It's no exaggeration to say that Leonard Bernstein was, at least in part, responsible for my love of classical music. His Young People's Concerts, which aired on CBS from 1958 to 1972, were mostly before my conscious time, but I remember seeing enough of them in the last few years to be really interested. My first live trip to a classical music concert was a similar Young People's Concert done by what was then called the Minneapolis Symphony (which has since then taken on the far more pedestrian moniker Minnesota Orchestra). Anyway, when you're being taught something by someone with a real passion for it, at least some of that passion is bound to rub off.
I have mixed feelings for Bernstein; starting with Tom Wolfe's infamous Radical Chic, which described in brutal, unrelenting detail the utter pomposity of the wealthy Bernsteins, in their Park Avenue apartment, hosting an awareness fundraiser for the Black Panthers. It's almost impossible to understand how anyone could take Bernstein seriously after that excoriating portrait, and then you combine it with Bernstein's increasingly flamboyant, almost campy lifestyle in his later years (I particularly remember his capes and other outrageous clothes), emoting on the podium, drinking heavily and often behaving crassly in public—well, the man was at times virtually a parody of himself. And again, one wonders, how can anyone take Lenny seriously?
Then you watch one of those concerts—almost all of them are on YouTube—you listen to how the man teaches, how he explains music to grade school children—not really children, but, as he called them, young people. I'm no musicologist, but I do know a fair bit about music, and yet watching some of these programs I find myself scrambling to keep up with this thought process. It's deep, profound, often engaging with ideas and topics such as philosophy in a quest to explain the relationship between music and life. Bernstein never talks down to his audience (either the young people in the concert hall, or those watching on television), he never condescends or patronizes, he always interjects enough topical language and music to let them know that he understands where it's at, and he presents all this as someone who finds the subject matter quite exciting, and wants his audience to share in that thrill. And, from the expressions on their faces, some of them do. Granted, they've been prepped for it by their music teacher in school (remember when they had music appreciation classes?), but there's really nothing that prepares anyone, young or old, from Lenny at full wattage.
Watch this program in which he explains Richard Strauss's famous piece, Thus Spake Zarathustra, better known as the theme to 2001. By the time it's over, you'll know more about Nietzsche'sphilosophy than you ever thought possible, as well as an absolutely stunning demonstration of how Strauss's music depicts the themes in Nietzsche's work. Bernstein expects his audience to be able to follow this, expects that grade school students can comprehend complex themes and ideas, and to relate them to the meaning of life. I found this as thrilling as Bernstein must have.
For all that Bernstein accomplished, the conducting and the compositions and the writing, I think his lasting influence will be as a teacher. Not a teacher of other musicians, although he mentored a good many of them. No, it's as a teacher who tried to enrich the lives of his students just a little bit, to make them look at life in a different way, perhaps introduce them to something they hadn't considered before. I recall a TV Guide in which Judith Crist wrote about how one of the functions of a critic was to teach readers to demand more, to put a value on the time that they spend watching a movie and then expect that movie to be worth that time? To stimulate a response? That's what Bernstein does in these programs, and in other cases, and there's nobody better at it them him. You know how I've written about how a program like Alistair Cooke's America taught me more than my high school civics class? Never mind music appreciation; I can guarantee this program should have been shown in my college philosophy class.
So can we reconcile the two Bernsteins, the teacher and the tramp, the passionate musician and the inviter of ridicule? Should we even try? This is, I think, one of those cases where I'm going to have to agree to disagree with myself, for as hard as it may be to take Lenny seriously, when Leonard Bernstein talks about music, people listen. Am I a nerd for calling this kind of show "thrilling"? Perhaps, but it's so worth the ride.
TV
From the YouTube channel Free the Kinescopes, it's a televised performance by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra, with the Robert Shaw Chorale, in a live broadcast from April 3, 1948. On the program: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
There are a number of things to note, besides the now-unthinkable idea that a television network would actually have its own symphony orchestra, led by one of the world's most famous conductors. For one, the broadcast comes from NBC's famed Studio 8-H in New York City (now home to Saturday Night Live), which makes for a very intimate setting, with the small audience right on top of the action.
Given its beginnings as a radio orchestra (it was founded in 1937), it's no surprise that announcer Ben Grauer, although he appears on camera, functions essentially as he would if this were a radio broadcast, standing in front of a microphone and reading from his script. Not too fancy, perhaps, but certainly effective.
And note as well how Maestro Toscanini, though he was one of the most famous (and intimidating) conductors of his era, has to wait until Grauer has finished his introduction before launching into the downbeat. Even then, television called the shots.
Until a few years ago, the most I could say about Peter Gunn was that Craig Stevens played a suave private eye, and it had one of the coolest themes of all time. I had to have seen it at some point in time, probably many years ago, before I was old enough to understand Lola Albright. But then I was able to get the complete series on DVD—and then I got Lola Albright.
Albright plays Edie Hart, the singer who's also Gunn's girlfriend. She works out of a bar called Mother's, which doubles as the place where Gunn meets his clients and conducts his business. She's a smart, sassy character* who's graced with some snappy dialogue, every bit Gunn's equal in the scenes in which they're matched. She has a fine singing voice, doing her own vocals in the occasional set pieces at Mother's. She exudes an adult sexiness that makes it impossible to take your eyes off of her when she's on screen. And she's a likable character, as is Gunn, making this one of the easier private eye shows to watch.
*Gunn's nickname for her was "Silly."
Off screen, Lola Albright has some things to say about what she sees as an unreasonable invasion of her privacy since her divorce from actor Jack Carson. "To tell the truth, I'm sick and tired of the line 'Does Lola get what Lola wants?'* Every magazine and newspaper seems to leap on it as though discovering it for the very first time. I am equally sick and tired of the line 'Lonely Lola.'" Such are the curses of having an alliterative name, it would appear. "If my name were Betty, I'd be two cliches to the good." She struggles with the line between personal and public; while she understands the sacrifices of privacy that are part of stardom, she wonders "why does the press have to go so far? Why do they print things you never said, things they make up out of a blue sky? Why do they twist what you say into meanings you never meant?" Lola also denies she's dissatisfied with her role on Gunn; she likes how Edie got her own place in the third (and final) season, a plot devise that gives her a chance to sing more. "I don't want to dominate the show and I certainly don't want a series of my own."
*If you're unsure of the origin of the line, watch this.
People who work with her have nothing but good things to say. Frank Stempel, who was her ex-husband Carson's manager, says that "Even now that she's making good money, she doesn't really know what it is. She goes out of her way to help people. She'd give away her last dime if she thought it would help somebody." Press agent Bill Stein remembers how when his wife was in the hospital, "Lola must have called me a dozen times offering to come out and take care of the two kids while I was working. If you know her, you like her."
