This week in TV Guide: September 3, 1955

Long before Star Trek was a twinkle in the sky, or in the eye of anyone with the possible exception of Gene Roddenberry, there was a letter-writing campaign in support of a show that was scheduled to go off the air. It was a show praised for its "honest and appealing" portrayals, for stories that weren't afraid to break the mould of prevailing fare, for its likeable characters. It had a loyal and devoted following of viewers, but not, unfortunately, enough to warrant the sponsor's interest in a second season. And when news of its cancellation was made public, the network was inundated with complaints from literally "thousands of irate viewers." In the face of such a public outcry, the show was revived, on a different network and with a different sponsor, for another season. Welcome to the world of Father Knows Best.

It may be hard to believe that such a fate once awaited a series that has since gone on to attain iconic status within the classic TV world, but when Father aired on CBS during the 1954-55 season, it averaged a 20.5 rating, as opposed to the show whose timeslot it will be assuming this season, NBC's My Little Margie, which came in at 27.3. The new sponsor, unnamed in the article but in reality the Scott Paper Company, is said to have been aware that it was trading a more popular show for a less popular one, but was heavily influenced by the viewer response, as well as a feeling that CBS had scheduled the program in a bad timeslot.

  Jane Wyatt and Robert Young read some letters

And what were some of those letters? A Cincinnati housewife wrote, "If the sponsors cannot tell when they have a good show, why should I believe they know what they are talking about when it comes to their products?" Zing! From a woman in Chicago: "Perhaps you do not realize the pleasure this intriguing show brings to people who remember their own youthful family life with nostalgia. Please keep it." And this from John Crosby, one of the nation's preeminent television critics: "Unless somebody does something about it. Father Knows Best will be dropped off the air . . . This would be a crying scandal because Father Knows Best is one of the most honest and appealing and thoroughly delightful situation comedies on TV."  

Well, a lot of someones did do something about it, which led in turn to someone else, a sponsor, doing something else about it, and as a result, this counter-cultural program is returning for a second season. Wait; what's that about counter-cultural? Well, ask star Robert Young what makes Father different from other family sitcoms: "We didn’t want a father who was always blowing his top, or a mother who dominated her husband, or kids who were so smart that they made their folks look like morons. And we particularly didn’t want Pop to fall off a ladder or down a flight of stairs every week. How many fathers do you know—living, I mean—who could stand that, week after week?" It's an attitude echoed by the many viewers who saw the show as "one of TV’s few situation comedies that don’t cast Pop as a dim-wit.," that "represents American family life as it really is and not as some TV scriptwriter thinks it is—or should be." It's fashionable to look at the sitcoms of the 1950s and '60s and scoff at them as portraying families that were too good to be true, living in an America that never was. Perhaps they'd feel differently if they looked back at those very families that watched Father Knows Best, recognized in it the world they lived in, and thought it was a show worth saving.

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On the cover this week is 29-year-old comedian Johnny Carson, seen with Jody, the first of his four wives. He's called the "young man with a grin," and undoubtedly, he's hoping that his career will have more longevity than his marriages. And interestingly, the comedian to whom he draws the most comparisons is George Gobel, for more reasons than the fact that Carson is the first comedian since Gobel to host his variety show from Hollywood. "We’re both low-pressure; we both underplay. Gobel is the hottest thing in the field right now, so naturally, anyone coming along with even an approximation of his style is going to be compared to him." 

One of Johnny's greatest champions has been Jack Benny, who was impressed with Carson from the first moment that Johnny firmly stepped into the spotlight to substitute for an ailing Red Skelton. ("All the way into the studio,” Carson says, “I kept trying to remember sure-fire gags. It was all so fast, I really didn’t have time to get into a nervous tizzy.") After the show, Benny insisted to anyone who would listen to him that "The kid is great," and urged CBS to find a format for him. "No wonder they can’t sell him," Benny complained, "he’s too good, too intelligent—they’re all looking for pie throwers." Finally, the network, with two sponsors in hand, launched Carson with his own variety show on June 30. 

