This week in TV Guide: October 27, 1956

Don't you like how the TV Guide logo was turned into a Halloween treat, complete with the stem? Anyway, on with the rest of the festivities. If you're not careful, you're always going to find something interesting in one of these issues, and we'll lead off this week with a couple of them, one more significant than the other but both worthy of attention.

On Monday, October 29, at 6:45 p.m. CT we have this description under NBC's News Caravan

NBC introduces two personalities new to the field of daily newscasting—Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. The two became familiar to viewers as anchor men during NBC's National Convention coverage. For this five-times-a-week show Huntley will be stationed in New York, Brinkley at his customary post in Washington, and they will share the newscasting duties.

That's right—it's day one of what would come to be known as The Huntley-Brinkley Report, and for most of the next 14 years it would be the definitive network news program. The show became such a ratings giant that during the 1963 coverage of JFK's assassination, NBC would pull in more viewers than CBS and ABC combined. It was such a ratings giant that in 1964 CBS would drop Walter Cronkite from the anchor booth for the Democratic Convention, replacing him with Robert Trout and Eric Sevareid in an attempt to improve the numbers. (It didn't work.) It was such a ratings giant that in 1965 Time magazine reported it brought in more advertising revenue than any other on television.

After a decade or so, that dominance began to fade; some said it was because of the space program, coverage of which Cronkite excelled at (Frank McGee and Bill Ryan were the main voices at NBC), while others thought the chemistry between Huntley and Brinkley diminished after the AFTRA strike of 1967 (Huntley crossed the picket lines, Brinkley refused to do so). Perhaps it was simply a case of all good things coming to an eventual end. In 1970 Chet Huntley retired and eventually was replaced by John Chancellor, a fine newsman who never matched the success of Chet and David; in 1981 Brinkley would move to ABC, where he would stay for another 15 years, in the process redefining the format of the Sunday morning interview show.

I doubt that anyone could have imagined all of this back on October 29, 1956 when NBC introduced those two new personalities. It's the little treasures like this that make writing about these TV Guides worth it.

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It's the week before the the 1956 elections, and not surprisingly the listings are filled with various political talks by various parties and candidates. President Eisenhower speaks for a half-hour on Thursday night, for example, preempting Ernie Ford's show. And then there's Adlai Stevenson's talk, advertised at left. (Doesn't he look as if he's in the middle of doing a twirl, like Mary Tyler Moore before she tosses her hat in the air? Maybe that's where she got the idea.) Of course, these talks are a big deal, predicated on the notion that the voters get a last chance to listen to the candidates before they make up their minds on Election Day.

Which brings us to Friday, November 2, and the second of the week's hidden items of interest. At 8:00 p.m. WTCN presents a half-hour talk by Joe Robbie, the Democratic nominee for Congress from Minnesota's Fifth District. On election day, Robbie loses to incumbent Republican Walter Judd, and that's the end of the story. Right?

If you're a Minnesotan or a political buff, Joe Robbie's name might not ring a bell because of that election. No, you might recognize the name from "Joe Robbie Stadium" in Miami, and if so you'd be right—it is the same Joe Robbie. Robbie had been in politics since living in South Dakota, even running for governor. In Minnesota, he was a confidant of U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey. However, he was also a friend of Joe Foss, a fellow South Dakotan (the two men had served in the Navy together), and currently the commissioner of the American Football League. The league was looking to expand to Florida, and Robbie entered into a partnership with Danny Thomas and became the first owner of the Miami Dolphins. While he owned the Dolphins he hired the legendary coach Don Shula from the Baltimore Colts, which led to two Super Bowl victories. In the 1980s, he privately funded construction of the Dolphins' new stadium, including putting the team up as collateral. That stadium, in its 30 years, has had ten different names, most of them corporate, but at its opening it bore the name of the man who had paid for it, the man who owned the team who played in it: Joe Robbie. The same Joe Robbie whose name appears in small print in this week's TV Guide, as a candidate for Congress. And there's the rest of this story.