Peter Gunn, which ends its three-year run at the end of the current season, is probably the high point of Lola Albright's career, although she's hardly a recluse once the series ends, appearing in several big-screen movies and is a steady presence in guest roles on TV through the 80s. But there's no disagreeing that in a genre that often produces more than its share of annoying characters, Peter Gunn's Edie is one of the most enjoyable; in fact, after you've watched her in a few episodes, you'll probably be singing these words as well:
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I've mentioned in the past the snarkiness of TV Guide writers like Richard Gehman, and the Letters to the Editor section this week shows I'm not the only one who picks up on this. Apparently Gehman did another of his hatchet jobs a couple of weeks ago, this time on Bobby Darin, to coincide with Darin's upcoming network special. Carol Tuman of Great Neck, NY writes that Gehman's profile of Darin "is . . . full of unprecedented nastiness," while Donna Ott and Joyce D'Ambrosio of Fair Lawn, NJ say that "We have never read or heard so many degrading comments on this terrific star," and make the point that "we are not teen-agers; we are a single girl of 20 and a married woman of 23," possibly in response to a comment about the demographics of Darin's fanbase.
Now, it might be that Gehman's article is a fairly accurate portrait of Darin; Kevin Spacey's Darin biopic Beyond the Sea certainly demonstrated that Darin had a his share of warts, and maybe Gehman really does capture how the people who work with Darin feel about him. And clearly, Gehman is among the vanguard of writers turning TV Guide away from the studio-driven fan-type articles of its first few years towards more of a critical appraisal of the medium andits stars, and I think we should be grateful for that. But at the same time there's clearly something about Gehman's writing style, his choice of words and turn of phrase, that rubbed readers the wrong way.
In Glenn Altschuler and David Grossvogel's excellent Changing Channels: America in TV Guide, the authors write that "Gehman believed that creative people were often emotionally insecure because of an unhappy childhood, and that those who became celebrities in the entertainment industry sometimes did so because their insecurity motivated them to succeed." I'm not surprised to read that; it's fairly typical of the amateur psychoanalysis that was so prevalent in the journalism of the time.
One could be tempted to suggest that Gehman was projecting his own insecurities onto his subjects; according to his entry in the always-reliable Wikipedia, he was married five times and fathered at least nine children, and wrote under a variety of pen names—all before his death at age 51. Perhaps he had an identity problem tied to a basic inferiority complex, causing him to tear others down in an attempt to elevate himself. Perhaps his experiences in the entertainment industry left him jaded and cynical, and ascribed those same motives to those he met.
I don't know, and it's not my place to say anything. Richard Gehman was also a talented and interesting writer who lent a much-needed seriousness to TV Guide. He was prolific to say the least; not only did he write 20 books, his friend Maurice Zolotow tells a story about how Gehman once wrote three of the principal articles for an issue of Cosmopolitan, each one under a different name, plus a record review and possibly another column. Now that takes something. And his daughter Pleasant, an artist, author and dancer (among other things) has had quite the career herself, both as herself and under her stage name.
You meet the most interesting people in TV Guide. Some of them even have articles written about them.
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Let's meet some more of those interesting people that fill the pages of this week's issue. Ed Sullivan leads off the star wars on Sunday night (7:00 p.m., CBS), with a fine lineup that includes Peggy Lee, Paul Anka, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, comedian Myron Cohen, the Wanderers vocal quartet, the Martelli Trio acrobats, and dancer Carmen de Lsvallade. I think Hollywood Palace would be hard-pressed to stand up to that. Next, G.E. Theater has some star power of its own; Ernest Borgnine stars as a has-been Hollywood director in the drama "The Legend that Walks Like a Man" (8:00 p.m., CBS), with Zsa Zsa Gabor, William Schallert, and Jason Robards Sr., and a script by Budd Schulberg. And on The Loretta Young Show (9:00 p.m., NBC), Darryl Hickman makes his television writing debut with "The Golden Cord," in which he also stars.
On Wednesday night, Bob Hope hosts the aptly-named Bob Hope Sports Awards (9:00 p.m., NBC), honoring the "best and brawniest athletes" of 1960. Being that it's a Bob Hope special, there are plenty of beautiful women among the presenters*—Julie London, Jayne Mansfield, Ginger Rogers, Jane Russell, Tuesday Weld, Esther Williams, Lucille Ball, Jane Wyman—but I wonder how many athletes were in attendance? The winners included Joe Bellino (college football), Norm Van Brocklin (pro football), Wilt Chamberlain (pro basketball), Pancho Gonzales (pro tennis), Dick Groat (National League baseball), Rafer Johnson (track), Roger Maris (American League baseball), Arnold Palmer (golf), Floyd Patterson (boxing), Jerry Lucas (college basketball), and Barry Mackay (amateur tennis). Might have been an interesting show; might not.
*Also among the presenters: Dean Martin, Dana Andrews and Ronald Reagan; obviously afterthoughts.
This didn't become an annual tradition (there are a lot of one-and-done sports awards shows in the history of television), but Bob did return with another version of the Bob Hope Sports Awards from 1973 through 1975. Hopefully, they didn't wait so long for an encore because the first one had been such a dud. . .
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He gets by with a little help from his friends
Wednesday's schedule also features taped coverage of President Kennedy's fourth press conference. (No details on which networks or what time it'll be shown.) I've mentioned before that these press conferences were quite the sensation, as Americans had never seen the president quizzed by reporters quite like this; President Eisenhower's conferences had been shown on same-day tape, but JFK had been the first to air live pressers on a regular basis, and it was his generous access to the press (at the time of his death, according to the JFK Library, he'd held 64 conferences, an average of one every sixteen days) that made those conferences popular viewing. "The first, less than a week after his inauguration, was viewed by an estimated 65 million people. A poll taken in 1961 indicated that 90 percent of those interviewed had watched at least one of JFK's first three press conferences. The average audience for all the broadcast conferences was 18 million viewers."
We shouldn't be too surprised; the medium loved JFK, and he loved to use the medium. The reporters loved him as well, for he was great copy: witty, quick, engaging, informative without necessarily saying anything. There's been a good deal of controversy over the amount of press access given by recent occupants of the White House, but there's little question Kennedy made himself much more accessible. And the viewing audience responded.
I would never make the link between a Kennedy and the playboy philosophy, so it's purely by chance that our next stop is Playboy's Penthouse (Thursday, 11:00 p.m., KMSP),where Hugh Hefner's guests are Tony Curtis (playing the flute!), Ray Charles, Gene Krupa and his trio, Phyllis Diller, and Frank D'Rone. I'm no fan of Hefner or his lifestyle, but the man certainly did a lot to give jazz musicians, especially black musicians, a media platform that they had a hard time getting otherwise.
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Thursday night's Ford Show with Tennessee Ernie Ford (8:30 p.m., NBC) offers a real change of pace: an adaptation of Bizet's opera Carmen. Ernie, who loved to play "The Ol' Pea-Picker," had in fact been classically trained at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, and he uses that rich bass-baritone of his to good use tonight in the role of the flashy torreador Escamillo. Karen Wessler plays the title role, John Guarnieri is Don Jose, and Ernie's house singers, the Top Twenty, provide the chorus. It's not the only time opera features on The Ford Show; in previous years, Ernie and the gang had done the Gilbert and Sulliven operettas The Mikado and HMS Pinafore.
