring us the finals of the U.S. Pro Tennis Championships from Boston. This was the cusp of the American tennis boom, when it seems that everyone was running around in shorts and carrying a racket, so I suppose PBS figured this was a good program for their demographic.

Actually, this Monday night tennis series ran for several summers on PBS, and it was an excellent production, with legendary tennis writer Bud Collins teaming up with Donald Dell to bring us the action. It was a serious, no-frills broadcast that concentrated on the tennis itself instead of the glitz. These late-summer tournaments served as the warm-up to the U.S. Open, so they tended to attract some pretty big names. I was a tennis fan myself at this time, and I always chose this over NBC’s Monday Night Baseball series. If PBS had stuck to sports, who knows where it would have wound up?

SOURCE: HADLEY TV GUIDE COLLECTION

Golf is another sport that’s changed radically when it comes to television. In 1974 a considerable number of tournaments were still shown through syndicated broadcasts (mostly from Hughes Sports Network), and this week’s Westchester Classic, from Harrison, NY, is no exception. The announcers are a mixture of network figures (Ray Scott), syndicated staples (Jim Thacker, John Derr) and golf experts (Bob Toski). The Westchester was actually one of golf’s biggest money tournaments of the time, with a first prize of $50,000. Johnny Miller, in the midst of his incredible 1974 season, takes the title this year, with a record winning score of -19. Today, the Westchester goes by the name of “The Barclays,” and isn’t even played at its namesake Westchester Country Club anymore.

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Ah, nostalgia. We don't often get to take a nostalgic look back at a nostalgic look back, but NBC’s Wonderful World of Disney embarks on such a tour this week with a rare rebroadcast of its 1954 Davy Crockett series. It’s a great throwback to the origins of the Disney program, and one of the classic adventures that helped establish Disney’s greatness in the non-animated arena. The Crockett adventures will run for the next three weeks, starting this week with “Davy Crockett—Indian Fighter.” I wonder why NBC was rerunning the series at this particular time? Could it be because Crockett’s sidekick, George Russel, is being played by Buddy Ebsen, star of CBS’ Barnaby Jones? I wouldn’t think so. Maybe they’re just celebrating the 20th anniversary of the original run.

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SOURCE: HADLEY TV GUIDE COLLECTION

Ah, Susie Blakely. Her smile, Neil Hickey tells us, is worth $100,000 a year. She’s typical of today’s big money, big star models, and she has what it takes: an inventory of great smiles. “I can do fake smiles for you all day, and every one of them will look real,” she says, matching the smile to whatever she happens to be hawking.

Right now, Susie has been taking acting lessons, hoping to duplicate the success of other models-turned-actresses such as Cybill Shepherd and Ali MacGraw. And it will be acting that will bring Susan Blakely her greatest fame, forever known for her role as Julie Prescott in the landmark miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man, winning a Golden Globe and getting an Emmy nomination in the process.

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Finally, one more rare glimpse into the world that was. A brief TV Guide editorial morns the loss of programs such as Where’s the Fire?, Everything Money Can’t Buy, We’ll Get By, The Love Nest, Sunshine and Second Start. What’s that, you say? Haven’t heard of them? There’s a good reason why—they never aired, at least not as part of the 1974 fall season. Just two months ago, a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling overturned changes to the FCC Prime-Time Access rule, which meant networks would have to cede 90 minutes per week of prime-time to local stations—90 minutes they’d already plotted out.

The shows listed above, manned by stars such as Paul Sorvino, Bob Crane, Cliff DeYoung, Billy Mumy and Meg Foster, would have aired in those lost time slots (mostly the 6:30 – 7:00 p.m. CT period, right after the local news). And as for what happened to them? Well, Television Obscurities has a very good write-up here.  By and large, I’d have to pronounce the local access rules a failure—the thought had been that local stations would provide news and public affairs shows in those timeslots, but the stations quickly figured out it would be cheaper and more profitable to run syndicated game shows and reruns of network series. We all know how well that’s worked out, don't we?  TV  

This week in TV Guide: February 4, 1984

Look familiar? It should; as I mentioned last week, we're in a brief hiatus from new TV Guide reviews, which means a blast from the past. This week, we go back six years to a rare look at an issue from the 1980s.