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College Football Saturday features a game between two old but occasional rivals, Oklahoma and Notre Dame (12:45 p.m. CT, NBC), and but for a year, this would have been a huge game. Oklahoma is the unquestioned power in college football in 1956; they'd won the national championship in 1953 and 1955, and will go on to win again in 1956. Throughout this entire time—dating back to October 10, 1953, in fact—Oklahoma has gone undefeated and untied. Their victory against Notre Dame this week in South Bend, 40-0, is their 35th consecutive victory, and that winning streak will eventually reach 47 games, until November 16, 1957, just a little over a year from the date of this issue, when Notre Dame upsets Oklahoma in the return match, 7-0. Now that would have been an issue to have. (It was on NBC.) To this day, Oklahoma's 47-game winning streak remains the longest in college football history; no modern-day school has come close.

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The cover story this week, quite appropriate for the season, is on Alfred Hitchcock and the secrets behind his success, one of which being: "How do you relate humor to horror?" "Watch our TV show," Hitch replies dryly. "Or ask yourself whether an undertaker laughs. In our shows, the undertaker laughs. Of course, we've never happened to have an undertaker in one of our shows, but I'm sure you get the point."

The point that Hitchcock makes is how his witty appearances, particularly at the conclusions of his often grim stories, serve a necessary purpose given the prevailing rules under which TV operates. "If you're going to tell a murder story, why be namby-pamby about it? But under existing television formats, you are almost forced to water things down. So we do it with the epilog That is where we really relate humor to horror." The jokes serve to "take the curse off the unhappy ending," which may see an innocent person meet a sorry fate or a villain literally get away with murder. The humor, or "detachment," as Hitchcock writer James Allardice says, "keeps things from getting too sticky. You watch a love scene of his. The couple will be all but strangling one another, but they'll be talking about what's for dinner."

Hitchcock also talks about one of his most celebrated devices, the "McGuffin." "In any chase or spy story, you have to have an object that is being chased or spied on or sought after." The Hitchcock signature is that this item often turns out to be of no importance. In his hit Notorious, with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, "which I understand is now being shown on television at practically no cost to the viewer, the McGuffin they were all chasing was a bottle of uranium."

That one producer rejected Notorious because he couldn't understand why people would chase after uranium illustrates the challenge that Hitchcock often encounters. "The public has a moronic logic," he says sadly. "I don't mean to say people are morons. Not at all. The public today is highly intelligent. But they ask too many questions. They will not accept things at face value." The problem, he concludes, is that "People today spend entirely too much time questioning the McGuffin."

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This issue, 62 years old, is one of the furthest separated from our own time. What are some of the shows we might recognize, and some that might seem entirely foreign to us?

The weekend gives us a couple of works that were once far better known than they are today. It begins on Saturday with Gordon Jenkins' musical comedy "Manhattan Tower" (NBC, 7:00 p.m.), featuring a wonderful cast: Cesar Romero, Edward Everett Horton, Ethel Waters, Hans Conreid, Phil Harris, and in the lead: Helen O'Connell, and a very young, "relative newcomer to TV," Peter Marshall. Yes, that Peter Marshall; he's done quite a lot of singing in his career. His current comedy partner Tommy Farrell appears in the show as well.

Sunday NBC's Hallmark Hall of Fame (6:30 p.m.) is "Born Yesterday," an adaptation of the Broadway play by Garson Kanin, with Mary Martin, Paul Douglas, and Arthur Hill. You'll probably be more familiar with the 1950 movie version, which featured Judy Holliday's Oscar-winning performance in the Martin role, along with Broderick Crawford and William Holden in the Douglas and Hill roles.

Monday gives us a couple of familiar faces, George Burns and Gracie Allen, in the seventh season of their network run (CBS, 7:00 p.m.), and at the same time on ABC it's The Danny Thomas Show, recently renamed from Make Room for Daddy. I Love Lucy is on CBS at 8:00 p.m., countered on ABC by Bishop Fulton Sheen's Life is Worth Living. One of early television's long-running prestige anthologies, Robert Montgomery Presents, is colorcast on NBC at 8:30 p.m., and at 9:00 Lloyd Bridges stars in "American Primitive" on CBS's Studio One.