On the other hand, you'd expect classical music from Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, and on Sunday's Young People's Concert and on Sunday you'll get it, with a tribute to the great American composer Aaron Copland, who celebrated his 60th birthday last November. (3:00 p.m., CBS; you can see a clip from the show here.) I loved watching these concerts when I was young, although I doubt that, at nine months, I tuned it for this one. Bernstein, whatever his other faults, was an engaging and often brilliant teacher: in these telecasts (53 of them, which ran on CBS from 1958 to 1972) he never talks down to children, never dumbs the material down for them. He treats them, instead, as intelligent beings capable of understanding and appreciating music, and he does a wonderful job of making classical music accessible and exciting without resorting to gimmicks. If it is true that the audience for classical music is dying off (literally), much of the blame can be laid at the feet of an educational system that no longer values music appreciation classes, and an industry itself that thinks Star Wars-themed concerts and hyperactive experiences are the way to introduce kids to the classics.
Bernstein wasn't the only teacher of classical music, of course. Through the 70s there were various attempts to use television to spread music appreciation. The great Joan Sutherland, with her conductor husband Richard Bonygne, hosted a PBS series in the early 70s, Who's Afraid of Opera? which used puppets to help teach children (and adults!) about opera.
It was the young people's concerts of the Minneapolis Symphony that first introduced me to classical music, and helped foster a lifelong interest in the classics. True, I didn't really develop this appreciation fully uintil the last 25 years, when I learned to embrace opera, but who knows if I would have been open to it at all without learning about it at a young age?
I'm put in mind of all this because of another letter this week, from Paul Winterhalter of Lincoln, NE, decrying the disappearance of Voice of Firestone. "The television 'brains' who presume to do all the thin king for the millions of viewers said that the Voice of Firestone lacked the quality for prime time, so we lost a fine program." Mr. Winterhalter said this in the context of criticizing Jackie Gleason's infamous You're in the Picture flop—"the most awful bunch of garbage*"—which those "brains" obviously considered a superior, or at least having the potential to be a more popular, show.
It's true that acclaimed music programs such as Voice of Firestone were never ratings hits, and it's also true that television—a medium designed primarily as a vehicle for moving the products of its advertisers—can't pay the bills solely from Peabody awards. Nonetheless, as I mentioned a while back, the Golden Age referred to more than the quality of programs; it had to do with the variety as well.
This Friday, opposite the post-You're in the Picture Gleason show, NBC airs The Bell Telephone Hour (8:00 p.m.), one of those shows probably on Mr. Winterhalter's hit parade (as well as being a favorite of mine), presenting "The Sounds of America," a salute to American music taped at Disneyland and produced (and conducted) by Gordon Jenkins. The show features not only musical pieces but "sound-effects 'essays'" that bring, literally, the sounds of America—the West, the river, Main Street. There's a heavy emphasis on dance, with Gene Nelson, Jacques d'Amboise and the Earl Twins dancing to choreography by Hermes Pan, who collaborated so successfully for so many years with Fred Astaire.
There's a sad irony in all that, don't you think? A program about America's long-gone past, told by a television genre on the way to being long-past itself.
TV
Given the choice between a cartoon of cats watching television and a video of musicians playing music, I opted to go with the latter this week. (You can let me know whether or not I chose wisely.) This video ties in with last week's clip of Glenn Gould discussing Mozart, in that it's from a time when arts programming was more common on television, although it comes from a BBC broadcast in 1954, and the Beeb still devotes some time and effort to this kind of programming today.*
*It should be noted, however, that the BBC can afford such programming because 1) it's a state-financed television network, and 2) people pay an annual television fee that subsidizes the BBC family of networks. I'll also mention that BBC news coverage is considered to have a decided liberal bias, which in turn has provoked a move against the fee. I'll have more on this kind of thing Saturday.
Anyway, back to the video! The conductor is the immortal Leopold Stokowski, and the piece in question is "When I am laid in earth," popularly known as "Dido's Lament," from the 1688 opera Dido and Aeneas by the English composer Henry Purcell (being performed with an orchestral arrangement by Stokowski himself). In Stokowski's prefacing remarks, he mentions how known and loved this piece is; it's annually played as part of the Remembrance Sunday ceremonies in England, and since today is Remembrance/Veterans Day, it's an appropriate example for us to us.
I don't know how familiar it is in this country other than for classical music aficionados; It's been used in movies and television shows over the years, including Band of Brothers. If it is true, as I believe it is, that music can soothe the savage breast, what better for our savage and discouraging age than something like this, which demonstrates the often-otherworldly quality that music possesses. This is the kind of thing that should be familiar to us, and of all the responsibilities that television has abrogated in the last few decades, that ability to provide this kind of programming is perhaps the most unfortunate.
What we have below is the pianist Glenn Gould, appearing on the April 28, 1968 PBL, discussing "How Mozart Became a Bad Composer." The segment lasts just under 40 minutes; PBL itself ran for two hours. In discusing Mozart, the notoriously eccentric Gould assumes the persona of one of his alter egos, the English conductor Sir Nigel Twitt-Thornwaite, to provide a counterpoint to Gould's own argument. You don't have to watch it all now; I'll be back afterwards to make a point or two.
The broadcast stirred up quite a bit of controversy, which NET must have loved; as Gould biographer Kevin Bazzana notes, "The program outraged viewers in both the United States and Canada, including formerly sympathetic fans and critics." Gould was known for taking potshots at Mozart, whom he viewed as a hedonist; he once said that when the composer died in 1791 at the age of thirty-five, "he died too late rather than too soon".
You may or may not have strong feelings on Mozart; I think much of his work is sublime, the output of a true genius, but I've also knocked his weak ending to Don Giovanni, the chauvinistic storyline in Cosi fan tutte, and the Masonic boredom of The Magic Flute. (Then again, there's his Requiem, which forgives everything else.) The point is, can you imagine this happening today? That a national television network, even PBS, would think that viewers might actually find this interesting, even engaging? That they would sit down to watch a 40-minute segment on Mozart?
But they did, back then. And maybe the episode didn't attract a massive audience, but people watched. Controversy resulted. I had no intention of watching the whole thing when I first saw the clip, not right away; I just wanted to check out what looked like a remarkably clear video tape from a program that had aired 52 years ago. Forty minutes later. . .
Last week on Twitter, the critic Terry Teachout pointed out that he'd first seen Hamlet, Our Town, Death of a Salesman, and the pianist Vladimir Horowitz "on what used to be called the three major TV networks—IN PRIME TIME." And times have changed. But the point remains: while it's understandable that not all TV shows are like this. It's shameful that there aren't any TV shows like this. Not any more. But there were, once upon a time, when the arts were part of lowbrow American culture, and we were all perhaps a bit more civilized. And you didn't even have to like Mozart. TV
BENJAMIN BRITTEN CONDUCTING HIS MADE-FOR-TV OPERA, OWEN WINGRAVE (BBC)
PART 1 OF 4
One of the great pleasures I find in studying classic television is the era of staged drama—live and taped performances of plays, musicals, and opera. The nature of the television studio and its confined space, as opposed to the large-scale movie stage, requires innovative direction; the ability to create imaginative set design and utilize camera angles and close-ups allows a freedom not found in a theater or opera house. Of all these various forms of television drama, I find television opera to be the most interesting. It's a relatively brief period of time, covering less than two decades, but it illustrates a type of high culture that had once shown great promise, but has long since disappeared from television. I'm dedicating this month to a four-part look at the history of television opera: an overview of opera specifically designed for TV; a look at NBC's bold effort to provide opera on a regular basis; the story of the most famous of all TV operas, one that became television's first Christmas tradition; and the state of opera on television today. We'll begin with Jennifer Barnes's definitive study of opera commissioned for television.