We've skipped ahead twenty years from last week's issue, to another Olympics preview—the XIV Winter Olympiad, in perhaps the most tragic city ever to host the games.

The '84 Games were the first Winter Olympics to be held in a Communist country, Yugoslavia. At the time Sarajevo was known primarily as the site of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the event that triggered World War I. Fresh off of its triumphant coverage of the Lake Placid games, ABC presented what was then a record 63½ hours of coverage for the 14 days*. As was the case in 1980, we see the coverage dominating ABC's prime-time schedule, covering anywhere from 2 to 4½ hours each night, with a 30 minute review after the late local news. It's interesting that ABC feels the need to point out that most of the coverage will be on a tape-delay basis, viewers having been spoiled by all the live coverage from Lake Placid (not including the US-USSR hockey game, of course).

*This was the last Winter Olympics to start in mid-week; in 1988 the Calgary games would begin on Saturday, and since then the start has been moved to Friday in order to accommodate a prime-time opening. ABC's coverage actually started the night before, on Tuesday, with the first round of the hockey tournament.

The Opening Ceremonies, Kosevo Stadium

Questions abounded: would the hockey team be able to repeat its memorable gold medal-winning 1980 run?  (Not hardly; they managed to defeat Poland 7-4 in the seventh-place game.) Would the speed skaters duplicate the amazing Eric Heiden's five gold medals? (Not quite—no medals at all, actually.) Would the Mahre brothers come through in the alpine events? (Yes; Phil won gold and Steve silver in the slalom.) And would there be another American star born in Sarajevo? (I'd nominate Bill Johnson, the downhill gold medalist.)

It was a great show; everyone agreed that Wednesday afternoon's Opening Ceremonies were charming, capturing the spirit and culture of Sarajevo. As the flag was passed to Calgary for 1988, everyone agreed that the Canadians would have a hard act to follow.

The bobsled run became a mortar launching pad

Fast forward ten years to 1994. Kosevo Stadium, the site of the Opening Ceremonies, is riddled with holes from howitzer shells and snipers' bullets, and a graveyard lies not far away. The bobsled run has been turned into an artillery position from which rebel forces can shell the city. The men’s downhill ski area is now a UN buffer, and the steps on the medal presentation stand are being used for executions. Zetra Stadium, home of the figure skating, was blown up a few years ago, and now serves as a base for French UN troops. Maps that used to direct tourists to various Olympic venues are now used by journalists as military battle maps.

The civil war that gutted Yugoslavia in the '90s killed nearly 150,000 people, and resulted in hundreds of thousands of refugees and the breakup of the country itself.* The siege of Sarajevo, which lasted nearly four years, killed over 11,000 people, including 1,500 children. Reminders of the 1984 games are few and far between, even as the city (now the capital of Boznia and Herzegovina) is well on the way to rebuilding. Some civic leaders even speak of the hope that they might once again host the Olympics. That, indeed, would be a miracle.

The stand for medal ceremonies: an execution site

*Making this the only Olympic Games to be held in a country that no longer exists, if one discounts the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany. I don't think the reunification of a country is quite the same as the dissolution of one, myself.

One of the most memorable quotes about Sarajevo came in a Sports Illustrated article written during the height of the war. Skier Jure Franko, who carried Yugoslavia's flag in the Opening Ceremonies and went on to win silver in the giant slalom, speaks bitterly about Sarajevo ten years later:

"As many positive feelings as I had then, that's how many negative feelings I have now. For me to know that the people who surrounded me with such love, the same people who surrounded all the athletes with such love, who wrapped the entire Olympic Village in all possible warm feelings...to know that they are now trying to kill each other is basically unthinkable. Eighty, maybe 90 percent of the people dying now in Sarajevo have absolutely nothing to do with the war. They die when they go to get bread or a bucket of water. They are innocent."

