This week in TV Guide: May 9, 1970

Usually, when we talk about all-stars, it's in in the context of sports. But this week's lineup on David Frost's show is so star-studded, it doesn't give anyone else a sporting chance.

Frost's show, syndicated by Group W, is featuring an all-star week of single-guest programs: four reruns and one brand-new show. On Monday, the guest is Sammy Davis Jr.; Tuesday, it's Johnny Carson; Thursday, the Great One, Jackie Gleason; and Friday, a two-for-one with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.* These shows surround the Wednesday program, an all-new, exclusive conversation with Vice President Spiro Agnew. It's undoubtedly one of the best single-week lineups you're likely to see on any talk show—certainly now, when hosts can't fill up 60 minutes with a multiplicity of guests, but even back then, in the heyday of 90-minute TV talk, when the competition includes Carson, Griffin and Cavett. Fitting, then, that David Frost is on the cover this week. 

*I know; technically two persons, but I always thought of Burton-Taylor (or Taylor-Burton) as representing a brand more than two individuals.

As Edith Efron points out, the Frost show is carried on "only" 70 stations nationwide, but it makes up for that with the amount of conversation it generates, and for a very good reason: "on the Frost talk show, people talk." His guests, which include "writers, artists, churchmen and politicians," seem to have found a level of comfort with Frost that causes them to share items (or "little confidences" as Efron describes them) that no other host seems able to achieve. "Richard Burton thinks Shakespeare smoked pot, that Liz wants another baby, that Johnny Carson is a good ventriloquist with a weird soprano voice, that Arthur Godfrey and Harve Presnell have had themselves sterilized, that the Archbishop of Canterbury feels the presence of God most intensely when he experiences serenity in the face of suffering, and that Raquel Welch thinks the mind is 'the most erogenous zone.'" No wonder Nixon talked to him after he left office.

He's not everyone's cup of tea, though. His attentiveness, which works so sucessfully in drawing his guests out, can border on sycophantic. His favorite closing line, "It's been a joy having you here," has become the butt of jokes, and New York Times TV critic Jack Gould acidly described him as "deferential enough to be an assistant to a television vice president." Meanwhile, across the pond, the British, for whom Frost was a popular and dreaded satirist (That Was the Week That Was) with a reputation as fierce as Mike Wallace, wonder whether he's sold out to the cousins. Geoffrey Hobbs, TV critic for the London Evening Standard, says that the old frost would tear people apart. But now, "The David Frost interview started becoming a show-biz chat show—very pally. Now, he's gotten a bit plasticky—the smile too much in evidence. . ." 

This last part is up for debate. His friends insist he hasn't soften—as Clay Felker, editor of New York magazine puts it, "he uses a more sophisticated technique—of questioning people so that they hang themselves!" And British producer Peter Baker points out that TW3 was a scripted show, produced by a writing staff. "[I]t wasn't him talking!" (You'll notice that people around Frost tend to talk in italics a lot.) Others note that, like so many comic actors, Frost has simply traded in his comedic chops for a more serious milieu.  

Whatever it is, it seems to agree with him. He works 19-hour days ("Why anyone should want to work this hard," says Britain's ambassador to the U.S. John Freeman, "is a mystery to me."), runs his own TV company, makes in excess of a million dollars a year, and travels in a $25,000 Bentley to expensive restaurants where he's dining with prime ministers, princesses, and jet-setters like Jackie and Ari. Producer Ned Sherrin says that "David would quite like to be Prime Minister—and the Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury. But being only one would limit him a bit." Some suggest that he was anti-Establishment only because he wasn't part of it. A friend calls him "a complex, brilliant, enormously neurotic man."

Frost himself insists that he works hard because he likes it, that he doesn't have any hangups, and that he's perfectly happy being who he is and doing what he does. Still, good or bad, people are talking about him; one wonders whether or not he's one who believes that there's no such thing as bad publicity.

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Speaking of talk shows as we have been, the Sunday morning political chatfest isn't my idea of entertainment, and I don't know if anyone feels any differently. But now I must stop viewing things like this through my current lens of cynicism, and return to the world of 1970, where these shows are engaged in the television version of big-game hunting, looking for the prize catch from Washington. And if you think the competition between Carson, Griffin and Cavett (and Frost?) is cutthroat, you haven't seen anything yet. 