Believe it or not, there was a time when it was thought that television could play an important part in the creation of a new and revolutionary art form. It was called the opera.
In 1952, NBC Opera Theatre prepared to present the American premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd, which had been written only the year before. Based on the novel by Herman Melville, one of the opera’s most famous scenes contains a twelve-minute aria by John Claggart, the villain of the piece, “in which the Master-at-Arms delineates his hatred of Budd and reveals his determination to destroy him.” For the broadcast, producer Samuel Chotzinoff elected to excise the entire aria—partly because of the need to compress the opera into a 90-minute timeslot, but also because he felt television presented an opportunity to completely change the way operas were written. Through the use of close-ups and shadows cast by lighting, Claggart’s malevolent intentions were expressed—proving, Chotzinoff said, that a broadcast could “[accomplish] in a few seconds what the aria took twelve minutes to tell us.” The implications were obvious, Chotzinoff felt, thinking it “probably that the composers of the future, writing especially for television, will find no necessity for explanatory and illuminating solo arias, once they realize the revealing potentialities of the television camera.”
Television Opera: The Fall of Opera Commissioned for Television, by Jennifer Barnes, Boydell Press, 138 pages, $29.95
Samuel Chotzinoff certainly understood the visual power inherent in television, but his confidence that it would change the course of modern opera was more than slightly misplaced. In Television Opera: The Fall of Opera Commissioned for Television, Jennifer Barnes shows how such early promise failed to pay off, leaving TV opera, like live drama, a dinosaur of television’s past.
Barnes focuses her book on three specific case studies, all of them operas commissioned for television: Amahl and the Night Visitors, Gian-Carlo Menotti’s landmark Christmas story that was the first ever written for TV; Britten’s Owen Wingrave, which he wrote for the BBC in 1970 after having seen several of his operas adapted for television; and Gerald Barry’s The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit, a 1994 production that was intended to explicitly take advantage of technology that only TV could provide.
While the three operas share a common birth, they differ in substantial ways. For example, Amahl was broadcast live on Christmas Eve in 1951, with Menotti working almost until the last minute to finish the composition. Owen Wingrave was shot on tape, duplicating the feel of a live broadcast while enabling special effects and editing to ensure the best performance possible. Beauty and Deceit was filmed, giving it the look of a movie, and allowing for a production radically different from one presented on the stage of a theater.
In the wake of the success of Amahl (including a rare front-page review in The New York Times), the future of television opera looked bright indeed. NBC Opera Theatre had been a regular presence on the network since 1949, and would continue presenting a handful of operas each season up through 1964. Menotti’s career flourished, as he won two Pulitzer Prizes and received several additional commissions from NBC. While Britten had not been particularly thrilled with the network’s adaptation of Billy Budd (which was edited so severely that he demanded the broadcast be entitled Scenes from “Billy Budd”), he was happier with BBC adaptations of some of his other works, including Peter Grimes, for which Britten conducted the orchestra. While Billy Budd was taped, rather than live, Britten insisted that the music and singing be performed live, rather than dubbed in after the fact (which would become standard in the future, including in The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit).
While many of these productions won great acclaim, however, ratings were something different. Due to its enduring popularity, Amahl never lacked for sponsorship, but most of the other broadcasts were subsidized by NBC. Gradually the number of productions diminished, as did the commissions, until televised opera of any kind—not just that written for the medium—had all but disappeared. Public broadcasting, thought to be the safeguard of such cultural programming, started out with promise, but as government funding dissipated, it too felt the pull of ratings (and donor dollars) and opted for more “popular” programming.
The arts remained active, if not vital, on British television, and The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit was part of a series of operas commissioned by Britain’s Channel 4—with the requirement that they be written in such a way as to make a live performance all but impossible. In other words, the operas were not only written for television, but were meant to be performed only on television. The fact that Barry’s opera went on to an eventual staged production is almost immaterial; several critics suggested that it was intrinsically unsuitable for live performances.
Barnes’ choice of these three operas for close examination does not neglect the overall genre; indeed, they were chosen specifically to illustrate the arc traveled by opera commissioned for television. And while each one is interesting in and of itself, they take on an added dimension when considered as part of the whole, showing how a form of programming which once held such promise never truly fulfilled its potential.
As one might suspect, this isn’t a book to be read casually (though I must say I enjoyed it immensely), but while an appreciation of opera certainly helps, it isn’t absolutely required. Our cast of characters ranges from merely proficient to fascinating to colorful, and Barnes takes a close look at the inside workings of television, spending ample time on the choice of camera angles, why close-ups are sometimes good and sometimes bad, and how in the early days of TV a director’s job was considerably more difficult that it might seem. In doing so she reprints excerpts from several shooting scripts, showing the various stage directions and framings, and provides a glimpse at the challenges inherent in adapting a work for television—especially when the composer of said work is both alive and opinionated!
It may not be for everyone, but anyone wanting to learn more about a niche of television history that in a handful of decades went from accepted fact to invisible memory will find Television Opera not only the definitive resource, but an engrossing story as well.
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Here's the complete broadcast of 1952's "Scenes from Billy Budd"; the title change was demanded by Britten, who felt that Chotzinoff's various cuts, including the excising of Claggart's aria, had so changed the nature of the production that it was no longer the same opera. The quality of the recording is rough, but considering the historical significance of the broadcast, I think we can handle it.
For reference, here's the Claggart aria that Chotzinoff cut from the production, which has come to be considered one of the most significant in the bass repertoire. The bass in question is the great James Morris in a Met performance from 1997.
It's no exaggeration to say that Leonard Bernstein was, at least in part, responsible for my love of classical music. His Young People's Concerts, which aired on CBS from 1958 to 1972, were mostly before my conscious time, but I remember seeing enough of them in the last few years to be really interested. My first live trip to a classical music concert was a similar Young People's Concert done by what was then called the Minneapolis Symphony (which has since then taken on the far more pedestrian moniker Minnesota Orchestra). Anyway, when you're being taught something by someone with a real passion for it, at least some of that passion is bound to rub off.
I have mixed feelings for Bernstein; starting with Tom Wolfe's infamous Radical Chic, which described in brutal, relentless detail the utter pomposity of the wealthy Bernsteins, in their Park Avenue apartment, hosting an awareness fundraiser for the Black Panthers. It's almost impossible to understand how anyone could take Bernstein seriously after that excoriating portrait, and then you combine it with Bernstein's increasingly flamboyant, almost campy lifestyle in his later years (I particularly remember his capes and other outrageous clothes), emoting on the podium, drinking heavily and often behaving crassly in public—well, the man was at times virtually a parody of himself. And again, one wonders, how can anyone take Lenny seriously?