The keys to Carson's future success seem clearly seen in retrospect. The unidentified author of the profile cites Carson's flair for "the quieter kind of comedy," and describes him as "both a listener and a worker," two of the characteristics that would serve Carson so well later on when hosting The Tonight Show. "Besides shouldering the burden of being a young comedian tossed into the network whirlpool, he plays an important part in the writing and casting of the show, chores which are generally full-time jobs in themselves." He uses wife Jody on the show on "an irregularly regular basis" (much like his marital history); she was, in fact, the only female member of the cast with any staying power until singer Jill Corey was booked for an eight-week run. 

Hosting his own variety show from Hollywood is a long way from Nebraska, where Carson was born and raised. After moving to Hollywood in 1950, he spent a year as a staff announcer at KNXT, the CBS affiliate, and hosted a local show, Carson's Cellar, which was "reasonably successful." He moved from there to a summer show, Earn Your Vacation, and started writing monologues for Red Skelton. When Skelton was injured during a rehearsal (smacking his head against a non-breakaway wall an hour before airtime for his live show), he "hollered for Carson, and Carson came running." Although The Johnny Carson Show lasts only one season, it's enough to attract the attention of ABC, which makes him the host of Who Do You Trust?, with sidekick Ed McMahon. It's there that Johnny really displays the quick wit and interview skills that will put him in such good standing when NBC calls for Tonight. And the rest—well, you know how that goes.

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It's always nice to read about the stars before they became stars, isn't it? Likewise, it's fun to capture iconic programs, like Father Knows Best, before they became legends. Let's see what we can run across in this week's batch.

On Saturday night, The Jimmy Durante Show (8:30 p.m. CT, NBC) presents what could be called an ironic storyline: Jimmy, having discovered that the bank is about to repossess his nightclub because he's behind on the payments, "acquires the answers to be used on a quiz show and contrives to be a contestant in order to raise some money." They're not suggesting, by any chance, that those quiz shows might be rigged, are they? How else would he get the answers ahead of time?

Miss America 1955, Lee Ann Meriwether relinquishes her crown next Saturday, but in the meantime, she's been preparing for life after the beauty-contest circuit. Last December, she made her TV acting debut on the anthology series TV Playhouse, and this Sunday she stars on that series' "The Miss America Story" (8:00 p.m., NBC). It's neither biographical nor a documentary, just a drama about "the experiences of a beauty-contest winner" being portrayed by a fledgling actress who just happens to be the reigning Miss America. During the past year, Meriwether has earned $60,000 from TV commercials and providing commentary on fashion shows, and she plans to continue her career in television after she's no longer "Miss America." "Dave Garroway has been dangling a Today job in front of her," which she thinks would be great, "But golly, how would I get my Master's degree?" She must figure it out, because she goes on to that two-year stint as one of the Today Girls, followed by an acting career that lasts until 2000 and includes, well, just about everything. A worthy Miss America indeed.

On Monday, which also happens to be Labor Day, former president Harry Truman addresses the AFL-CIO Labor Day celebration at Cadillac Square in Detroit. (1:00 p.m., CBS and NBC). It's also nearing the end of Arthur Godfrey's summer vacation; in the meantime, Peter Lind Hayes fills for Godfrey on Arthur Godfrey Time (9:30 a.m., CBS), while Jack Paar pinch-hits for the Old Redhead on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts (7:30 p.m., CBS). Garry Moore also has the day off, with Walter O'Keefe filling in on The Garry Moore Show (9:00 a.m., CBS), and Ernie Kovacs begins his second week substituting for Steve Allen on The Tonight Show (11;00 p.m., NBC). Tony Martin has no such luck; his evening Tony Martin Show returns for another season (6:30 p.m., NBC), taking up the first 15 minutes of the half-hour block that includes NBC's evening news. 

Tuesday leads off with The World at Home (9:45 a.m., NBC), with Arlene Francis and Hugh Downs interviewing the most decorated soldier of World War II, actor Audie Murphy.* In prinetime, it's the debut of television's first "adult" Western, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (7:30 p.m., ABC), starring Hugh O'Brian as the legendary lawman. In one of the early examples of linear storytelling on television, the series opens with "Mr. Earp Becomes a Marshal," as Earp launches his storied career by becoming marshal in Ellsworth, Kansas. 

*The program, which airs for 15 minutes prior to the start of Arlene's Home series, has some interesting guests this week; on Wednesday, it's NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, who was the attorney in the Brown v. Board case that ended school segregation, and would go on to become a justice of the Supreme Court.