Jonathan Winters has to be one of the funniest men ever on television, but he's better known for his guest appearances with Jack Paar, Dean Martin, Johnny Carson, and others, than he is for The Jonathan Winters Show, a 15-minute variety show airing Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. on NBC, right before Chet and David. Phil Silvers is Bilko at 7:00 p.m. on NBC, and Red Skelton—only a half-hour at this point—is on CBS at 8:30. But there's plenty more: Westerns like The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, the first "adult" western, with Hugh O'Brian (7:30 p.m, NBC) and Broken Arrow with John Lupton and Michael Ansara (8:00 p.m., ABC); anthologies sponsored by Armstrong (8:30 p.m., NBC) and DuPont (8:30 p.m, ABC); and shows hosted by Herb Shriner (8:00 p.m., CBS) and Jane Wyman (8:00 p.m., NBC). They're not unknown shows, but more like deep cuts.

We're used to seeing What's My Line? Sunday nights at 9:30 p.m. on CBS, and why not: it aired on that day at that time for 17 years. However, in 1956, it was being shown on Wednesday night at 10:00 p.m. on WCCO, Channel 4. Back then, WCCO, which has been the Twin Cities news powerhouse for as long as I can remember, didn't have a 10:00 p.m. newscast; they had movies or local programs or, as in this case, shows which ordinarily were broadcast on other nights. (In case you were worried, the local news came on at 10:30 p.m.)

Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life is still going strong, and on Thursday (7:00 p.m., NBC) one of his guests is C.S. Forester, best known as the author of the Horatio Hornblower books, but the author also of a book that is probably better known for its movie adaptation: The African Queen. We'll have more of the night's programs in our Monday "What's on TV?" feature.

On Friday, between political talks, there's room for The Chevy Show with Dinah Shore, in color (8:00 p.m., NBC) with guests Betty Grable, cabaret singer Hildegarde, Jaye P. Morgan, and Hal March. A couple of unranked lightweights, Paolo Rosi and Henry "Toothpick" Brown, face off in the main event on Cavalcade of Sports (9:00 p.m., NBC), and Mr. This is Your Life himself, Ralph Edwards, is one of the guests on Person to Person with Edward R. Murrow. (9:30 p.m., CBS)

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Finally, let's return to David Brinkley for this footnote (H/T), which explains a great deal about the morass into which television news has fallen. I don't know when he said it, but it's as good an argument against the 24/7 cable news cycle as any I've ever read. "People have the illusion that all over the world, all the time, all kinds of fantastic things are happening," he said. "When in fact, over most of the world, most of the time, nothing is happening."

Which explains why it all has to be created, doesn't it? TV  

David Brinkley's view of television

This is from David Brinkley's gravesite in Wilmington, North Carolina. I wish I'd seen this earlier, when I was writing The Electronic Mirror. (I ran across it last week while looking up a factoid that you'll see in this Saturday's piece.) It wouldn't have added anything new to the book, but it would have been a validation, a confirmation of my view that television acts as a time capsule that told you what it was like back then.

As it is, it's kind of cool to see how close the subtitle of The Electronic Mirror—"What Classic TV Tells Us About Who We Were and Who We Are (and Everything In-Between)"—comes to Brinkley's own view of early television. I consider that pretty good company. TV  

This week in TV Guide: April 15, 1972

There's another moon landing scheduled for this week, and to say something this matter-of-factly a few weeks ago would have been unthinkable. And yet that's what success will do for you. By Apollo 13 the novelty of a manned moon flight was already wearing off, and it was only the life-and-death struggle to get the astronauts back that captured the public's attention. Apollo 14 would have brought people back somewhat, just to see if anything happened this time, but by the time of Apollo 16, it takes a moon buggy to capture people's imagination once again.