Then you watch one of those concerts—TCM had five of them on a few weeks ago, in honor of Bernstein's 100th birthday, and almost all of them are on YouTube—, you listen to how the man teaches, how he explains music to grade school children—not really children, but, as he called them, young people. I'm no musicologist, but I do know a fair bit about music, and yet watching some of these programs I find myself scrambling to keep up with this thought process. It's deep, profound, often engaging with ideas and topics such as philosophy in a quest to explain the relationship between music and life. Bernstein never talks down to his audience (either the young people in the concert hall, or those watching on television), he never condescends or patronizes, he always interjects enough topical language and music to let them know that he understands where it's at, and he presents all this as someone who finds the subject matter quite exciting, and wants his audience to share in that thrill. And, from the expressions on their faces, some of them do. Granted, they've been prepped for it by their music teacher in school (remember when they had music appreciation classes?), but there's really nothing that prepares anyone, young or old, from Lenny at full wattage.
Watch this program in which he explains Richard Strauss's famous piece, Thus Spake Zarathustra, better known as the theme to 2001. By the time it's over, you'll know more about Nietzsche'sphilosophy than you ever thought possible, as well as an absolutely stunning demonstration of how Strauss's music depicts the themes in Nietzsche's work. Bernstein expects his audience to be able to follow this, expects that grade school students can comprehend complex themes and ideas, and to relate them to the meaning of life. I found this as thrilling as Bernstein must have.
For all that Bernstein accomplished, the conducting and the compositions and the writing, I think his lasting influence will be as a teacher. Not a teacher of other musicians, although he mentored a good many of them. No, it's as a teacher who tried to enrich the lives of his students just a little bit, to make them look at life in a different way, perhaps introduce them to something they hadn't considered before. Remember how on Saturday Judith Crist wrote about how one of the functions of a critic was to teach readers to demand more, to put a value on the time that they spend watching a movie and then expect that movie to be worth that time? To stimulate a response? That's what Bernstein does in these programs, and in other cases, and there's nobody better at it them him. You know how I've written about how a program like Alistair Cooke's America taught me more than my high school civics class? Never mind music appreciation; I can guarantee this program should have been shown in my college philosophy class.
So can we reconcile the two Bernsteins, the teacher and the tramp, the passionate musician and the inviter of ridicule? Should we even try? This is, I think, one of those cases where I'm going to have to agree to disagree with myself, for as hard as it may be to take Lenny seriously, when Leonard Bernstein talks about music, people listen. Am I a nerd for calling this kind of show "thrilling"? Perhaps, but it's so worth the ride. TV
The title for this week's entry comes from our first story, a very interesting link from Terry Teachout on Leonard Bernstein's Young Peoples Concerts on CBS, and why they had such prominence when they were aired. In this Saturday's TV Guide review I take some time to look at a typical Sunday afternoon of programming back in the early '60s, also known as the timeslot where cultural shows went to die. It's quite interesting to note that half of Bernstein's concerts appeared not in this Sunday afternoon slot, but in prime time. How things change.
Speaking of Teachout, you'll recall that last year I wrote about Bob Hope, and how Teachout had identified him as a man largely forgotten today. I had my doubts, which have increased since then, and that's why this piece from the AV Club on the lasting influence of the Crosby-Hope "Road" movies interested me. Forgotten by individuals, perhaps, but still present in what we watch.
I've always had something of an affinity for losers, having been one (big time) when I ran for political office in a previous life.* Naturally, therefore, I was attracted to Cult TV's article on the obscure British show The Losers, starring Reginald Perrin's Leonard Rossiter.
*So much so that I used to joke our campaign theme ought to have been Beck's "Loser."
Television Obscurities has a piece on the state of classic TV on television, which gives us a rundown on the increasing number of classic TV channels, and what you can expect on each of them. In our apartment building, thanks to ATT Uverse, all we can get is MeTV, which means an HD antenna may well be in our future.
Those Were the Days has some great images in their collection, and this one is a terrific TV Guide cover from 1956 with Janis Page. The colors on that are so vivid; they leap off the page so much more than the covers today. (Check out the green logo!) And of course Janis isn't bad either.
And speaking of images, Faded Signals has some great ones from the good old days when Dallas was on the air. That's my adopted hometown you're talking about now, and although some of the sites (like Texas Stadium) have since disappeared, there's still a lot of the skyline to see.
Many thanks to you who wished me well last week while I recovered from my brief bout of something or other, from which I've mostly recovered thanks to the miracle of modern pharmaceuticals. Let's celebrate with a new issue of TV Guide tomorrow! What's that, you say I do that every Saturday anyway? Well, we'll still take a look at it! TV
This week we get a look at Paul Sand, whose CBS sitcom Friends and Lovers has been an almost unanimous choice to be the breakout hit of the new season. It's sandwiched between two of CBS' biggest shows, All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. And yet the series barely survives the new year, exiting in early January after a mere 15 episodes.
There's no hint of that in Rowland Barber's article on "Paul Sand's Long Road to Stardom." Sand comes across as an eminently likable person: modest, unpretentious. A veteran of the Second City, he's now the rising star of the MTM team, having first been noticed when his old friend Valerie Harper recommended him for a guest spot on Moore's show, and now slated to follow Bob Newhart into the world of MTM sitcom success. Barber calls him "possibly the most appealing new face on the tube since the debut of Mary Tyler Moore herself."
So what happened? One theory, suggested by the always-reliable Wikipedia, is that the ratings were good, just not good enough - it lost too much of Family's lead-in, and itself wasn't feeding the viewers to MTM. In another era, it might have been given more time to develop, or moved to a different time slot. Likewise, in another era, it might have been cancelled even more rapidly, in order to limit the damage. Its replacement, The Jeffersons, winds up doing exactly what the network wants. As for Sand, despite a long television career, never again would he headline his own series.
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Last week we took a look at the new 1967 model televisions, spotlighted in a special section in the middle of the issue, replete with ads from all the major manufacturers. Eight years later, it's a four-page article, surrounded by car ads (and no Joey Heatherton). And whereas the story of 1967's sets is COLOR!, the big news in 1975 will be far less sexy: solid state, meaning that except for the picture tube itself, all those little tubes in the set's interior are gone - replaced by transistors, diodes and integrated circuits.*
*Ironically, the first solid state television was introduced by Motorola in 1967. I can't remember if it was mentioned in that preview or not.
What's good about this is that integrated circuits should allow for "vastly improved" color adjustments, getting rid of virtually all the knobs and dials that used to do the job. It's more energy efficient as well, a handy thing to have during the energy crisis. The old dial that you see on my "Around the Dial" features will be a thing of the past as well, replaced by remote control or push button tuners. Some of them will feature on-screen channel displays. And in general, the picture should be both clearer and brighter - important things, now that 70% of the public has color TV.
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The ill-fated Morning News duo.
