This week in TV Guide: April 7, 1956

With tensions between the United States and Canada running high at the moment, it seems appropriate to lead off this week with an article from Gordon Sinclair, the legendary Canadian journalist who in 1973 will become famous south of the border for his editorial on behalf of America at a time when the rest of the world is taking potshots at her. He's writing on the state of Canadian television, which he describes as "green," as it was in America a few years before; "there's no doubt that the future is just as bright" but at this moment, don't expect to see "the same slick technique you get in the States." Indeed, TV in Canada is still a little rough around the edges: "Our scripts are pedestrian, our crews are inexperienced and our directors seem hesitant to direct. Or even to suggest to performers older than themselves how to play a scene better."

Canadians produce 38 hours of network television each week, ranking third behind Hollywood and New York. Canadians have produced stars of American television, including Lorne Greene, Gisele MacKenzie and Barry Morse. (But no William Shatner?) Canadian shows have their share of curvy females, including Joan Fairfax and Shirley Harmer. But American television is still more popular than many home-grown shows; one of those native shows, Cross Canada Hit Parade (similar to Your Hit Parade in the States) is a twice-weekly musical showcase. A guest star ("usually American") is invited to sing a top record; MacKenzie, Canada's "most glittering expert in the field of song," has never appeared on the show. She was offered as much as $2,000 for a one-shot, but "showed no interest." And Fairfax, who was once voted "Miss Canadian Television" (because of her picture tubes?) has a Monday variety hour she co-hosts with Denny Vaughan, but it's beaten in the ratings by Robert Montgomery Presents; "You see, American programs are highly popular north of the border."

One of Canadian television's sitcoms, the French-Canadian Plouffe Family, is unique in that "it must be the only dramatic show on earth bradcast in two languages by the same cast playing the identical parts." A nice trick if you can pull it off. And there's the comic team of Johnny Wayne and Frank SHuster, "who are vulgar or delightful, depending on how you feel about such stuff." (Ed Sullivan was one who obviously expressed the latter; he had the two on his show 58 times.) On the Jackie Rae Show, he says, Canadians occasionally get the unexpected—along with imported guests. There are even what Sinclair describes as "fleeting glimpses of high comedy," which means Canada's Jackie doesn't really measure up to America's Jackie (Gleason, that is). Don't despair, thoughf: Sinclair suggests Canadian television will one day thrive. After all, even the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the government-run entity that "frowns on press agentry and commercial exploitation" hasn't been able to completely subdue the spirit of Canadian TV.

Where, I wonder, is today's Gordon Sinclair? We could certainly use him, on both sides of the border.

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Let's make sure we take care of the cover stories. The cover picture of Garry Moore, host of the quiz show I've Got a Secret, along with the show's two female panelists of the time, Jayne Meadows and Faye Emerson (much better looking than the male panelists, Bill Cullen and Henry Morgan) doesn't really have anything to do with the inside story. That's about the "secret" files of I've Got a Secret, which aren't really that secret. What is a secret, or at least something many of you might not have known, is that IGAS was created by Allan Sherman, the singer-comedian who was Weird Al before Weird Al, best-known for the hit single "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah." This week Sherman talks about some of the up to 4,000 secrets he receives each week—people with 12 toes or 13 fingers or no eyebrows, but also people with relatives who came to America on the Mayflower or shook hands with Abraham Lincoln, a man who went over Niagara Falls in a rubber ball and lived to tell about it, the first man to cash a Social Security check, or the woman who won the first Miss America pageant. By the way, Sherman says, if you have 40 toes he'll take you, but if it's only 12, don't bother.

After that, we go down south to Nashville, and visit the Grand Ole Opry. The Opry is already an American institution, having started in 1925, and what's surprising about its transition to television is not that it's happened, but that it took this long. The 1955-56 fall season brought about the premiere of the Opry on ABC, where once a month it substitutes for Ozark Jubilee, another Country-Western program, and in rural areas (which, remember, make up a much larger part of America in 1956 than they do today), it is absolutely slaughtering the competition, Perry Como and Jackie Gleason.

This week's article takes a kind of quaint approach to the whole thing, pointing out that these Country stars are just as business-savvy as anyone—hardly surprising considering how successful the Grand Ole Opry has been over the years; and when you think of how big Country music has become as a business, I think it shows these "hayseeds" have always been pretty shrewd business people.

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Two new soap operas premiered last week on CBS, and they're unusual in that they run for 30 minutes, rather than the traditional 15-minute format (a carryover from radio; you notice a lot of shows fit into that category). You might have heard of them: As the World Turns and The Edge of Night. Incidentally, The Edge of Night started out as "the daytime version of Perry Mason," with Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner writing it, but the notoriously temperamental Gardner pulls out due to "creative differences,"* and the character of the heroic lawyer is changed from Mason to Mike Karr, played by John Larkin, who played Mason on the radio.

*According to the always-reliable Wikipedia, those differences include Mason having a regular girlfriend, which throws into question that intriguing relationship with his secretary, Della Street. That's something Gardner, who jealously guarded Mason's image, would never agree to.