The launch of Apollo 16 comes off as scheduled on Sunday, with the first of three moon walks taking place on Thursday. And while that little car might not look like much, it revolutionizes exploration of the moon, dramatically increasing the amount of terrain that astronauts John Young and Charlie Duke will be able to cover. And there will be more television coverage of this trip than ever before, including three prime-time color broadcasts live from the moon - with, NASA says, an improved and "cleaned up" picture. They also promise a better view of the Lunar Module launch from the moon's surface to reunite with Ken Mattingly, orbiting the moon - the camera on Apollo 15 failed to follow the upward flight of the LM, but "a new-type clutch in the camera mounting should fix that." And while the shock absorbers on the buggy aren't good enough to permit live shots while it's moving, it will allow viewers at home to see some truly spectacular shots of the moon's terrain, including Stone and Smoky Mountains and Palmetto crater.

Hard to believe that after this, there's only one more moon flight - December's launch of Apollo 17, the first nighttime launch. And after that - well, there's the joint mission with the Soviets, and then the space shuttle and the international space station, and - that's it. Forty-five years later, and we haven't returned to the moon since.

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Throughout the 60s and early 70s, TV Guide's reviews were written by the witty and acerbic Cleveland Amory. Whenever we get the chance, we'll look at Cleve's latest take on the series of the era. 

I'll be upfront (as I always am with you, dear readers) by admitting that I've never been a fan of David Frost, and so you'll forgive me if I seem to be focusing on only the negative parts of Cleve's review. But then, where is one to go when the very first paragraph notes that Our Favorite Reviewer takes "a rather dim vue of it." When he adds that "it's not all bad, by any means," you know that's damning with faint praise. Part of the problem stems from the talent that Frost has apparently displayed for the deft interview, and Amory feels that he deserves higher standards than what he's been given here. The jokes are old - for example, in discussing the Seven Deadly Sins, Frost refers to "autolatry," defined as "the intemperate worship of one's automobile - and they weren't all that funny to begin with.

Frost has a band of regulars, ala Steve Allen, who join him in each episode, and with the exception of Jack Gilford, who does "long vignettes," the cast "are subjected to one or two skits which are either underwritten or overdirected or both." Of course, that's nothing terribly unusual - Saturday Night Live has been doing the same thing for decades - but that doesn't mean it's very good, either. Even when a bit does succeed at hitting the mark, there seems to be just too much of it, and as we all know too much of anything isn't necessarily a good thing.

Amory also complains that guest stars aren't used to their particular advantage, and that can be fatal - when Sid Caesar is your guest and you're not getting laughs, there's something seriously wrong. This show, which happened to be about politics - every episode tends to have a theme - should have been a barrel of laughs; if you can't find something funny about politics, you might as well just give up. And yet, as Amory notes, he could only think of two funny scenes, and one of those was overcooked. It is too bad, as he notes in conclusion, that the show doesn't come off better. "Can't anybody on this show tell what's funny and what isn't?" he asks plaintively. "And, if he can, why doesn't he tell somebody else?"

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SOURCE ALL: HADLEY TV GUIDE COLLECTION

If David Frost had really wanted to do a funny show about politics, he should have turned to David Brinkley. He's no longer anchoring The Huntley-Brinkley Report since Chet Huntley's retirement, but his commentaries on NBC Nightly News allow him a platform from which he can launch his incisive opinions, most of which are quite funny without him even trying. (Frost, take note!)

For example, there's the story of the time he was in West Virginia covering the 1960 Democratic presidential primary, when the longest lines weren't to talk to the candidates, but to get Brinkley's autograph. "It was just . . .embarrassing," Brinkley recalls. "What I think is that you could put a baboon on television every night for 15 years and he'd become some sort of celebrity."

It's that refusal to take himself seriously that's endeared himself to so many. Brinkley considers himself not a celebrity, nor an anchorman, but a newsman - a reporter. And yet, even within that definition, there are limitations. He compares the lot of the journalist to that of a politician. "In the case of the politicians, it's a seeking of approval and a seeking for power. In journalism it may be more of the first and less of the latter, because there's no real power in journalism. People say you have it, but you don't. You may write about them, talk about them, watch them, follow them, chronicle their doings, but they have the power."