It might seem hard to believe nowadays, but one of the biggest TV stories of 1973 was the debut of Sally Quinn as co-anchor of the CBS Morning News with Hughes Rudd. Quinn had been a journalist with the Washington Post when she was hired by CBS, and she was thrown on the air with virtually no preparation or training whatsoever, teamed up with an anchor with whom she had no chemistry and who clearly didn't want her on the show. Not surprisingly, it was a disaster, lasting six months before Quinn returned to the Post.
Well, it's comeback time of a sort for Quinn, as The Doan Report - well, reports. She's going to be featured in NBC's new magazine show, Weekend, hosted by Lloyd Dobyns. Weekend will be a once-a-month show, taking the place of the Saturday night Johnny Carson rerun.* Next year, it will be performing the same function for NBC's new late-night comedy show - Saturday Night Live.
*Except in the areas where Carson reruns are on Sunday; in those cases, the show runs on Sunday. Which is, I suppose, why it's called Weekend.
Weekend itself runs for five years, the last of which was spent in prime time, when Dobyns was joined by Linda Ellerbee. Quinn maintained a successful career at the Post, marrying her boss Ben Bradlee, and becoming one of Washington's more successful hostesses.
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Lots of shows to look at this week, so let's get right to it.
Saturday's college football is nothing special. In this era of one game per week, the regional choice is Washington State vs. Illinois. The two teams will combine for eight victories this season; Illinois wins this game 21-19. Following the game, Wide World of Sports presents the Harlem Globetrotters from London, followed by the Southern 500 stock car race, taped on Labor Day weekend.
That night, it's the bizarre, wonderful movie Theatre of Blood on ABC, starring Vincent Price and Diana Rigg, and featuring a who's-who of British character actors including Ian Hendry, Coral Browne (Mrs. Price), Robert Coote (from The Rogues), Oscar winner Jack Hawkins (Ben Hur), Robert Morley, and Arthur Lowe. As Judith Crist says in her review, "if the names don't ring a bell, the faces and talents will." It's the story of Shakespearean actor Edward Lionheart (Price), who embarks on a bloody trail of revenge against the film critics who deny him an important reward. Crist calls it "a romp and a roll," done with "high style and invention" and serving to "restore that fine sense of fun to a genre more honored of late in its exploitation then by a creative exploration of its intelligent entertainment values."
On Sunday, the NFL doubleheader starts with the Chicago Bears and Minnesota Vikings on CBS at 1pm (CT), followed by the Oakland Raiders and Pittsburgh Steelers at 3pm on NBC. Not a bad lineup, but it reminds us that before the NFL became a day-long marathon, there was room for other afternoon programming. Leonard Bernstein became famous to millions as host of CBS' Young People's Concerts, performed with the New York Philharmonic. But Lenny is gone now, leading the Vienna Philharmonic, and in his place is Michael Tilson Thomas, who presents "What Makes a Gershwin Tune a Gershwin Tune?" The fact that kids would genuinely be interested in the program speaks volumes about the difference between young people then and now. Following that, at 5:00pm, a CBS News Special looks at President Ford's struggle with the troubled economy, especially the attempts to curb inflation. Anyone remember "WIN" buttons?
In prime time, if you haven't had enough music for one day, PBS' Evening at Pops presents the great Ella Fitzgerald in concert with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, among other things doing an Irving Berlin medley. And finally, Sonny Bono's failed solo attempt The Sonny Comedy Revue has as guest stars McLean Stevenson (a relic of the '70s if ever there was one) and - hang on - Joey Heatherton! See, even if you can't get her in the new TV preview, she's still here!
Monday night's highlight is probably NBC's Monday Night at the Movies presentation of 'Support Your Local Sheriff!", a delightfully funny Western spoof with James Garner as the Sheriff, Joan Hackett as the Girl, Harry Morgan as the Mayor, and Walter Brennan and Bruce Dern as two of the most spectacularly inept villains you're likely to ever see.
Also, I'm struck by the lineup CBS has on Mondays, starting with Gunsmoke at 7:00, Maude at 8:00, Rhoda at 8:30 and Medical Center at 9:00. In a sense, this evening presents television's transition in a microcosm: Gunsmoke in its 20th and final season and Medical Center in its sixth of seven seasons, both series very much cut from the traditional cloth of television drama: self-contained (for the most part) episodes featuring traditional heroes from two traditional genres, Westerns and medical dramas. They're bookending two series in the vanguard of the medium's new wave - Maude, in its third season, featuring abrasive personalities and socially liberal causes, far more outspoken than the typical sitcom; and Rhoda, in its first season, a spinoff from Mary Tyler Moore that combines traditional elements (the single woman looking for a husband, the spectacular wedding) while eventually evolving to subjects infrequently discussed on comedies: separation and divorce.
Tuesday: All week, Channel 9, the ABC affiliate in the Twin Cities, is advertising how their 6 o'clock news can now be seen at five o'clock. If you've read some of the program listings from the 1960s, you might have noticed that Channel 9 generally eschewed the 6:00 news, preferring to counter other stations' news with game shows or reruns of sitcoms. I don't know how long ago they introduced a 6:00 news program, if indeed they had one, but they're now the first with local news, followed by the evening news with Howard K. Smith and Harry Reasoner. and Truth or Consequences at 6.
CBS continues the "big show" lineup they had on Monday, and again it's a blend of the old and the new: Good Times at 7 (black, urban comedy), M*A*S*H at 7:30 (the groundbreaking dramedy), Hawaii Five-O at 8 (old-fashioned police work), and Barnaby Jones at 9 (private detective, albeit a senior citizen version). But looking at ABC's Tuesday lineup you can begin to see the stirrings of the programming that would soon make it #1: Happy Days, combined with one of the network's first hits, Marcus Welby, M.D. Wednesday: It's kind of a lean night for the networks, although there are a couple of pretty successful shows on: Little House on the Prairie, in its first season, on NBC, and Cannon, in its fourth season, on CBS. Combine that with NBC's Petrocelli at 9:00, rumored to be coming to DVD, and you could replicate the entire season at home. However, the more unsuccessful shows are more prevalent on this night, with CBS having Sons and Daughters and Manhunter, NBC countering with Lucas Tanner, and ABC following up with That's My Mama, a movie, and the legendary Get Christie Love!
On Thursday PBS premieres one of my favorite shows of the time, the sports documentary series The Way It Was. It's a nice combination of archival footage, occasionally with the original play-by-play, and interviews with participants from the event. It's hosted by Curt Gowdy, accompanied by one of the event's announcers. Tonight, it's a look at the "Miracle of Coogan's Bluff," the "Shot Around the World": Bobby Thomson's home run for the New York Giants to defeat the Brooklyn Dodgers in the final game of the 1951 National League playoff. The Way It Was ran for two seasons, I think, and it was a terrific show.
It's a good sports night; at 8:00, it's the World Football League Game of the Week, with the New York Stars taking on the Chicago Fire. If you know anything about the WFL, you'll recognize the historical implication of this listing, for before too much longer the Stars will move to Charlotte, where they're become the Hornets. I didn't see this game, of course, because I was living in the World's Worst Town™.