It puts the "warfare" of modern athletic competition in perspective a bit, don't you think?

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I don't know about you, but these 1980s TV Guides really don't do much for me. But that just means I have to work a little harder to find something of interest, and hard work is good for you. Isn't it?

How about Barbara Walters? Her Monday night interview special features Mr. T. ("Is he as mean as he looks?  Is anybody?"), Ester Williams ("The movie queen of the 50s dove out of stardom, into marriage.  Any regrets?") and Howard Cosell ("Why does he think people love to hate him?").  No word on whether or not she asked any of them what kind of tree they would be.

It's also a pretty good movie week, with a number of top theatrical flicks making their network debuts. Three alone come from 1981: Chariots of Fire, the Oscar winner for Best Picture, premieres on Sunday night on CBS. Its Oscar rival, On Golden Pond, makes its own bow 30 minutes later on NBC And a third, Dudley Moore's Arthur, hits the airwaves on Monday, courtesy of ABC. But if you want to watch that one, you're going to have to skip Little House: The Last Farewell on NBC. Tough call, isn't it?

There's plenty of sports to choose from, mostly for college basketball fans. I count ten games on Saturday alone, and—this is the important part—only two of them are exclusively on cable. ESPN has those, while the rest of them are either network, syndication, or a syndication/ESPN pairing. If you don't like roundball, there's other stuff: bowling and boxing on ABC, the 24 Hours of Daytona on TBS, the Bing Crosby Pro-Am on CBS, the NHL on USA.

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You might notice that some cable stations have started to creep into our discussion. It's not much, but we are seeing some of the mainstream networks being featured in the programming grids—A&E, ESPN, HBO, Nick, Showtime, TBS, TMC, USA and WGN.  Of these, I'd say that A&E has undergone the most dramatic change over time. In 1984 it's still only a part-time station, starting its broadcasting day at 8:00 p.m. ET, known as "Arts & Entertainment" and listed in the programming grid as "ART", and that's where the focus is. A selection of typical shows: Dudley Moore in concert with the San Francisco Symphony, the hilarious British sitcom Yes, Minister, a profile of the painter Andrew Wyeth, and a program by the Allen Ailey American Dance Theater. Is all of this to my interest? No, of course not. But for anyone interested in the arts, there's going to be something there—and it's not likely you're going to find this kind of programming anywhere else.

Indeed, today you won't even find it on A&E. Hell, the network doesn't even have the words "Arts" and "Entertainment" as part of their name. Today's A&E is dominated by various reality shows. Now, my inclination is that the letters A and E ought to stand for "Artless" and "Embarrassing", but I haven't watched it in many years, so I can't really say for sure. Any of you out there care to chip in?

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CBS must really be banking on the success of two of its mid-season replacement shows. It has full-page ads for Airwolf and Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer. That's something else I've noticed about this issue: it's very busy. Every page seems to have a half- or quarter-sized ad for something or other, and there are more than a few pages that only have ads. And there's very cluttered ads as well, filled with explosive ads and garish images, fairly shouting off the page. Between that and the newly introduced prime-time programming grid, not to mention the added cable stations, there's less and less room for the programs themselves.

And that's why it's so hard to "read" a TV Guide from this era. When you pick up a coffee-table book of photographs, you don't think of yourself as "reading" it; you leaf through it, browse the pages, scan the contents. (Probably the only picture publication anyone reads is Playboy, where the "reading" is sure to be in quotes.) Same here—there's so much visual overload, you can't really do anything more than flip through it. Maybe there's something worth watching buried somewhere in this mess, maybe there isn't. And that's change; times are different. More networks, more shows, more choice than back in the '60s.