It's not all fun and games, being a respected television reporter; as a matter of fact, it isn't much fun at all. "I like what I do, but I don't much like the way I have to do it," he says, lamenting that with the tight, rigid schedule under which they all have to work, TV newsmen often wind up slapping something together, rather than crafting a story that really interests him. He does find, however, encouragement in his frequent trips to speak on college campuses. Whether or not young people are as smart as they think they are, or have all the answers, ("everybody who's 19 years old is wrong about a lot of things, because in most cases he doesn't know what he's talking about"), "they do talk and they do care about it and they think about it and they ask about it and they read about it." Had previous generations done this, he thinks, "this country would be in much better shape now than it is."

Interspersed with glimpses of Brinkley's grueling workday ("At the end of the day I'm like a squeezed lemon."), are more of his pithy comments on the issues of the day. "The Federal Government is marvelously equipped to start things and totally ill-equipped to stop them. It never stops anything. Everything that was started in the '30s to deal with the Depression and unemployment is still thriving and booming. Government as an instrument of social reform is an idea I used to hold but don't much any longer." He's a fervent believer in freedom of the press, reminding one and all that "if people are concerned about dangers to their liberties, they ought to know where these dangers come from, and they do not come from the press." And he is convinced that "power is very much apart from the people. The people in this country have no power."

Lest you get too caught up in this seriousness, though, one more Brinkley anecdote to lighten the mood" "When I was [in the Washington airport] waiting for an airplane, a lady came up to me and said, 'Aren't you Chet Huntley?' And I said, 'Yes.' Actually, that is the polite answer, because first of all, it doesn't make any difference. People confuse us all the time; nothing could be less important, so if I had said, 'No, I'm Brinkley,' then she would have been embarrassed and would have felt it necessary to apologize, which was not necessary, and this would have taken some time and I would have missed my airplane. So I said, 'Yes,' and she said, 'Well, I want to say I think you're pretty good, but I don't know how you put up with that idiot in Washington'."

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Of all the items of interest this week, one stands out from the rest, a momentous change in television. On Wednesday, April 19, Johnny Carson hosts the last regular episode of The Tonight Show from New York; after a few days off, the show will start up again on May 1 from its new home in Hollywood. This is a landmark in more ways than one. It demonstrates, once and for all, that the celebrity balance of power has moved away from New York and the legitimate theater, and to California, the land of movies and television. That might not mean much to those of you who grew up watching Johnny from Hollywood (or Burbank, if you will), but there was something about New York that gave those shows a different feel.

New York was the home of the first late-night show, Broadway Open House, with Jerry Lester. It was the home to Lester's successors in the time slot, Steve Allen and Jack Paar. When Tonight was done live, it could count on stars appearing after they'd finished a Broadway performance. There were comedians who were playing in the Village, or at clubs in other parts of the city. Most celebrities promoting their latest book or movie or television show had to pass through New York at some point in time, and a trip to Tonight was natural. There was a sense of - I don't know, maybe grown-up sophistication - that wasn't particularly apparent in Hollywood. But one has to go where the stars are - Joey Bishop had done his show from there, and Merv Griffin would soon move his as well - and Johnny wanted to make the move, so there.

Of course, with Jimmy Fallon as host The Tonight Show has returned to the city of its birth, and Letterman was always based there. It's a different New York, naturally, a different world in fact. I'm not sure there is any one center of the entertainment world anymore, not when you can make a successful web series or cut an album from your own home, not when travel between the two coasts is much more commonplace. There was a time, though - and that time runs out this week.

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The Doan Report has the scoop on the new television season, as CBS and ABC announce their new fall lineups, to go along with NBC, which made their announcement last month. Anything here we should be concerned with? Well, yes.

On CBS, debuting series include M*A*S*H, "an army hospital comedy with Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers," Cousin Maude, with Bea Arthur in a spin-off from All in the Family, Spencer's Mountain, starring Richard Thomas, and The Bob Newhart Show, with Bob "as a condominium manager, with Suzanne Pleshette as his wife." Obviously, some of these series underwent a bit of fine-tuning between now and the time in September when they go on the air - Spencer's Mountain becomes The Waltons, Maude drops the "Cousin," and Newhart goes from managing a condo to being a psychologist. Still, that's not bad for one season. To make way, the losers include My Three Sons, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, and Arnie.