Friday is the best night of the week, because, you know, weekend! But NBC has a hit Friday night lineup, and I think after seeing this you'll agree: Sanford and Son at 7:00, Chico and the Man at 7:30, The Rockford Files at 8:00, and Police Woman at 9:00. It's what I had on Friday nights, being stuck with Channel 7 for a commercial TV station, but if I'd had the choice, I likely would have been watching CBS' Friday Night Movie, a repeat of Steve McQueen's Bullitt, with hands-down the greatest car chase scene in the history of anything.
Too bad they never spun that movie off into a TV series, isn't it? Bullitt would have been a great foil for Peter Gunn, don't you think? Bullett & Gunn? Gunn & Bullett? Take your choice. TV
BENJAMIN BRITTEN CONDUCTING HIS MADE-FOR-TV OPERA, OWEN WINGRAVE (BBC)
Believe it or not, there was a time when it was thought that television could play an important part in the creation of a new art form. It was called the opera.
In 1952, NBC Opera Theatre prepared to present the American premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd, which had been written only the year before. Based on the novel by Herman Melville, one of the opera’s most famous scenes contains a twelve-minute aria by John Claggart, the villain of the piece, “in which the Master-at-Arms delineates his hatred of Budd and reveals his determination to destroy him.” For the broadcast, producer Samuel Chotzinoff elected to excise the entire aria – partly because of the need to compress the opera into a 90-minute timeslot, but also because he felt television presented an opportunity to completely change the way operas were written. Through the use of close-ups and shadows cast by lighting, Claggart’s malevolent intentions were expressed – proving, Chotzinoff said, that a broadcast could “[accomplish] in a few seconds what the aria took twelve minutes to tell us.” The implications were obvious, Chotzinoff felt, thinking it “probably that the composers of the future, writing especially for television, will find no necessity for explanatory and illuminating solo arias, once they realize the revealing potentialities of the television camera.”
Samuel Chotzinoff certainly understood the visual power inherent in television, but his confidence that it would change the course of modern opera was more than slightly misplaced. In Television Opera: The Fall of Opera Commissioned for Television, Jennifer Barnes shows how such early promise failed to pay off, leaving TV opera, like live drama, a dinosaur of television’s past.
Barnes focuses her book on three specific case studies, all of them operas commissioned for television: Amahl and the Night Visitors, Gian-Carlo Menotti’s landmark Christmas story that was the first ever written for TV; Britten’s Owen Wingrave, which he wrote for the BBC in 1970 after having seen several of his operas adapted for television; and Gerald Barry’s The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit, a 1994 production that was intended to explicitly take advantage of technology that only TV could provide.
While the three operas share a common birth, they differ in substantial ways. For example, Amahl was broadcast live on Christmas Eve in 1951, with Menotti working almost until the last minute to finish the composition. Owen Wingrave was shot on tape, duplicating the feel of a live broadcast while enabling special effects and editing to ensure the best performance possible. Beauty and Deceit was filmed, giving it the look of a movie, and allowing for a production radically different from one presented on the stage of a theater.
In the wake of the success of Amahl (including a rare front-page review in The New York Times), the future of television opera looked bright indeed. NBC Opera Theatre had been a regular presence on the network since 1949, and would continue presenting a handful of operas each season up through 1964. Menotti’s career flourished, as he won two Pulitzer Prizes and received several additional commissions from NBC. While Britten had not been particularly thrilled with the network’s adaptation of Billy Budd (which was edited so severely that he demanded the broadcast be entitled Scenes from “Billy Budd”), he was happier with BBC adaptations of some of his other works, including Peter Grimes, for which Britten conducted the orchestra. While Billy Budd was taped, rather than live, Britten insisted that the music and singing be performed live, rather than dubbed in after the fact (which would become standard in the future, including in The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit).
While many of these productions won great acclaim, however, ratings were something different. Due to its enduring popularity, Amahl never lacked for sponsorship, but most of the other broadcasts were subsidized by NBC. Gradually the number of productions diminished, as did the commissions, until televised opera of any kind – not just that written for the medium – had all but disappeared. Public broadcasting, thought to be the safeguard of such cultural programming, started out with promise, but as government funding dissipated, it too felt the pull of ratings (and donor dollars) and opted for more “popular” programming.
The arts remained active, if not vital, on British television, and The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit was part of a series of operas commissioned by Britain’s Channel 4 – with the requirement that they be written in such a way as to make a live performance all but impossible. In other words, the operas were not only written for television, but were meant to be performed only on television. The fact that Barry’s opera went on to an eventual staged production is almost immaterial; several critics suggested that it was intrinsically unsuitable for live performances.
Barnes’ choice of these three operas for close examination does not neglect the overall genre; indeed, they were chosen specifically to illustrate the arc traveled by opera commissioned for television. And while each one is interesting in and of itself, they take on an added dimension when considered as part of the whole, showing how a form of programming which once held such promise never truly fulfilled its potential.
As one might suspect, this isn’t a book to be read casually (though I must say I enjoyed it immensely), but while an appreciation of opera certainly helps, it isn’t absolutely required. Our cast of characters ranges from merely proficient to fascinating to colorful, and Barnes takes a close look at the inside workings of television, spending ample time on the choice of camera angles, why close-ups are sometimes good and sometimes bad, and how in the early days of TV a director’s job was considerably more difficult that it might seem. In doing so she reprints excerpts from several shooting scripts, showing the various stage directions and framings, and provides a glimpse at the challenges inherent in adapting a work for television - especially when the composer of said work is both alive and opinionated!
It may not be for everyone, but anyone wanting to learn more about a niche of television history that in a handful of decades went from accepted fact to invisible memory will find Television Opera not only the definitive resource, but an engrossing story as well.
This week it's the first of several issues coming to us from New England. I'm a bit familiar with the area myself, having lived in Maine for four years, so I recognize a few of these stations. And while we'll see some differences in programming, for the most part television is television, no matter where it comes from.
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And we'll lead off with our cover story, looking at the great Red Skelton. You might think he's the one asking "What Good Are Television Critics?" but he's not - we'll get to that later. In fact, the bulk of this article asks a different question - "What Makes a Clown?" - and plays this off against the death last year of his nine-year-old son Richard from leukemia. Does tragedy help define a clown - you know, in the same way that Janus has the laughing and crying face? "Malarky!" Red replies (or something like that; I'm betting that he didn't use quite that tame a word); "My comedy has nothing to do with tragedy. I couldn't tell you why people laugh at me."
But laugh at him they do. Skelton started on radio in 1937, graduating to host his own show the next year, and moved to television in 1951, where he will stay until 1971. He's made movies, done countless personal appearances, and lives on an estate with his wife and daughter and a staggering number of pets. In his spare time he paints clown pictures (such as the one on the cover), and estimates he's done at least 500.
But Dwight Whitney's story keeps coming back to tragedy, albeit sensitively, and though Skelton denies it, there is a moment when he lets the mask slip. Everyone undergoes tragedy, he says, everyone suffers. "How about the parents during the war who sweated out that telegram from the War Department?" And then, after a pause, he adds, "Except my kid had no gun to defend himself with."