Speaking of the great lawyer, there's an interesting item in this week's Hollywood Teletype: "If everybody can agree on the contracts, Fred MacMurray will wind up as lawyer Perry Mason in the new CBS hour-long detective series." Discussions had gotten to the point that a Gardner memo states, "Apparently Fred MacMurray is the person who will probably be selected." It's an intriguing thought; like Burr, MacMurray had played many the heavy in movies up to that time (and would continue to do so; check him out in The Apartment), and there are many who think that Burr brought, from those roles as a heavy, an underlying sense of menace that gave his Mason, especially in the early seasons, a real edge of danger. Could MacMurray have done the same? He was certainly talented enough, but when Burr finally had the chance to audition for the role (he'd previously been tried as Hamilton Burger), he is said to have so impressed Gardner that he told Bur, "In twenty minutes, you captured Perry Mason better than I did in twenty years." That, presumably, was the end of that.

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Baseball is back! Well, kind of; it's still Spring Training, but on Saturday the New York Giants take on the Cleveland Indians in a pre-season game live from Dallas, home of this week's TV Guide. (1:25 p.m. CT, CBS). Dizzy Dean and Buddy Blattner call the action. It's not the big sports story of the weekend, though; that would be the final round of the Masters Golf Tournament, live from Augusta, Georgia. (Sunday, 4:00 p.m., CBS) It's the first time for the Masters on television (and the start of the tournament's long association with CBS), and the first major championship for Jack Burke Jr.,  who came from eight shots behind to defeat amateur Ken Venturi by one stroke. It remains the last time no golfer broke par for the tournament. 

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There's some real star power in this week's shows. On Saturday night's Ford Star Jubilee (9:30 p.m., CBS), Orson Welles and Betty Grable make rare television appearances in the comedy "Twentieth Century," written by the famed Broadway duo of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Welles would come to do a lot of television in the last couple of decades of his life—remember those cheesy appearances on the Dean Martin roasts and the commercials for Paul Masson wine? ("We will sell no wine before its time.")—but in 1956 he was still a star, known for The War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane and The Third Man, and still two years away from his noir classic Touch of Evil. Ah, one has to pay the bills, however, and Welles was always looking for money for his latest projects, many of which sadly never came to fruition. As he once famously said, "I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts."*

*By the way, if you're interested in absorbing article on Welles, check out this New Yorker piece by Alex Ross from ten years ago, celebrating the Welles centennial. It truly seems as if Orson Welles could only have been a character concocted in an Orson Welles movie.

On Sunday afternoon the American composer Norman Dello Joio premieres his opera "The Trial at Rouen" on NBC Opera Theatre (3:00 p.m.). It's Dello Joio's second crack at rendering an operatic version of the story of Joan of Arc. His first, "The Triumph of St. Joan," premiered in 1950, but Dello Joio was never happy with it, and eventually reworked the story (but neither the music nor the libretto) into the 75-minute opera (plus commercials) that you'd be seeing on television. There's yet a third version to come, however, as Dello Joio will add some of the music from the 1950 version to the 1956 version while creating some new scenes and expanding on others, resulting in the 1959 version, also called "The Triumph of St. Joan." Many of the critics of the time will consider it to be the best of the three versions of the story.

That night, G.E. Theater (8:00 p.m., CBS) presents Judy Garland in an informal one-woman show, performing a half-hour of songs she's never before done in public, and backed by pianist Leonard Pennario and choreographer Peter Gennaro (who did Annie, West Side Story and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, among other Broadway hits). It's introduced by host Ronald Reagan.

If you happen to own the boxed set of Studio One episodes that came out a few years ago, you'll have seen the Rod Serling political drama "The Arena," airing Monday night (9:00 p.m., CBS), with Wendell Corey as an ambitious young senator dealing with the legacy (and feuds) of his father. (If not, you can watch it here.) You might have thought, watching it, that it was substandard Serling, one of the episodes that helped drive him to create The Twilight Zone. The problem, as he writes in his 1957 collection of television plays Patterns: Four Television Plays With The Author’s Personal Commentaries, is not a new one: interference from the network and sponsors. His reaction, however, shows us the direction he is already considering going:

I was not permitted to have my Senators discuss any current or pressing problem. To talk of tariff was to align oneself with the Republicans; to talk of labor was to suggest control by the Democrats. To say a single thing germane to the current political scene was absolutely prohibited. So on television in April 1956, several million viewers got a definitive picture of television’s concept of politics and the way government is run. They were treated to an incredible display on the floor of The United States Senate of groups of Senators shouting, gesticulating and talking in hieroglyphics about make-believe issues, using invented terminology, in a kind of prolonged, unbelievable double-talk… In retrospect, I probably would have had a much more adult play had I made it science fiction, put it in the year 2057, and peopled the Senate with robots. This would probably have been more reasonable and no less dramatically incisive.