"I don't concern myself too much with what the other shows are doing," Lawrence Spivak, moderator of NBC's Meet the Press and dean of the Sunday interview programs, tells Neil Hickey. Despite this calm exterior, Hickey notes, "privately he pursues potential guests with all the tenacity of a ferret." It's a "highly competitive" process, according to Prentiss Childs, co-producer of CBS's Face the Nation. "As long as we're all thinking about the major news stories of any given week, we're bound to be crashing into each other in the booking of guests." Adds Peggy Whedon of ABC's Issues and Answers, "I have lunch with various contact people three or four days a week. I try to stay highly visible on the Washington scene, and get my bids in early." 

One of the key players in the whole process doesn't work for a network at all; as director of communications for President Nixon, Herb Klein answers to a higher power. "My office acts as a coordinating element. One thing we do is assist the shows in breaking loose the people they want to interview." If one of the producers lets him know they're interested in, say, Senator X, "I might call that senator and chat with him about why I think he should go on. Or I might advise him not to go on at that particular time." Such is Klein's expertise, and level of trust within the White House, he doesn't even have to confer with the President before taking such action.

Each of the shows has had its share of memorable guests. Sometimes it's being in the right place at the right time; the guest on the very first Meet the Press (August 27, 1948) was Whittaker Chambers, who—unprotected by immunity of any kind—accused Alger Hiss, on the air, of being a Communist. Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater told Issues and Answers that low-yield nuclear weapons "might be useful in Vietnam to defoliate the jungles." Face the Nation scored big in 1964 when it landed Che Guevara, who was in New York to speak at the United Nations.

Other times it's a matter of being persistent. Spivak worked for 13 years to get Prince Philip, who "coolly" went on the show and confirmed that the royal household was all but broke. (Nowadays, you'd expect to see something like that on Oprah, although Philip has too much class for that.) And it was Peggy Whedon's hard work that brought off Issues and Answers' special primetime debate between Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, four days before the California primary—and RFK's shooting. Sometimes landing the right guest involves war zones, as was the case when Whedon interviewed King Hussein of Jordan, days after the end of the Six-Day War in 1967, arriving on a plane flying a zigzag course at night without lights, after Syria had threatened to shoot down any plane flying over its territory.

The all-time champ? That would be former vice president and presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey, who filled in on less than three hours' notice for a missing guest on Issues and Answers, arriving in the uniform he'd been wearing while playing baseball with some friends. He borrowed a shirt, tie and jacket from some stagehands, and the cameramen only photographed him from the waste up. Hubert was as smooth as ever—a fact which would surprise nobody who lived in Minnesota while he was here.

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There's a feature in TV Guides of this era called "Second Look," written by Scott MacDonough, and I'll admit that the purpose of this totally escapes me. It's pretty much what it says it is: MacDonough takes a look at programs that recently aired and lets us know what he thought of them. It's not that I object to MacDonough, who does his job well, and often quite wittily. I just don't understand why this feature exists. In the days of VCRs or DVRs or TV on demand, yes—"Second Look" could tell you if that show you've recorded is worth hanging on to, or if you should press the delete button. But what good does it to do review a program that's already been on, unless it's to inform you about its viewing worthiness? Unlike the reviews by Judith Crist (movies) and Cleveland Amory (TV), this doesn't give you any advice about what to watch, because you already missed the chance. And if any of them are rerun, in a few months or so, what are the odds you're going to remember what MacDonough thought of them?  I don't mind saying that I'm confused.

With Tom Jones, Bob Hope and
John Wayne, no less!

All that said, this week's column is immensely entertaining, with MacDonough looking back at a recent week littered—"and we do mean litter"—with specials that aren't, as it happens, very special. We begin with CBS's Raquel, starring "That ravishing robot Raquel Welsh," which may be a pleasant enough show to look at—but "unfortunately came equipped with a sound track," and it "presented Miss Welch's 'many talents' (CBS's words, not ours.)" In the course of the 60 minutes, Raquel goes on to pose philosophical questions ("Sometimes I feel paradoxical"), sing a few tunes ("Dum-deedle-dee-dum-deedle-dee-dum"), show off her sense of humor ("I don't know if I could dance with a glass of water on my head"), recite a bit of poetry ("Fawr grrrest walls an' fawr grrreat towahs"), and terrorize a field full of horses (no other description required). 

Raquel is an example of something you see a lot in the 1970s and 1980s, the variety show hosted by someone you don't ordinarily associate with the genre. For example, Telly: Who Loves Ya, Baby. Whether shows like this are good or bad, what they accomplish is to give you the temperature of the times: who's hot, who's not. And while Raquel Welch is definitely hot, as MacDonough says, "We prefer our sex symbols laced with that intangible quality called talent. Paging Ann-Margret."