I wonder how I felt about it at the time. Did I notice? Would I have made the same complaints that I'm making now? Perhaps; probably, if I'm truthful about it. After all, I was weaned on what to expect from reading those old TV Guides, with such a different look and feel to them. I remember being disappointed with TV Guide's redesign at the end of 1969—it its attempt to look modern and updated I thought it was too sparse, too insignificant, not special enough. Compared to the clutter of the '80s, though, I might be inclined to give them a break. It's true that I love TV, but as one of our great TV heroes, Captain Kirk, once said, "Too much of anything, even love, isn't necessarily a good thing." TV  

This week in TV Guide: July 26, 1975

We're back this week with another in our summer series of second looks, this time at the issue of July 26, 1975. As always when we do this, all the material you're reading is brand new - no duplication from last time. (You can read the first look here.)

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Periodically, we read about the specter of cable television looming over the network horizon. It goes by many names, depending on when the article's written; it's referred to as "Pay-TV," "CATV," and "pay-cable" in this article alone, but it all amounts to the same thing, and just about every time we read about it, we're assured that it's the next big thing, that it is - as the cover says - "ready to take off."

In this case, the phrase "take-off" can be taken literally, as the big game-changer may well be "a satellite-fed national pay-TV network," primarily financed by Time Inc., which just happens to be the owner of a fledgling cable channel named Home Box Office. Until recently HBO had a national audience of about 115,000 subscribers, gathered in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, where the signal is transmitted via microwave and land lines. However, once Teleprompter Corp., the nation's largest cable system, joined Time in the satellite investment, nearly 200,000 more homes were added. And once HBO starts beaming the signal via an RCA-leased satellite to dishes in Florida - well, you can see where this is headed. Time is nothing if not ambitious - they plan 24 of these earth stations, which will enable HBO to be delivered to over 80 systems in 21 states, comprising some 870,000 homes. Although TeleMation and Paramount are also talking about getting into the satellite and microwave networking business, "most cable experts see no HBO competition in sight."

SOURCE: HADLEY TV GUIDE COLLECTION

There's some discussion in this article (written by Richard K. Doan, whose Doan Report is a reliable TV Guide look at what's new in the industry) as to why the growth in cable hasn't happened earlier; the recession is cited as a factor, drying up venture capital, but even so there are already 10 million homes hooked up to cable. It's also interesting that, at least in the beginning, a sort of ala carte delivery method exists, with many customers paying a basic service fee of $5 or $6 per month, and anywhere from $5 to $9 for the pay channel. In a few years, however, this is expected to be replaced by a pay-per-view system (they got that wrong, at least when it comes to day-to-day watching). Everyone agrees that uncut movies are the big attraction for cable; pornography, interestingly enough, isn't seen as much of a factor, and HBO doesn't air R-rated movies until after 9:00 p.m. "It's the convenience of watching at home" that makes the difference, according to Bob Weisberg of TeleMation, who adds that the key audience is between 30 and 50 and rarely goes out to movies, but will pay to watch one at home.

Don't overlook the obstacles to growth, however. The FCC has ruled that cable can't "siphon" off movies between three and ten years old, and networks are pushing studios into even more restrictive exclusivity deals. There are also network fears that a prime sporting event, such as the World Series or Super Bowl, might eventually wind up on cable. For all that, though, one expert forecasts as many as two million homes might have cable by 1980*, a "haunting possibility" that pay-TV could grow into a "massive box office."

*In fact the number was actually closer to 16 million; by 1990 the number was 51,700,000. I wonder if any of the experts saw that coming?

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I remember how much of a treat Monday Night Baseball was, back in the summer of 1975. It wasn't really called "Monday Night Baseball" back then; Monday Night Football wasn't yet as iconic a brand as it is today. But in the days before the aforementioned cable networks started to bring us 15 or so games a week, before teams started to broadcast virtually all of their games on their local cable affiliates, you were lucky to see three or four games a week. There was the Saturday Game of the Week, of course, and if you had a team to call your own (as we did in Minnesota, though in the mid-'70s few of us would admit it), you might get two or tree more games if your team was on a road trip. But glimpses of teams from the other league (the National, in our case) were few and far between, which made an additional national TV game a treat.