I suspect this episode was included in the DVD collection because 1) it was Serling, and 2) it was in fairly good condition. There are likely better episodes that could have been chosen. "The Arena" isn't bad, mind you, but far from peak Serling.

Dinah Shore currently hosts a twice-weekly 15-minute show (Tuesday and Thursday evenings on NBC, filling the remainder of the half hour occupied by John Cameron Swayzee's News Caravan), but she's talking about dumping that in favor of an hour-long Tuesday night show; another idea is to keep the current show, while adding a number of hour-long specials. The latter gets a tryout tonight (7:00 p.m., NBC), with Dinah welcoming Dean Martin and Marge and Gower Champion. As it turns out, nothing could be finah than to catch an hour of Dinah: The Dinah Shore Chevy Show starts up this October, and runs until 1963. (Her 15-minute show, which airs at 6:15 p.m. tonight, is guest-hosted by Gordon MacRae.) And, in the "you might be interested" category, a note on The 64,000 Question (9:00 p.m, CBS) tells us that, "As of the 43rd show, emcee Hal March has given out $544,608 and nine luxury automobiles." 

On Wednesday, M-G-M Parade (7:30 p.m., ABC) presents "The Greatness of Garbo," the conclusion of a two-part tribute to the legendary star. (Presumably, Garbo speaks.) Parade is the subject of Robert Sanders' review this week, which isn't a positive one; last month, Walter Pidgeon had been introduced as the new host, and the format of the show had been altered to present serialized versions of movies along with clips from the M-G-M vault. The problem, Sanders says, is that this doesn't produce any new material for television; the studio execs seem to "presumptously believe that viewers will be eager to watch their old hit movies and promotional plugs for new movies." And when movies are chopped up into two or three parts, "viewers cannot help but lose interest." Anyway, it only has another month to run. One story you'll get to see all at once is "The Funny Heart," tonight's presentation on The U.S. Steel Hour (9:00 p.m., CBS), with Imogene Coca, the female side of the team that made Your Show of Shows such a success, making her dramatic television debut. 

Thursday we see another of those shows that we likely won't see today, The All-American Homemaker of Tomorrow (7:00 p.m., ABC), sponsored by Betty Crocker, with the aforementioned Hal March on hand to crown the winner (or whatever is was they did). The competition, which was comprised of high school students who'd won similar competitions at the local level, began in 1955, and ran through 1977. You might be interested to know that one of the future contestants will be now-Senator Elizabeth Warren, competiting in 1966 as the representative from Northwest Classen High School in Oklahoma City. Meantime, Shower of Stars (7:30 p.m., CBS) presents a review of current musical trends, with Frankie Lane and Joe E. Brown sharing the hosting duties. 

On Friday, John Newland, who we'll come to know better as the host of One Step Beyond, stars in "The Bitter Land" on Schlitz Playhouse of Stars (8:00 p.m., CBS), as a father heading West to revenge the death of his son during a bank robbery. Later, Edward R. Murrow interviews pollster George Gallup on Person to Person (9:30 p.m., CBS), discussing the exotic art of measuring public opinion. It was probably just as accurate then as it is today.

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Finally, there's a small ad on the bottom of Wednesday's listings referring to the social event of the year, perhaps the television event of the year, with the provocative question: "How much will you see?"

That event is the marriage of the Academy Award-winning actress Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco, and everybody who's anybody will be heading over there to cover it. At the end of this week's What's My Line?, John Daly mentions that both Dorothy Kilgallen and Arlene Francis will be in Monaco to cover the wedding (Dorothy for the New York Journal American, Arlene for her Home show on NBC), and a worldwide audience estimated at 30 million tunes in for the formal ceremony on April 19.

It's an interesting mix of attendees; with Rainier as a head of state, a vast assemblage of diplomats and other heads of state are present, while Grace's status as Hollywood royalty attracts such luminaries as Cary Grant (who costarred with her in the Monaco-based To Catch a Thief), David Niven, Gloria Swanson, Ava Gardner and Aristotle Onassis, and her iconic wedding dress is designed by MGM's Helen Rose.* In essence, this is Charles and Di before Charles and Di.

*According to the always-reliable Wikipedia, this dress was the inspiration for that worn by Kate Middleton for her wedding to Prince William.

There are actually two marriage ceremonies; the first, a civil ceremony required by law, was held on April 18, while the Catholic Nuptial Mass, the televised event, was held the following day at St. Nicholas Cathedral. I'm not sure of the answer to TV Guide's question of how much viewers will see, but here's a brief look at what all the shouting was about. TV  

This week in TV Guide: October 30, 1954

Robert Montgomery is a man of many talents: noted film actor, producer and director (including two nominations for Best Actor), Tony Award-winning director, twice president of the Screen Actors Guild, host and occasional star of Robert Montgomery Presents, one of the longest-running and most prestigeous of the early drama anthologies, and if that weren't enough, father of Elizabeth Montgomery. And now, add to that: presidential advisor. 