On the other hand, maybe I would remember this review the next time Raquel shows up in the listings.

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Enough of all this! Let's watch some TV!

Country music's growing in popularity, as seen by a trio of shows this week, starting Saturday with Harper Valley U.S.A. (7:30 p.m. PT, NBC), named not, oddly enough, for host Jerry Reed, but for guest star Jeannie C. Riley's hit single, which she will naturally sing. Other guests include Earl Scruggs, Louis Roberts, Delaney & Bonnie & Friends (without, alas, Eric Clapton), and the Dillards, while Tom T. Hall, who wrote the title song, is among those providing comic relief. Wednesday, it's Hee Haw (7:30 p.m., CBS), with guests Merle Haggard and his wife Bonnie Owens, who doubles as the former wife of the show's co-host, Buck Owens. I absolutely can't think of a better scenario for a C&W song that that.  And later Wednesday (9:00 p.m., ABC), it's the season finale of The Johnny Cash Show, with Tex Ritter, Roy Acuff, Marty Robbins, and Danny Davis and the Nashville Brass.

On Sunday it's a sports doubleheader, though you won't be able to watch them at the same time. At 11:00 a.m. on CBS, it's the fourth (and, as it happens, final) game of the Stanley Cup Final between the Boston Bruins and St. Louis Blues. Bobby Orr's overtime goal—one of the ◄ most iconic photos in sports history—gave the Bruins a 4-3 victory, and their first Stanley Cup in 29 years.

At 12:30 on a special edition of ABC's Wide World of Sports, it's same-day coverage of Formula 1's most glamorous race of the year, the Grand Prix of Monaco. Jochen Rindt, with Price Rainier and Princess Grace in attendance, drives to a smashing victory over Jack Brabham and Henri Pescarolo. It's a bittersweet reminder of what auto racing was like in the day: Bruce McLaren, the champion driver and car designer who finishes 14th, is killed in an accident less than a month later. Rindt himself will be killed in practice for the Italian Grand Prix later in the season; he will become the sport's first (and, hopefully, only) postumous world champion.

Speaking of racing, former Indy 500 winer and future world champion Mario Andretti plays himself in It Takes a Thief (Monday, 7:30 p.m., ABC), an epsisode which also includes Dick Smothers, who was himself an avid racer. Mason Williams, musical guru for those same Smothers Brothers, and Grammy winner for "Classical Gas," is the focus on NET Festival (Tuesday, 9:00 p.m., NET). Sammy Davis Jr. makes a guest appearance on The Beverly Hillbillies (Wednesday, 8:30 p.m, CBS) as a New York policeman, in an episode partly filmed in the Big Apple. Orson Welles does a Shakespearean reading on The Dean Martin Show (Thursdasy, 10:00 p.m., NBC); Deano's other guests are Gina Lollobrigida, George Gobel and Charles Nelson Reilly; nice guest mix, isn't it? And on Friday, it's the aforementioned David Frost interview with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, (8:30 p.m., KPTV), with Burton doing some classical readings of his own. One of the questions we won't hear from Frost: did Liz ruin Burton's career? Enquiring minds want to know.

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Last but not least, we have Peter Pflug's humorous piece on television violence. Peter is most assuredly a man after my own heart: "When I came home from work, cloted with choler and spoiling for a safe fight, I didn't take it out on my famly. Instead, I turned on television. After an hour or two filled with gunfire, screams and moans, I would find that all of my murderous fantasies had been massaged into nothingness."

But now, of course, we're in the era of the war on violence (no pun intended), one of the lasting (for now, anyway) legacies from 1968. Networks have promised, under pain of government oversight, to clean up their act and provide entertainment that was at least a little bit kindler and gentler. Pflug doesn't mention any of this, merely decring the acts of the "do-gooders," the "infernal ladies' clubs and their write-in campaigns," but it's the background to the situation in which he now finds himself. "All but gone are the days when TV heroes returned from the edge of the grave to gouge and bit their way to happiness in the final 10 minutes before the kiddies were put to bed." When the hero laments that the villian is simply a product of his environment, that's when Pflug draws the line, storming out of the house to punch a couple of trees lest he do something even more disagreeable while inside.

And that's when he overheard a conversation between two men, discussing the same show he'd just been watching. "I've seen terrible in my time but never so terrible as that," said one man. His friend replied, "When that rat told the hero he'd stolen his dog and sold it to a laboratory, I thought sure he'd bought himself at least a karate chop. But the guy just stood there and said, 'I feel sorryh for ayone with so much hate inside.'" I feel his pain, even though the characters who actually deserIt've to feel pain manage to avoid it.