How does ABC counter this? Start with The Rookies, about "four young, antiviolence policement," Temperature's Rising, which the network tried so hard to make work, The Julie Andrews Show, which should have worked, and Kung Fu and The Streets of San Francisco, which did work. Among the casualties: The Courtship of Eddie's Father, Longstreet, and Bewitched (sorry, Adam-Michael!).

By the way, speaking of Eddie's Father, Brandon Cruz - Eddie - is among the acquaintances waiting to surprise Bill Bixby on This Is Your Life (WJZ, 10:30 p.m. Wednesday). He's joined by Ray Walston (My Favorite Martian), William Windom, and Dinah Shore. I wonder if you could do a show like that nowadays? "Kim Kardashian, this is your life!" I mean, what more is there to show?

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It was called "Ping Pong Diplomacy," the exchange of table tennis players between the United States and Communist China; it helped make possible Nixon's trip to China, and on Saturday it's the feature presentation on ABC's Wide World of Sports (5:00 p.m. ET), as the Chinese team kicks off its 13-city tour of the U.S. It is not, however, the only pivotal moment in sports history that day, as a syndicated lineup of stations presents third-round coverage of the richest tournament in women's professional golf history, the inaugural Dinah Shore Women's Circle Championship, from Palm Springs, California (5:30 p.m.). The winner's share of the purse is $20,000, nothing to sneeze at, but it's Dinah's long-term support of women's golf, starting here, that makes this tournament one of the oldest and most prestigious on the women's tour to this day, even though the late star's name is no longer appended to the tournament.

On Sunday, we get a glimpse at one of the most infamous stars from the Jerry Springer era of television: Maury Povich. Only he's not involved in sleazy, sensationalist chat yet; he's best-known as the son of famed Washington baseball writer Shirley Povich, and at 10:30 p.m. on WTTG, his Sports, People and Povich show takes a look "A Town Without a Team: - the first year without baseball in the nation's capital, now that the Senators have moved to Texas.

One of the biggest music stars of the early '70s, Chuck Mangione, headlines with the Rochester (N.Y.) Philharmonic in a 90 minute special on PBS Monday night (8:00 p.m. ET). He had some really big hits in the day - do that many people remember him today? Meanwhile, Dinah Shore guest stars as herself in Here's Lucy (9:00 p.m., CBS). The redhead, typically, is star-struck to meet her.

On Tuesday, Today (7:00 a.m., NBC) presents a terrific show, with the legendary conductor Leopold Stokowski* interviewed on the occasion of his 90th birthday, after which John Houseman discusses his memoir Run-Through.

*"Leopold!" in the Bugs Bunny cartoon "Long-Haired Hare," and the maestro in the Disney movie Fantasia.

We've already touched on Wednesday a couple of times, so we'll skip to Thursday, where I love this description of tonight's Ironside: " 'Murder Impromptu,' a whodunit about an on-stage stabbing during an improvisational comedy show." I don't ever remember that happening on Who's Line is it, Anyway? - not even the British version. CBS counters this with a CBS Reports look at Chicago Mayor Richard Daley - timely, with a presidential election coming up.

And there's supposed to be some baseball on Friday, but at press time, we're not quite sure. Under the description for the Cleveland - Baltimore game, the notation informs us that "a players' strike threatened cancellation of the game." For those of you who've never known a time when labor unrest was not part of professional sports, you can't appreciate how disturbing this possibility was. The players walked on April 1, and didn't return until April 13, when the union reached agreement with the owners about salary arbitration and increases in the players pension fund. Nearly 90 games were cancelled during the strike, and were never made up - cold comfort to the Boston Red Sox, who will lose the American League East title to the Detroit Tigers by one-half game because the Sox will have one more game cancelled than the Tigers. It's just the way the ball bounces, I guess. TV