Wednesday's Disneyland (6:30 p.m., ABC) takes a trip to Tomorrowland, where Wernher von Braun is one of the scientists discussing the challenges ahead for putting a "Man in Space," and what man's first spaceflight will look like. That's followed by Pall Mall Playhouse (7:30 p.m., ABC), with John Newland—whom we'll know better from hosting One Step Beyond—starring as a tenderfoot finding out that life in the West isn't what he expected. And at 8:30 p.m., I've Got a Secret (CBS) gives us a second look this week at Audie Murphy, who has a secret for the panel. Don McNeill sits in for Garry Moore, who returns to IGAS as well as his own show next week. 

Thursday afternoon's Early Show presents "Tomorrow's Man" (4:00 p.m., CBS), with Pat O'Brien as a football coach* who must decide whether to win a game, or teach his son (John Derek) a lesson. I've got an idea: why not teach him how to win? Problem solved! Later, it's a rare comedy on Climax! (7:30 p.m., CBS), but for good reason: the star of "Public Pigeon No. 1" is Red Skelton, who plays a sucker hired by conmen to sell stock in a phony uranium company. That's followed at 8:30 p.m. by Four Star Playhouse, and this week the star is Charles Boyer as a mysterious stranger who arrives at the front door of a young woman whose husband has just escaped from prison; Beverly Garland co-stars. 

*Not Knute Rockne, presumably.

On Friday the dramatic anthology series Star Stage premieres with "The Toy Lady" (8:30 p.m., NBC), starring Silvia Sidney and Lorne Greene (I wonder whatever happened to him?). Later, on Edward R. Murrow's Person to Person, Ed's guests are Ethel Merman, appearing with her husband and two children from their home in Denver. Later on, it's the deferred premiere on WTMJ of Science Fiction Theater (10:30 p.m.). The syndicated series actually debuted in April, but it's debuting here as part of WTMJ's fall schedule. (And by the way, it's actually spelled Theatre.

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Curious as to what's popular on TV in Chicagoland? Well, wonder no more; American Research Bureau, which used to provide the ratings for the networks, is out with their Top Ten list for July, and, to nobody's surprise, The $64,000 Question sits on top of the heap, well ahead of Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town. CBS and NBC dominate the ratings, with ABC's U.S. Steel Hour the highest-rated show on the lowest-rated network. 

The $64,000 Question is also the nation's number one show, based on the Trendex ratings, followed by I've Got a Secret, Toast of the Town, Two for the Money, and G.E. Theater. By the way, according to the Teletype, Toast of the Town has a change upcoming; starting with the new season, it will henceforth be called The Ed Sullivan Show. Elsewhere, if you're wondering why Audie Murphy's been so active on TV this week, it's probably because he's promoting his new movie, To Hell and Back. And Jim Backus is on the lookout for one of those sound-proof booths like the kind you see on Question, "For my mother-in-law."

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Tom D'Andrea and Hal March: discharged

This week, Bob Stahl reviews a sitcom I hadn't previously been aware of (not that there aren't a lot of those), The Soldiers, starring Tom D'Andrea and Hal March. In much the same way as Saturday Night Live spun off long-running skits like "Wayne's World" and "The Coneheads" into big-screen movies, The Soldiers is a spin-off from a routine that D'Andrea and March used to do on The Colgate Comedy Hour. And just to show you that tart commentary didn't begin with our hero, Cleveland Amory, this is how Stahl describes the transition to television: "Apparently encouraged by an overwhelming lack of critical acclaim, they have expanded the idea into a half-hour series that NBC gambled on this summer as a Saturday night replacement." 

The pair play peacetime GI sad-sacks who are perpetually getting into trouble with the brass, as well as anyone else who comes near. As Stahl points out, there's nothing inherently wrong with Army comedy; "No Time for Sergeants," with Andy Griffith, was a big hit on Broadway, television, and the movies; and Phil Silvers will do pretty well, starting this fall, with Bilko. However, that's where the comparison ends, as "D’Andrea and March play such stupid dolts that there’s little humor left." Well, not everyone gets everything right; although the series bites the dust after just ten episodes, Tom D'Andrea will continue with his movie and television career, while Hal March will make an honest living as host of The $64,000 Question.