Late last year, Montgomery was invited by old friend Jim Hagerty—who also happens to be President Eisenhower's press secretary—to breakfast at the White House with Ike and a half-dozen other Republican operatives. They discussed effective communication on television; after breakfast, the meeting moved to the Oval Office. At the end, he was offered the position as a staff consultant to the president. The position includes an executive office in the White House, along with a secretary; he spends a couple of days a week at the job. 

Montgomery stresses that he is not, as he has been referred to in the press, Eisenhower's "coach." He hasn't tried to change or "glamorize" the president, or to change his gestures or mannerisms. "Mr. Eisenhower," he says, "is a public figure, not an actor. He has a right—and an obligation—to appear to the public as he is; not as someone else wants him to appear." His job, he says, is to "help project Mr. Eisenhower’s own personality and thoughts in as natural a manner as possible."

Montgomery spent three months studying the president's habits off-camera. "All right, these are the methods he, as an individual, ordinarily uses to convey what he wants to say." Montgomery's job is to incorporate those methods to television, to not worry about what he's been told to do, but to do what he finds easiest and most comfortable. When Eisenhower voiced concern about inconveniencing cameramen, Montgomery told him, "Whatever you want to do, Mr. President, do. It’s the technicians’ obligation to make you comfortable."

   The student and the teacher

Over the past year, Montgomery has worked to raise the lecturn when Eisenhower addresses Congress, so that Ike didn't have to bend over, and to give the television audience a better look at his face. He changed the president's glasses from heavy, horn-rimmed to a more flattering shape and lighter rims. When Montgomery noticed that Eisenhower frequently paced back and forth behind his desk and occasionally wen to the front to sit on the edge, he suggested that he do the same when making informal talks on TV. He had a layer of felt placed over the president's polished desktop to keep lights from reflecting into his eyes, and he coordinates the president's wardrobe to make sure it stands out from the backdrop from wherever he's speaking. He checks camera and light locations, does sound checks, and makes sure that stand-by cameras and audio are ready. He also recommend that Eisenhower use a teleprompter, but only on certain occasions; ideally, he uses a cue sheet with only about 40 words in his notes for a 30-minute speech. 

For all this, Montgomery accepts no salary or expenses. He considers working with the president to be "his most exciting assignment and the high point of his career." Mr. Eisenhower, he says, is a man of wisdom, ability, integrity, and modesty; "It’s important that these qualities be projected to the people who have elected ohim." He concludes, "If you believe so thoroughly in a man and his program, how much better can you do in point of service?" I think there are more than a few candidates out there who could benefit from Montgomery's council. 

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Let's stay in the political arena; Tuesday is election day, and even though it's a mid-term election, with the presidency not at stake, all three networks plan to cover the vote-counting at least until control of both houses of Congress has been decied. 

Cronkite and crew during 1952 coverage 

On CBS (beginning at 9:00 p.m. ET), Walter Cronkite heads a team of veterans from the 1952 election, including Edward R. Murrow, Douglas Edwards, Charles Collingwood, Eric Sevaried, Ron Cochran, and others. Included is the Univac computer, "the electronic brain that calculates and projects the trends," first introduced with "some success" in 1952. The network plans cutaways to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. 

Over at NBC (9:30 p.m.), Dave Garroway, "who can be counted on to remain cool amidst the most hectic proceedings," will anchor the coverage, aided by John Cameron Swayze, Roy Neal, David Brinkley, Joseph McCaffrey, Ray Scherer, and others. They'll have remotes from Republican and Democratic national headquarters. Both CBS and NBC will break for local updates for the last five minutes of each half-hour.

And then there's ABC. While WFIL, the ABC/DuMont affiliate in Philadelphia, plans to break into local programming to cover the results in the East, the network plans to deliver "complete nationwide returns" beginning at midnight, with John Daly anchoring from ABC's New York studios. It's ironic: even though ABC's news division was widely derided for most of its existence (at least up until the late 1970s), their mode of limited coverage of events such as political conventions and elections has become the norm for networks nowadays. Of course, that's not what they intended at the time . . . 

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It's remarkable just how much you can talk about Barry Nelson without actually talking about Barry Nelson. What do I mean about that? Point #1: Nelson is on the cover of this week's issue, along with Joan Caulfield, with whom he co-stars Saturday nights on CBS in the sitcom My Favorite Husband. Now, if that show sounds familar to you, it's probably because My Favorite Husband was a radio comedy, airing from 1948 through 1951, starring Lucille Ball as a "slightly zany housewife" married to bank executive Richard Denning, and that series eventually evolved into I Love Lucy. While both the network and sponsor Jell-O wanted Denning to continue on the show when it moved to TV in 1951, Lucy insisted on casting Desi Arnaz as her on-screen husband. The show lost Jell-O as a sponsor, but gained television immortality, which I would figure as a pretty good trade-off. The actual My Favorite Husband, with the original radio premise, finally made it to TV in 1953 with Nelson and Caulfield, running for two-and-a-half seasons. That's a good-sized paragraph about Barry Nelson that actually has very little to do with him.