It's very funny, but there's a point to it. I wrote a few years ago at this very site about Mickey Spillane's comment that what television needed was not less violence, but better violence. The act of seeing the bad guy punished—something that, as novelist Dorothy L. Sayers once pointed out, is essential to restoring the equilibrium of justice—is a cathartic event for the reader, or in this case the viewer, of a mystery. To remove that retributive violence through which justice is often dispensed is, in a way, a denial, a deprivation, of what the viewer not only wants but needs. To go without it leaves me, at the end, with a sour taste in my mouth. In this sense, television's relationship to violence is that not of a pressure cooker, but a pressure valve, a relesase to the accumulation of tensions in today's modern world. 

And you know what? Say otherwise and you'll get a punch in the nose. TV  

This week in TV Guide: December 18, 1971

Let's start off the week with a couple of true Christmas classics.

First up is Richard Williams' magnificent animation version of A Christmas Carol. TV Guide's pictorial takes us behind the scenes to show the process behind the animated special. The animators base their drawings on John Leach's illustrations in the first edition of Dickens' story, as well as old engravings of 19th-century London. Studies are made on things even as small as the items on Scrooge's desk.

And then there's one of the highlights of the special: the stunning opening shot, in which "[t]he camera will focus on Scrooge's home and then pan dramatically down the facade of the building to the lighted window of the room occupied by the old skinflint." An artist works on the details of the scene, "using an old engraving as his source of authentic architectural details." Best of all, perhaps, the story features Alastair Sim recreating his 1951 film role as Scrooge; Michael Hordern, who played Marley's Ghost in the movie, does so here as well. Sir Michael Redgrave is the narrator.

The special airs Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. CT on ABC, and in a mere half-hour it does a remarkable job of condensing the story without losing any of the important details, let alone the flavor. At the end of the article, the author posits that viewers will decide "whether it is a 'Carol' to be remembered." The Motion Picture Academy certainly thought so; shortly after the airing, A Christmas Carol was released in theaters, and wound up winning the 1972 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.* Viewers thought so as well; despite its brevity, it remains one of the most-loved of all Carol adaptations. Richard Williams discusses it below:


*Not everyone was a fan, however; controversy about the eligibility of a film that had been initially broadcast on television resulted in a change to Academy rules, requiring all films to premiere in theaters first. We might think of it today as the "Netflix Rule."

Now we come to the CBS movie special at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, one which TV Guide labels "A potential Christmas classic," and they're not wrong. It's The Homecoming: A Christmas Story, the pilot for The Waltons, written by and based on the novel by Earl Hamner Jr., with Academy Award winner Patricia Neal as Olivia Walton, Richard Thomas as John-Boy, and Andrew Duggan as John Walton. Ellen Corby, Judy Norton, and Mary Elizabeth McDonough will join Thomas when The Waltons becomes a weekly series in September 1972.

As Dick Adler writes in his profile of Patricia Neal, this is a homecoming in more ways than one. It's the first time she's really been before the cameras in Hollywood since her trio of massive strokes in 1965; The Subject Was Roses, her storied comeback after a three-year recovery, was shot in New York. Having been born in a small Kentucky town, she can identify not only with Hamner's characters, but having lived through the Depression, having lived through a Christmas with "no money in the house, snow outside and FDR on the radio." And though she's done several dramas for British TV (she's lived for many years in England with her husband, writer Roald Dahl), this is her first appearance on American television in over a decade. It is, to be sure, a memorable one.

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Throughout the 60s and early 70s, TV Guide's weekly 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. 

We begin Cleveland Amory's review of McCloud with the image of Dennis Weaver galloping down a New York street while riding a horse. (I don't imagine it was Wall Street; otherwise, he would have been riding either a bull or a bear.) Worry not, Cleve assures us, for while the show is not played narrowly, it's not played that broadly, either. But, he says, it is played well. The cop from the sticks—or, at least, Taos, New Mexico—teaches the city boys a thing or two. "It's kind of a one-joke premise, but these days, what television premises aren't?"

The joys of McCloud begin with Dennis Weaver, who plays "a terrific country slicker." He gets the nut cases, "but what he does with them makes wonderful little comic vignettes." Case in point: a man asking for police protection because of constant assaults by women. "With them," he says, "I am a sex object. "Replies McCloud, with wonderfully live deadpan, 'Well, it's a curse, all right.'" Weaver is aided by "the wonderful exasperation of J.D. Cannon, as McCloud's chief."