The Monday night broadcast started in 1967, when NBC broadcast three specials a year, but by 1973 that number had swelled to 15. This 1975 season marks the last year of NBC's Monday night telecasts; next year the games would move to ABC, as part of the new TV deal that included alternate-year broadcasts of the All-Star Game, League Championship Series and World Series. This may have been good news for ABC, but it was bad news for me, because our single channel in The World's Worst Town™ chose to carry The John Davidson Show and Monday Night at the Movies instead. It wasn't a very good trade.

This season, the game is preceded by the 15-minute Baseball World of Joe Garagiola, a show that was both insightful and witty. Tonight, Joe talks about the minor league Portland Mavericks, a team that features Ball Four author Jim Bouton in the midst of his comeback after five years in retirement. The main game, following at 7:15 p.m. (CT) pits the Milwaukee Brewers and Boston Red Sox, back when Milwaukee was in the American League (where they belong). The secondary game, in case of rain (it was also broadcast in the cities of the two teams playing in the main game) has the San Francisco Giants and Cincinnati Reds. Those were the days - I can't remember the last time baseball was a feature prime-time program for me.

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This year we're seeing various limited-run summer series popping up on the networks. For example, on Wednesday night ABC premieres a six-week variety series hosted by Jim Stafford. Meanwhile, Gladys Knight & the Pips wind up a four-week stint on NBC Thursday nights; next week it will be Ben Vereen's turn to fill the time slot for another four weeks.

However, perhaps the oddest show of the summer debuts its five-week run on ABC Thursday night (up against Gladys Knight). It's Almost Anything Goes, I mentioned this briefly back when I did this issue the first time, but I think it bears a little more extrapolation.

Almost Anything Goes comes to television during what might be thought of as the British invasion of American TV (All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Lotsa Luck and Beacon Hill, among others); the British version was called It's a Knockout which was, itself, a takeoff on the French series Intervilles.* As I wrote back in 2012, it can be seen as a forerunner to shows such as Wipeout, but that alone sells the show short. As the synopsis from "The Screening Room" says, "shooting greased beach balls through a hoop while balancing on a tilted, greased platform" is "Silly? Definitely - but also old-fashioned slapstick fun."

*Fun fact, and one of the reasons you come to this site week after week: Both the American and British versions were part of the overall franchise umbrella, called "Jeux Sans Frontières," or "Games Without Frontiers." It's the inspiration for Peter Gabriel's hit song of the same name, which not only contains the words "Jeux Sans Frontières" in the chorus, but also contains the line "It's a knockout." You can thank the always-reliable Wikipedia for this.

The show pits six-member teams from small towns across America; this week's participants are the Burrillville (RI) Indians, the Webster (MA) Broncos, and the Putnam (CT) Clippers. The following three weeks will feature additional three-way battles, with the four champions meeting in the final episode to decide the championship. In that contest, Putnam - tonight's winner - takes on Boulder City (NV), Canton (IL), and Marianna (FL). (Boulder City wins the title, in case you've ever wondered about that.) The announcers for this wild concept are Charlie Jones - whose other work includes AFL football, the World Track & Field Championships, the Olympics, and the college football National Championship Game - and Lynn Shackleford, who for several years announces Lakers games with Chick Hearn. Dick Whittington (not this one, but this one) is what today we would refer to as the sideline reporter.

Almost Anything Goes is actually successful enough that it will be back for a second season; Jones and Shackleford return as well, but Whittington will be replaced by this guy.

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Another program we looked at last time out was Catholics, which airs as the Friday night movie on CBS. It's up against the College All-Star Game on ABC, but I remarked back then that "I'd love to see that program today." Well. . .