Stahl's second review is of another summer replacement series, Windows, a half-hour anthology that subs for Person to Person. The premise involves the camera peering through a window, setting the stage for the story of the people seen through that window. This is another of those series with which I wasn't previously familiar, and it gives off more than a little bit of the Twilight Zone vibe, beginning with the initial episode, in which all the children of a neighborhood disappear at the same time. That one, according to Stahl, came up a cropper after a terrific premise, but a later story "of a girl locked in an apartment from which there was no escape, this being her estranged husband’s way of driving her out of her mind," hit the sweet spot. It also took a crack at a pair of Ray Bradbury stories, "The World Out There" and "Arcade." It was, Stahl says, "an excellent example of how TV can dress up an otherwise routine series of dramatic shows with a single gimmick."

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MST3K alert: Jungle Goddess (1948) Two pilots go into the depths of the African jungle to search for a missing heiress. George Reeves, Ralph Byrd, Wanda McKay. (Wednesday, midnight, WNBQ in Chicago) Even the Man of Steel can't save this one, in which two ugly Americans travel to darkest Africa with the motto, "If it moves, shoot it." It's saved on MST3K, however (if that's the word), by part one of the Bela Lugosi serial, "The Phantom Creeps." TV

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This week in TV Guide: April 22, 1967

In our last episode, TV Guide's David Lachenbruch looked to the future to see what television might have in store for us. This week, he looks back to the past, in an interview with "the father of television," who says, "it realy hasn't turned out at all as I expected."

Dr. Vladimir Kosma Zworykin is currently Honorary Vice President of RCA and recently recived the National Medal of Science from President Johnson at a White House ceremony. The 77-year-old comes by his title as father of television honestly; as the inventor of both the first TV camera tube and the picture tube, his influence is compared to Marconi's in radio. Yet he "would rather look to the future than pack to the past."

But what a past. Zworykin first became interested in television in 1910 in St. Petersburg; after a sojourn in France, Zworykin came to the United States in 1918, and resumed his television experiments at Westinghouse where, in 1923, he demonstrated the first working television system without moving parts. Westinghouse may not have been impressed, telling Zworykin to "work on something more useful," but David Sarnoff was, and in 1929 Zworykin and his entire team moved over to RCA. Ten years later, Sarnoff formally launched the nation's first regular television broadcasting service with a televadts of President Roosevelt opening the New York World's Fair.

Looking back on it all, Zworykin is asked what he'd anticipated from his invention. "Certainly not Amos 'n' Andy," he says of the first television program he'd witnessed. "I essentially visualized an extension of human sight, to let us see what we couldn’t see with our own eyes—whatever was too small, too big, too dangerous or too far." In 1954, he'd written that one day the TV camera would be "the pioneer observer in interplanetary travel." But the entertainment potential quickly overshadowed the scientific, industrial, and educational potential. "You work with something and it blossoms, and turns out to be something quite different from what you visualized," he says, and TV's popularity probably did bring in the investment that allowed development of the products we're now seeing in science and medicine. 

As for his own viewing habits, Zworykin acknowledges that he doesn't watch much TV. "My wife watches, he says, "and she sometimes calls me when a good program is on." His favorites include opera and musical shows—"something which gives pleasure or is instructive." Asked about his opinion on current television, he's blunt: "Too often [programs] try to suit the taste of the majority, and there are many people who don’t agree with the majority. I think you can have a good program without killing half a dozen people in half an hour." He doesn't have much time for television, though; he's working in a new science called "medical engineering." Less than a decade ago, his team developed the radio endosonde, a tiny transmitter which aids in diagnosing ailments when the patient swallows it. Electronics, he ponts out, has already been indespensible in medicine, including closed-circuit TV training for doctors, and he things the computer will "save countless lives." 

Asked to sum it all up, Vladimir Zworykin says, "It has been my privilege to live long enough to see television grow and have my dreams of the past materialize,” and adds: “My only complaint is that it was far slower than we thought it would be.”

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During the 60s, the Ed Sullivan Show and The Hollywood Palace were the premiere variety shows on television. Whenever they appear in TV Guide together, we'll match them up and see who has the best lineup.