Not all the stories are plausible; in fact, most of them strain some level of credulity. But, in these days when so much of television looks and sounds so much alike, "there's something about that li'l ol' boy that relieves it—even when you can't quite believe it."

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Friday is Christmas Eve, and it's the last chance for weekly series to air their Christmas-themed episodes in. Let's take a look at a few of them.

Remember Getting Together, the Partridge Family spin-off starring Bobby Sherman and Wes Stern? Here's Saturday's episode (7:00 p.m., ABC), "Tale of an old-fashioned Christmas... in a run-down mountain cabin without heat, electricity or plumbing." And on Arnie (8:30 p.m, CBS), "A holiday tale about giving and receiving traces Arnie's anxiety over a Christmas bonus." Nothing for Mission: Impossible, though it wouldn't be hard to come up with something: "Responding to the dying declaration of a mob hitman, Phelps and his IMF team launch a scheme to protect a toymaker from being taken over by an Eastern syndicate." See how easy it is?

On Monday's daytime rerun of The Dick Van Dyke Show (4:30 p.m., KSTP), "'The Alan Brady Show Presents' a Christmas musicale" in which Laura joins the writing staff in showing off their talents. One of the best scenes features the four of them performing "I Am a Fine Musician."


On Adam-12 (7:00 p.m., NBC) reruns it's annual Christmas episode: "Tales of Christmas: a robbed Santa, an unwed mother caught shoplifting, an infant lost in a mountain area." Henry Fonda's single-season police-family drama The Smith Family (8:00 p.m., ABC) invites viewers to spend "Christmas with the Smith Family: the children are out of town, Betty has a touch of the blues and Chad's handling everything from shoplifting to a jail break." Hollywood Television Theatre hearkens back to the Golden Age of Radio Drama (Thursday, 8:00 p.m., PBS) with a re-creation of Norman Corwin's radio verse play "The Plot to Overthrow Christmas," about the Devil's plan to kill off Santa Claus. John McIntyre plays the Devil, who's joined in his efforts by Nero, Ivan the Terrible, Caligula, and Simon Legree. I've heard the radio version; it may sound like a comedy, but it isn't. And Christmas Eve brings perhaps the best of them all, The Odd Couple's classic Christmas episode (8:30 p.m., ABC) as "Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol' gets the comic treatment: Oscar's dreaming that he's Scrooge in a nightmare populated by Felix and their poker-playing pals." (Read more about it here.)

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The holidays also mean college football bowl season, starting Saturday with CBS's coverage of the Sun Bowl (12:00 noon), pitting LSU against Iowa State. And with the NFL regular season at a close, the Liberty Bowl slides into the Monday Night Football timeslot (8:00 p.m, ABC), pitting Arkansas against Tennessee.

What else have we got here? Well, Edith Efron's visit to Boston's respected PBS station WGBH yields this interesting observation from Greg Harney, executive producer of The Advocates, which I remember has being a very interesting show: "In our first year, we mostly had liberal advocates, activist types. It dawned on me we weren't clarifying the issues, we were muddying them up! We were trying to polarize within the liberal position! All we were attracting were the Eastern-liberal-leftist viewers!" So, Harney hired a strong conservative advocate, William Rusher, publisher of National Review. "It turns out that Rusher and [William F.] Buckley aren't splinter-groups spokesmen at all! They represent the point of view of millions of people. We've doubled our mail. And the show has become one of the few that he whole PBS system cherishes." They were shocked, shocked, to find out there was another legitimate point of view out there, and that, my friends, is how Boris Johnson and Donald Trump wind up being elected.

The Doan Report mentions that Merv Griffin's return to syndication with Metromedia after his run at CBS could be trouble for—David Frost. Merv will take Frost's prime-time slots on Metromedia's channels in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and Frost could wind up being moved to late evening, where he could wind up in competition with Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett. Group W says the show is not in jeopardy, but it will go off the air next year. There's also a report on cable-TV, where the future appears bright; the Alfred E. Sloan Foundation says that cable could bring "as many as 40 channels into 40 to 60 per cent of all American homes," and that the competition with broadcast TV will be good for viewers. And ABC is talking about cutting commercials back on Saturday morning kids' shows, from six minutes per half hour to four. The reason for the the discussion? The FTC is cracking down on children's TV, and ABC is floating the idea in hopes that the Commission picks up on it; they're "not likely" to do it on their own "for competitive reasons."