Red Skelton has a reputation for being difficult to work with, a suggestion that all is not rosy behind the crowd-pleasing clown's face, but for this article, at least, Skelton is all-too human.
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It's a Leonard Bernstein doubleheader this week! I assumed that Sunday afternoon's concert on CBS, in which Bernstein leads his New York Philharmonic in a program called "Jazz in Classical Music," must have been one of his renowned "Young People's Concerts." After all, it has all the trademarks of one of Bernstein's programs, "showing how composers have consciously or unconsciously employed jazz elements" in their classical pieces.
But no - flipping the pages to the front of the programming section, there Bernstein is again, with a Saturday noon offering, on CBS that is one of the Young People's Concerts. The ad promises "an exciting opportunity to learn 'What Does Classical Music Mean?'" And it was exciting. Bernstein, whatever his faults and flaws - and he had many, both professionally and personally - was a wonderful teacher, not only able to transmit knowledge to both children and adults in an understandable manner, but to infuse it with his own personal enthusiasm and excitement. I wasn't yet alive when his Young People's broadcasts started, but Bernstein did them throughout the '60s, and many of them (along with his broadcasts for Omnibus) survive on DVD. Here's part one of the broadcast in question:
To this day I may not always get everything he's teaching, but I know he had a lot to do with building a love of classical music in me. Could anyone today do what Bernstein did back then? My wife suggested Michael Tilson Thomas, the conductor for the San Francisco Philharmonic, who succeeded Bernstein in the original broadcasts. He's done some very good classical music programs for PBS in the last few years, but could he transmit Bernstein's excitement to young people? If there's anyone out there who could, I suspect it would be Gustavo Dudamel, the dynamic conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I wish he'd try it, he might be the only one who could talk a network into broadcasting that kind of show. Since most schools, for whatever reason, no longer have music appreciation, a show like this may be the last best hope for transmitting to future generations a love of classical music.
ALL: HADLEY TV GUIDE COLLECTION
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Also on Saturday night, WBZ carries Archbishop Fulton Sheen's religious program Life is Worth Living. Sheen is one of the most famous religious apologists of the time, a popular and widely loved spokesman for the Christian faith. His gentle, witty manner has won many converts among both celebrities and ordinary folk, and his long-running program, seen first on DuMont, then ABC, and by 1959 in syndication, has won Emmy awards and drawn audiences of as many as 10 million viewers. Here's the program that was broadcast that Saturday on WBZ, with Sheen discussing the topic of courtship:
This of course begs the same question: could anyone do this today? Granted there are any number of religious networks on cable today, including the Catholic network EWTN, which broadcasts Sheen's program. But could a mainstream network do it? You've got to be kidding, right? These are the people who won't even use the word "Christmas" anymore. But even if there was such an opportunity, who would take advantage of it? With Billy Graham having retired, is there anyone that the public would trust, anyone who could escape the suspicions generated by sex and financial scandals? I know a few who would be great at it, but they lack the high profile to be able to do it. No, I think not - and in this case, the churches have often been their own worst enemies.
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There are other programs like these this week - The Voice of Firestone, for example, which airs on ABC Monday nights and this week features a quintet of stars from the Metropolitan Opera; and a host of religious programs on Sunday morning, including highlights of the installation of the new Protestant Episcopal Bishop, shown on WHDH in Boston.
And those aren't the only kinds of programs you don't see on mainstream television anymore. For instance, science.
The United States has been in something of a tizzy about a "science gap" since the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957. Amid growing fears that the U.S. is falling farther and father behind, the nation launches a renewed emphasis on teaching science*, and evidence of that can be seen on TV screens everywhere.
*No pun intended.
On NBC Monday night, our favorite scientist, Dr. Linguistics (aka Dr. Frank Baxter) is back with another installment in the Bell Laboratories Science Series, "The Alphabet Conspiracy."
Continental Classroom, which airs Monday through Friday morning at 6:30am ET on Portland's WCSH, is chock-full of science programming - "Electromagnetic Waves" on Monday, "Vacuum Tubes" on Tuesday, "Experiment on Vacuum Tubes" on Wednesday, "Oscillators and Amplifiers" on Thursday, and "Transistors" to end the week. WGBH, Boston's legendary public broadcasting channel, carries Grade 6 Science on Monday morning and has Science in Sight on Monday evening, and WPRO in Providence has Space and Science Saturday afternoon, And then, of course, there's the grandfather of them all, NBC's Watch Mr. Wizard, with Don Herbert. Oh, and don't forget programs such as G-E College Bowl, which made knowledge admirable, if not sexy.
Does any of this help close the gap? I don't know. We do know that the United States will catch and pass the Soviets, landing a man on the moon a little over ten years from now. It is a great victory for American engineering and one of the great scientific achievements of all time. Now, over 40 years since that first moon landing, there's a cable channel devoted to science, But you might need that microscope to find any scientific programming on mainstream television.
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"What good are television critics?" is the question posed on this week's cover. And the answer? It depends on who you ask. Oliver Treyz, president of ABC, says they "Certainly affect our over-all thinking," which C. Terence Clyne, vice president of the McCann-Erickson ad agency, counters that critics' importance are "limited to the board of directors of the sponsor and his ad agency."*
*Remember that at this time, sponsors were still prime movers and shakers when it came to the television schedule, and a sponsor could doom a series if it withdrew sponsorship.
Critics are themselves divided on the subject - the famed New York Times critic Jack Gould things "our influence is vastly overrated. We generate interest more than influence," while his counterpart at the Herald Tribune, John Crosby, says that he and other critics get plenty of mail from their readers telling that that "we persuade or dissuade them from watching a certain show." A recent poll shows that 54% of viewers have, at one time or another, made their viewing choices based on a review.
One thing that everyone seems to agree on, though, is that critics perform a vital function. David Susskind feels it is the critic who holds producers' feet to the fire, forcing him to offer better quality programming. "Without the critic, I believe we would have more mediocrity than we now have."
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Last week I wrote about the March of Dimes, which updated the progress of their annual campaign with a local television program. This week, we're reminded again of how big the March of Dimes was with WHDH's March of Dimes Auction. The show kicks off at 2pm and runs until 4:30, returning intermittently throughout the night until the station signs off. All the goods are donated by local merchants, and the phones are being handled by "models and Channel 5 staffers." It reminds me of the old Action Auction fundraiser on Minneapolis' PBS station, Channel 2 - although that was used to raise money for the station itself.
The show is described as a fundraiser "for the benefit of polio victims," of which there are still many. It's true, however, that with the advent of the Salk and Sabin vaccines, polio is not the horrifying plague that it has been for so many generations. And this ad perhaps indicates that knowledge, as the organization begins to transition from polio research to that of other illnesses, finally settling on birth defects. I love the tag line at the end of this ad: "Toward Greater Victories". It's a reminder that the March of Dimes helped fund the discoveries that helped stamp out polio, and a sign that the same kind of scientific progress can be made toward other diseases. And a reminder, as if we didn't need one this week, that science indeed plays a major role in the culture of the late 1950s. TV