Point #2: Nine days prior to this issue—that is, October 21—Nelson starred in the third episode of the mystery anthology series Climax!, "Casino Royale," co-starring Peter Lorre and Linda Christian. If that sounds familiar to you, it should: it's based on the novel of the same name, written in 1953 by Ian Fleming, and Nelson plays Fleming's hero, James Bond. Yes, that James Bond. In this version, Bond is an American agent, working with a British contact named Clarence Leiter, to subdue arch villain Le Chiffre, played by Lorre. Nelson thereby became the first actor, of any nationality, to play Bond, and if he seems somewhat miscast in the role, I don't think he can be held to blame. (But you can watch it here and decide for yourself.) No adaptation that features "Jimmy Bond" is going to capture the essense of the Bond we've all come to know and love. Despite its proximity to the Climax broadcast, the TV Guide article doesn't even mention "Casino Royale." Granted, the Bond stories didn't really become popular in the United States until JFK mentioned how much he enjoyed them, but it's still funny to think of it flying so far under the radar.  That's two paragraphs about Barry Nelson, and still we haven't really talked about him.

So: we're told that Barry Nelson looks a lot like "an aging Tom Sawyer," but doesn't act like one. He's "actively intelligent," devoted to acting as a profession in which "he knows he is competent, hopes to improve, and works constantly toward bigger and better things." Following his discharge from the Army, he made his mark on the stage, culminating with three years on Broadway in "The Moon Is Blue." But "An actor can't afford to stay very long on Broadway," he says. "In order to become known, he must appear on the mass media—on television or in pictures." With that in mind, he made the move to TV and My Favorite Husband. He finds live television "too much of a grind" and calls the process "a dull, tedious business, but he says this without rancor or complaint—it is, for a professional actor, simply a fact.

Nelson maintained an active and varied career throughout his life: returning to Broadway as both actor and director (including a Tony nomination), was one of the regular panelists on To Tell the Truth, served as a host on NBC Radio's Monitor in the mid-60s, acted in several movies (including Airport and The Shining), and was a guest star on many television series, with his last coming in an episode of Murder, She Wrote in 1989. He died in 2007, shortly before his 90th birthday, with a pretty good career to his name. 

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Speaking of television as we were—which is not surprising since this is a television website, after all—Frank De Blois is complaining that Hollywood movie studios are taking away too much talent from TV: female talent, to be specific. It's not surprising in a historical context, given that television in its early days was, by-and-large, populated either by former movie stars who'd maxed out their stardom, or up-and-coming talent looking to make it big in the movies. (There's also a select group of visionaries who, seeing television's potential, got into it early on, from the production side as well as acting. But since that doesn't fit into this story, we'll just pretend they don't exist.)

MGM, Paramount, RKO, and Columbia have already made off with "choice properties" who made their start on TV: Grace Kelly, Anne Francis, Rosemary Clooney, and Betsy Palmer, to name a few. For example, just two years ago, the future Princess of Monaco was one of the "bright stars" on television, having made her mark on Studio One, Suspense, and TV Playhouse. She then headed for Hollywood, promising to return to TV "after a picture or two." Since then, she's made High Noon, Mogambo, Dial M for Murder, and Rear Window, and she'll win a Best Actress Oscar for the about-to-be-released The Country Girl. I wouldn't look for her to return to television any time soon.

In retrospect, though, I'm not sure that Grace wasn't the exception, rather than the rule. Anne Francis had a hit in Forbidden Planet, but a diet of low-budget movies saw her return to television, which I think really suited her better. (Honey West, anyone?) Rosemary Clooney started out with Arthur Godfrey and Ed Sullivan, and had a smash with White Christmas, but that was it; her greatest success came as a recording star, with a few guest spots on TV. Likewise, Betsy Palmer is far better known as a regular on I've Got a Secret and The Today Show and for her appearances on stage; there is, of course, Friday the 13th, but that's a ways in the future. Other names, such as Rita Gam and Joanne Jordan, never achieved megaton stardom, and Eva Marie Saint (who'd win an Oscar for On the Waterfront and would win hearts in North by Northwest) never planned on a long-term film career; she preferred "a voice in her own future as an actress." Still, there's plenty of talent out there, and as long as they continue to succeed, Hollywood will continue to come calling.

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It's a quiet week on the old tube, with election coverage being the dominant feature, but there's always something worth mentioning. For instance, on Saturday, the college football game of the week features a matchup from a time when the Ivy League was still relevant in major college football: Penn State at Penn, from Franklin Field in Philadelphia. (2:00 p.m., ABC) Penn State was well on its way to becoming the dominant team in the East, while Penn played a schedule that included teams like Army, Navy, Duke, and Notre Dame. Not a surprise that the Quakers would finish the season 0-9, losing to Penn State 35-13 in one of their better outings.