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Saturday at 2:00 p.m., WTCN carries the 40th Annual Santa Claus Lane Parade, taped November 25. Mickey Mouse is the star, along with Pat Boone, Johnny Mathis, Kent McCord, Gisele McKenzie, Wayne Newton, Lou Rawls, Robert Reed, Rudy Vallee, and the casts of Arnie, Room 222, The Doris Day Show, Nanny and the Professor, and many others! This parade is still around, known today as the Hollywood Christmas Parade. True story: Gene Autry, riding in the parade one year, heard a couple of excited children pointing further down the parade route and crying, "Here comes Santa Claus! Here comes Santa Claus!" And Gene, as smart a businessman as ever there was, thought to himself, "That gives me an idea. . ."

Speaking of Mickey Mouse, he's back Sunday in the live-action "Disney on Parade" on The Wonderful World of Disney (6:30 p.m., NBC). On Masterpiece Theatre (8:00 p.m., PBS), it's the final episode of Tolstoy's "Resurrection"; next week, it's a two-hour adaptation of "Cold Comfort Farm" starring none other than Alastair Sim; too bad that couldn't have been on this week, isn't it? Will Geer is the guest star on Bonanza (8:00 p.m., NBC); the next time we see him, he'll be sliding into Edgar Bergen's role as Grandpa on The Waltons.

Monday, Burt Lancaster hosts An American Christmas: Words and Music (7:00 p.m., PBS), with James Earl Jones, the Columbus Boychoir, the Harlem Children's Chorus, a series of short films, and more. That's followed at 8:00 p.m. by the special Christmas in Boys' Town, with the Boys' Town Choir.

Tuesday, NBC follows President Nixon around the White House for December 6, 1971: A Day in the Presidency (6:30 p.m., hosted by John Chancellor). What was going on back then? Henry Kissinger talks to the president about the India-Pakistan conflict (they're joined later by General William Westmoreland, Secretary of State William Rogers, and CIA director Richard Helms); Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew discuss a revenue-sharing bill; and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau arrives for a conference and state dinner. At 8:30 p.m., CBS preempts Cannon for The Comedians, with Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Tony Randall, Don Adams, Peggy Cass, and Ron Carey.

Wednesday night at 9:00 p.m., Notre Dame travels to Los Angeles to take on UCLA in one of college basketball's great rivalries (WTCN/syndicated, probably by TVS; since school is on Christmas break, I would have stayed up to watch this). It's the first time the two have played since the Fighting Irish ended UCLA's 44-game winning streak in January; UCLA, led by Bill Walton and Henry Bibby, roars out to a 53-16 halftime lead, en route to a 114-56 win. The Bruins won't lose again until January 1974, when their 88-game winning streak ends, once again at the hands of Notre Dame.

Thursday night CBS continues the tradition of year-end reviews with part one of a two-part look back (8:00 p.m.), with Walter Cronkite leading the correspondents on a survey of the economy, the Supreme Court, prison riots, and jockeying for the upcoming elections. At 9:00 p.m., Jonathan Winters plays a "wisecracking Santa" (is there any other kind?) on The Dean Martin Show; and at 12:30 a.m., David Frost's guests are Joy Piccolo, Gale Sayers, and Dick Butkus—remember, it was just last month that Brian's Song premiered on ABC.

Friday is Christmas Eve, and CBS presents a rerun of the touching J.T. (7:00 p.m.), the touching Peabody-award winning story of a shy black youngster (Kevin Hooks) determined to nurse a mangy, one-eyed and half-starving alley cat back to health. I wonder why Hallmark doesn't do any movies like this?


If you've already seen it, check out Mitch Miller's Christmas show (7:00 p.m., WTCN), with Leslie Uggams and Diana Trask; it was originally broadcast in 1961. Don't ask me why, but I distinctly remember we were watching this before doing our Christmas Eve tree. As we pass into late night, with Santa coming our way, NBC gives Johnny Carson the night off; first, Skitch Henderson hosts a half-hour of holiday music with the Robert Shaw chorale (10:30 p.m.), followed by Midnight Mass live from St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. CBS's traditional church service is the candlelight service from the True Light Lutheran Church in New York City's Chinatown (11:00 p.m.), followed at midnight by Christmas gospel music from the Greater Zion Church of God in Christ in Philadelphia. And what better possible way could there be to end Christmas Eve than with KSTP's showing of Miracle on 34th Street, the greatest Christmas movie ever? That's a gift anyone would be happy to find under the tree on Christmas morning. TV