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Saturdays nowadays are a television wasteland, as I've mentioned more than once. In 1975, CBS didn't feel the same way. The prime time lineup is their killer sitcom schedule, with All in the Family, The Jeffersons, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and The Bob Newhart Show. In the 9:00 p.m. slot, however, the network has chosen to show a prestige property, the six-hour miniseries Moses the Lawgiver (appropriately enough, given our earlier mention of the British invasion, an import from the British distributor ITC), starring Burt Lancaster in his television debut.* As I recall, this was something of a big deal back then; unimaginable, now, that a network would show it on a Saturday night. Cable, though - maybe.

*Fun fact: Just as Charlton Heston's son Fraser played the infant Moses in The Ten Commandments, Burt Lancaster's son Bill plays the infant Moses in Moses the Lawgiver.

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Finally, let's spend a few minutes with Andy Rooney.

Rooney's in this week's issue twice; on Monday night, CBS replays his whimsical look at the vagaries of the Federal bureaucracy, "Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington." If you want to know what's wrong with the government, look no further than this statistic: "every week [the Government Printing Office] covers a forest of paper with an ocean of ink," while at the same time the Pentagon Disposal Office destroys secret papers at the rate of 10 to 14 tons of pulp a day. What man giveth, man taketh away, I guess.

More interesting, though, is Rooney's appearance in this week's Letters to the Editor section. It's not that Rooney has written a letter to TV Guide; his contribution was an article from June 28th's issue commemorating the beginning of the Bicentennial year. Apparently, in that article, Rooney wrote that there had been no women heroes in American history. Let's just say a number of readers took issue with his contention.

Linda Bilodeau of Windsor Locks, CT, suggests the names of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Eleanor Roosevelt as candidates, while Rose Joyner of Celina, OH offered Harriet Tubman, Amelia Earhart, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Sybil Ludington. Mrs. J.R. Rogers of Massilion, OH nominated Revolutionary War figures Deborah Sampson and Molly Pitcher, and Betty Zane, whose exploits were chronicled by her great-grandnephew, Zane Grey. Lenora Brennan of Brooklyn mentions Sojourner Truth, Mary Cassatt and Jane Addams, and says that "Rooney's attitude, in writing off 200 years of American women, is offensive." And out of date, I say; 200 years out of date. TV  

Around the Dial

The Broadcasting Archive at the University of Maryland nails it with this one.  Star Trek III on VH-1?  In a previous installment we talked about the idea that so many niche cable networks have completely lost their way - and their reason for being.  Will the inevitable ala-cartization of cable TV finish them off for good?

The Flaming Nose has a story, appropriate for the coming long weekend, that tells how the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. played a role in keeping Nichelle Nichols on Star Trek.  Nice way I've been able to link these first two stories, hmm?

I haven't made a commitment to catching Maverick every week, but I'm almost always entertained when I do, and The HORN Section provides the background on yet another episode with this week's "Maverick Monday" on the final season episode "Epitaph for a Gambler."  Be warned, though: this is from the post-James Garner era of Maverick, though Jack Kelly was always good.

Bosom Buddies was not on my watch list when it was on TV, though I knew enough about it to notice that one of its stars hit it pretty big in the movies, and the other didn't do too badly in television.  But Comfort TV suggests that the show should be remembered as more than a punch line - in fact, it was pretty good.

This week's TV Guide review at Television Obscurities takes us to the issue of January 16, 1965.  Among other things, it gives us a preview of TV's coverage of the upcoming presidential inauguration, a look at behind-the-scenes battles at Peyton Place, and Cleveland Amory's savage review of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.  Some great images from this week's issue!

Finally, The Bootleg Files gives us some insight on the beloved Sherlock Holmes movies of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, which many of us have seen on television, and tells us about the one person who wasn't a fan at all - Basil Rathbone himself.

Sorry for the relative shortness this week, which shouldn't reflect on all the great stuff out there.  See you back here tomorrow for another big TV Guide, right? TV