Sunday, Hallmark Hall of Fame (5:00 p.m., NBC) presents a story we'd probably never see today: "The Path to Peace," newspaper editor Horace "Go West, Young Man" Greeley's drive to have former Confederate President Jefferson Davis freed from federal prison. You'll notice that title again: reconcilation is always a path to peace, but unfortunately, too many people today seem to think that reconcilation only goes one way—theirs. Coincidentally, tonight's You Are There (6:30 p.m., CBS) tells the story of Abraham Lincoln's selection as the Republican candidate for president in 1860. 

Speaking of Robert Montgomery as we were, it would be wrong to neglect this Monday's Robert Montgomery Presents, "The Gentleman" (9:30 p.m., NBC), the story of "A man . . . obsessed with the way things used to be. Rather than accepting and appreciating the present, he sadly retreats to living his life in the past." It sounds like the story of this blog, doesn't it? Otherwise, Benny Goodman and his quintet have the joint jumping on (Sid) Caesar's Hour (8:00 p.m., NBC), with regulars Carl Reiner and Howard Morris.

Tuesday provides us with a final bit of politicking, albeit in a non-partisan vein; The Morning Show (7:00 a.m., CBS) presents a filmed message from President Eisenhower urging people to get out and vote, regardless of which party they support. For those of you too young to remember, there was a time when everyone voted on the same day unless they could demonstrate they'd be out of town on Election Day, in which case they got an absentee ballot. I kind of miss those days. . . Later, on The Garry Moore Show (10:00 a.m., CBS), Garry interviews his congressman, played by Durward Kirby.

On Wednesday, it's the second-ever episode of Disneyland (7:30 p.m., ABC), and Walt has a treat in store: the television premiere of Alice in Wonderland, the 1951 animated feature film with a wonderful list of voice talent, including Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter, Sterling Holloway as the Cheshire Cat, Jerry Colonna as the March Hare, and J. Pat O'Malley as Tweedledum and Tweedlede. Sure, it's abridged, and it's shown in black-and-white, but it's probably still the best show on TV tonight.

Thursday's highlight can be seen on Climax!, the show that gave us "Casino Royale" a couple of weeks ago. This time, it's an adaptation of Lucille Fletcher's1943 radio thriller Sorry, Wrong Number (8:30 p.m., CBS), starring Shelley Winters in the role played by Agnes Moorhead in the original broadcast and, perhaps more famously, Barbara Stanwyck in the 1948 movie adaptation (for which Stanwyck was nominated for Best Actress). Fletcher, who also wrote the movie screenplay, did the television adaptation as well, so I have great confidence the quality remained high. (Orson Welles called the original "the greatest single radio script ever written.") Fun fact: the music for the TV version was composed by Fletcher's former husband, Bernard Herrmann.

We'll stick with radio—kind of—to end the week: on Friday's Today Show (7:00 a.m., NBC), Dave Garroway's guest is "the father of radio," Lee DeForest. It's said that they'll be discussing DeForest's lastest invention; now, I haven't found any info as to what that might have been, but I can imagine Garroway enjoying the interview immensely. Besides the fact he started on radio, he would have been fascinated by the science and technology of radio, not to mention the other areas in which DeForest worked.

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At some point along the way we apparently decided to become a completely homogeneous culture. There are exceptions, of course, some natural resources and local landmarks unique to a given area, but for the most part we seem determined to make every city in every region of the country look identical—and identically bland—to every other city in every other region: the same chain stores in the same strip malls designed in the same architectural style.

Television, in its role as a mirror of culture, is no different. Thanks (?) to some of our streaming providers, it's now easy to check out local newscasts from various parts of the country, and I defy anyone to find substantial differences in the broadcasts: they use the same fonts, the same color schemes, the same types of intro music, the same style of logo, the same backdrop showing their respective city skylines (themselves becoming less and less distinctive). The anchors have the same, vaguley nondescript accents, they wear the same clothes (female anchors even share cute outfits online), and they read from virtually identical scripts. 

Of all the things that used to give a station its unique identity, the station-identification slide was one of the most distinctive. This week, TV Guide shares some of those slides from around the country, as stations show off their mascots, local landmarks, regional color, and more. 

Even after the artistic renditions became more sophisticated, station IDs maintained their distinctiveness. There were specialized versions for various holidays, photographs capturing seasonal representations of local landscapes, skylines, and the like. I don't even know if there are station ID slides anymore other than at the start of the local news; it seems as if we just go from one program to another, and heaven forbid we should take any time away from commercial opportunities. There's no use crying over spilt station logos; still, it does seem as if we've lost something, doesn't it? TV  

This week in TV Guide: April 7, 1956

There's nothing terribly earth-shattering about this week's issue, so let's do what I like to do most when I've got a new issue of TV Guide - just skip around and see what's what.

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For example, two new soap operas premiered last week on CBS, and they're unusual in that they run for 30 minutes, rather than the traditional 15-minute format (a carryover from radio; you notice a lot of shows fit into that category). You might have heard of them: As the World Turns and The Edge of Night. Incidentally, The Edge of Night started out as "the daytime version of Perry Mason," with Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner writing it, but the notoriously temperamental Gardner pulls out due to "creative differences,"* and the character of the heroic lawyer is changed from Mason to Mike Karr, played by John Larkin, who played Mason on the radio.

*According to the always-reliable Wikipedia, those differences include Mason having a regular girlfriend, which throws into question that intriguing relationship with his secretary, Della Street. That's something Gardner, who jealously guarded Mason's image, would never agree to.

Speaking of the great lawyer, there's an interesting item in this week's Hollywood Teletype: "If everybody can agree on the contracts, Fred MacMurray will wind up as lawyer Perry Mason in the new CBS hour-long detective series." Color me naïve, but I've never heard anything to suggest that producers were that close to hiring MacMurray. I'd read that he was one of those "considered but rejected" (Efrem Zimbalist Jr. being another), and I've seen the screen test William Hopper took for the role before he was chosen as Paul Drake, but most of the stories I've read over the years talk of Raymond Burr being Gardner's choice. I wonder if Gardner vetoed MacMurray as Mason - that wouldn't surprise me a bit. I like Fred MacMurray a lot, but he's not Perry Mason.

In the New York version of the Teletype, we read that Dinah Shore may be dumping her twice-weekly 15-minute show (which airs Tuesday and Thursday evenings on NBC, filling the remainder of the half hour occupied by John Cameron Swayzee's News Caravan) in favor of an hour-long Tuesday night show. Dinah's been doing the quarter-hour show since 1951, but she figures now may be the time to expand. Another idea: keeping the current show, and adding a number of hour-long specials in addition. As it turns out, nothing could be finah than Dinah at an hour: The Dinah Shore Chevy Show starts up this October, and runs until 1963, and her rendition of "See the U.S.A. in Your Chevrolet" becomes a part of pop culture lore.


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Let's make sure we take care of the cover stories. First, we'll go down south to Nashville, and visit the Grand Ole Opry. The Opry is already an American institution, having started in 1925, and what's surprising about its transition to television is not that it's happened, but that it took this long. The 1955-56 fall season brought about the premiere of the Opry on ABC, where once a month it substitutes for Ozark Jubilee, another Country-Western program, and in rural areas (which, remember, make up a much larger part of America in 1956 than they do today), it is absolutely slaughtering the competition, Perry Como and Jackie Gleason.

This week's article takes a kind of quaint approach to the whole thing, pointing out that these Country stars are just as business-savvy as anyone - hardly surprising considering how successful the Grand Ole Opry has been over the years; and when you think of how big Country music has become as a business, I think it shows these "hayseeds" have always been pretty shrewd business people.

The cover picture of Garry Moore, host of the quiz show I've Got a Secret, along with the show's two female panelists of the time, Jayne Meadows and Faye Emerson (much better looking than the male panelists, Bill Cullen and Henry Morgan) doesn't really have anything to do with the inside story. That's about the "secret" files of I've Got a Secret, which aren't really that secret. What is a secret, or at least something many of you might not have known, is that IGAS was created by Allan Sherman, the singer-comedian who was Weird Al before Weird Al, best-known for the hit single "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah." This week Sherman talks about some of the up to 4,000 secrets he receives each week - people with 12 toes or 13 fingers or no eyebrows, but also people with relatives who came to America on the Mayflower or shook hands with Abraham Lincoln, a man who went over Niagara Falls in a rubber ball and lived to tell about it, the first man to cash a Social Security check, or the woman who won the first Miss America pageant. By the way, Sherman says, if you have 40 toes he'll take you, but if it's only 12, don't bother.

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Gordon Sinclair, the legendary Canadian journalist who in 1973 will become famous south of the border for his editorial on behalf of America at a time when the rest of the world is taking potshots at her, writes this week about the state of Canadian television. Television in Canada is "green," as it was in America a few years before, and "there's no doubt that the future is just as bright" as in America, but you'll have to excuse Canadians if their shows are still a little rough around the edges. "Our scripts are pedestrian, our crews are inexperienced and our directors seem hesitant to direct. Or even to suggest to performers older than themselves how to play a scene better."

Canadians produce 38 hours of network television each week, ranking third behind Hollywood and New York. Canadians have produced stars of American television, including Lorne Greene, Gisele MacKenzie and Barry Morse. Canadian shows have their share of curvy females, including Joan Fairfax and Shirley Harmer. But American television is still more popular than many home-grown shows; Robert Montgomery Presents is particularly successful. Sinclair suggests Canadian television will one day thrive - after all, even the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the government-run entity that "frowns on press agentry and commercial exploitation" hasn't been able to completely subdue the spirit of Canadian TV.

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ALL: HADLEY TV GUIDES

There's some real star power in this week's shows. On Saturday night's Ford Star Jubilee (CBS), Orson Welles and Betty Grable make rare television appearances in the comedy "Twentieth Century," written by the famed Broadway duo of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Welles would come to do a lot of television in the last couple of decades of his life - remember those cheesy appearances on the Dean Martin roasts and the commercials for Paul Masson wine? ("We will sell no wine before its time.") - but in 1956 he was still a star, known for The War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane and The Third Man, and still two years away from his noir classic Touch of Evil. Ah, one has to pay the bills, however, and Welles was always looking for money for his latest projects, many of which sadly never came to fruition. As he once famously said, "I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts."*

*By the way, if you're interested in absorbing article on Welles, check out this New Yorker piece by Alex Ross from last year. It truly seems as if Orson Welles could only have been a character concocted in an Orson Welles movie.

On Sunday afternoon the American composer Norman Dello Joio premieres his opera "The Trial at Rouen" on NBC Opera Theatre. It's Dello Joio's second crack at rendering an operatic version of the story of Joan of Arc. His first, "The Triumph of St. Joan," premiered in 1950, but Dello Joio was never happy with it, and eventually reworked the story (but neither the music nor the libretto) into the 75-minute opera (plus commercials) that you'd be seeing on television. There's yet a third version to come, however, as Dello Joio will add some of the music from the 1950 version to the 1956 version while creating some new scenes and expanding on others, resulting in the 1959 version, also called "The Triumph of St. Joan." Many of the critics of the time will consider it to be the best of the three versions of the story.

Sunday night CBS' G.E. Theater presents Judy Garland in an informal one-woman show, performing a half-hour of songs she's never before done in public, and backed by pianist Leonard Pennario and choreographer Peter Gennaro (who did Annie, West Side Story and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, among other Broadway hits). It's introduced by G.E. host Ronald Reagan.

If you happen to own the boxed set of Studio One episodes that came out a few years ago, you'll have seen the Rod Serling political drama "The Arena," airing Monday night on CBS, with Wendell Corey as an ambitious young senator dealing with the legacy (and feuds) of his father. You might also know that this is substandard Serling, one of the episodes that helped drive him to create The Twilight Zone. The problem, as he writes in his 1957 collection of television plays Patterns: Four Television Plays With The Author’s Personal Commentaries, is not a new one: interference from the network and sponsors. His reaction, however, shows us the direction he is already considering going:

I was not permitted to have my Senators discuss any current or pressing problem. To talk of tariff was to align oneself with the Republicans; to talk of labor was to suggest control by the Democrats. To say a single thing germane to the current political scene was absolutely prohibited. So on television in April 1956, several million viewers got a definitive picture of television’s concept of politics and the way government is run. They were treated to an incredible display on the floor of The United States Senate of groups of Senators shouting, gesticulating and talking in hieroglyphics about make-believe issues, using invented terminology, in a kind of prolonged, unbelievable double-talk… In retrospect, I probably would have had a much more adult play had I made it science fiction, put it in the year 2057, and peopled the Senate with robots. This would probably have been more reasonable and no less dramatically incisive.

I suspect this episode was included in the DVD collection because 1) it was Serling, and 2) it was in fairly good condition. There are certainly better episodes that could have been chosen.

There's not too much of note on Tuesday, but there is a note on CBS' $64,000 Question that "As of the 43rd show, emcee Hal March has given out $544,608 and nine luxury automobiles." On Wednesday Imogene Coca, the female side of the team that made Your Show of Shows such a success, makes her dramatic television debut in CBS' U.S. Steel Hour. Thursday we see another of those shows that we likely won't see today, The All-American Homemaker of Tomorrow show, sponsored by Betty Crocker, with the aforementioned Hal March on hand to crown the winner (or whatever they do). No word on whether or not this program continues today. The week concludes Friday with Edward R. Murrow interviewing pollster George Gallup on Person to Person, about the exotic art of measuring public opinion. It was probably just as accurate then as it is today.

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Finally, there's a small ad on the bottom of Wednesday's listings referring to the social event of the year, perhaps the television event of the year, with the provocative question: "How much will you see?"

That event is the marriage of the Academy Award-winning actress Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco, and everybody who's anybody will be heading over there to cover it. At the end of this week's What's My Line?, John Daly mentions that both Dorothy Kilgallen and Arlene Francis will be in Monaco to cover the wedding (Dorothy for the New York Journal American, Arlene for her Home show on NBC), and a worldwide audience estimated at 30 million tunes in for the formal ceremony on April 19.

It's an interesting mix of attendees; with Rainier as a head of state, a vast assemblage of diplomats and other heads of state are present, while Grace's status as Hollywood royalty attracts such luminaries as Cary Grant (who costarred with her in the Monaco-based To Catch a Thief), David Niven, Gloria Swanson, Ava Gardner and Aristotle Onassis, and her wedding dress is designed by MGM's Helen Rose.* In essence, this is Charles and Di before Charles and Di.

*According to the always-reliable Wikipedia, this dress was the inspiration for that worn by Kate Middleton for her wedding to Prince William.

There are actually two marriage ceremonies; the first, a civil ceremony required by law, was held on April 18, while the Catholic Nuptial Mass, the televised event, was held the following day at St. Nicholas Cathedral. I'm not sure about the answer to TV Guide's question of how much viewers will see, but here's a look at what the shouting was all about.


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