Sullivan: Scheduled: Bert Lahr; the McGuire Sisters; comedians Jackie Mason, George Kirby and Joan Rivers; singer Bobby Vinton; the Y Americans, a choral group from Brigham Young University in Utah; and balancer Agostino.  

Palace: Hostess Joan Crawford performs "The Dreamer," a dramatic scene about a little girl. Joan also presents singers Nancy Ames and Julius La Rosa; Tim "Rango" Conway, who plays a prison warden; the rock ‘n’ rolling Cyrkle; the Flying Cavarettas, teen-age aerialists; the acrobatic Halasis; and illusionist Ralph Adams.  

This is one of those weeks where the choice depends almost entirely on your own personal tastes. If you're a fan of Joan Crawford, you're probably going to let her pull Nancy Ames and Julius La Rosa across the finish line; meanwhile, if you're fond of Bert Lahr and Jackie Mason, you might the McGuire Sisters and Joan Rivers tag along. I don't have any strong feelings one way or another; if I was a real television historian I might rely on some video clips,but I'm really just typing as fast as I can, so I'm calling it a push.

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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 shows of the era. 

I'm sure some of you are going to tell me you remember the Smothers Brothers from way back when, when they were only "folk-singing comedians." Or maybe you first saw them in their 1965 sitcom, which cast Tom in the unlikely role of an angel and served them poorly. For the rest of us, it's hard to imagine a time when the Smothers Brothers, agree with them or not, weren't associated with political controversy. (For reference, the Pete Seeger controversy doesn't occur until September 1967.)  But that's where we are, in the first season of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and it's almost as if Cleveland Amory is reviewing a show completely different from the one we've since come to know and love—or hate.

It's easy to overlook the "comedy" part of that title, given the trouble with the network and the White House that would come, but at this point, that's what this show is about, and Amory praises the format for allowing more of the "brotherly chit-spats" the duo are known for. Their personalities are defined and work well off each other, particularly Tommy's "Smothersese" doubletalk. At times their bits can remind you of great comedy teams of the past, especially one where Dick accidentelly claps to death a singing mosquito. Accused by Tom of being a murderer, Dick protests. "Everybody kills mosquitos," to which Tom replies, "I know everybody kills mosquitoes. That’s why so few of them make it in show business." All right, maybe it's not Abbott and Costello, but it's still funny. Also funny was a show featuring Jack Benny and George Burns as guests; says Cleve, "great as Benny and Burns have been, you had only to see the Smothers Brothers working with them to see how good the Brothers are now."

There are, however, clouds on the horizon, although they're easier to see in retrospect. Amory thought that a bit including Paul Revere and the Raiders that made fun of Revolutionary heroes was "on the edge of tastelessness," and a recent show that made fun of the Lindbergh flight to Paris ws "definitely over the edge." Nowadays the Founding Fathers are ridiculed as oppressive white men, and Lindbergh's star started to dim with his involvement with Germany before World War II, but in 1967 it was still standard to see them—rightly—as American icons, integral parts of the nation's history. As Amory says, "The line between poking fun and insulting heroes is a thin one—but it is a line." One we can see the Smothers Brothers only too willing to cross. CBS should have seen it coming.

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I've noted in the past how today's network television doesn't have much time for religious holidays compared to how things were in, say, 1967. I'm usually talking about Christmas or Easter, but this week it's Passover, and you'd certainly know it by Sunday's programming. 

CBS offers a Sunday morning doubleheader of sorts, beginning at 8:00 a.m. PT with Ben-Gurion on the Bible, an interview with former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who talks about how the Bible's teachings apply to today's world. That's followed at 8:30 a.m. by Passover Today, a roundtable discussion on the meaning of Passover and how it relates to modern times. 

NBC's Eternal Light (5:00 p.m.) presents "How Far Away, How Long Ago," a half-hour drama baesd on a story by 1966 Nobel Prize winner S.Y. Agnon, about two lonely people who attend a Seder together. And later, on their acclaimed documentary series Project 20 (10:00 p.m.), Alexander Scourby narrates "The Law and the Prophets," a look at Old Testament history as seen through paintings of the old masters, including Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Rubens, Raphael and Caravaggio, with music by Robert Russell Bennett. The program is presented without commercial interruption. A few years previously, Project 20 did a similar story on Christmas, and I'd imagine this one is equally good—but then, as my wife says, you'd listen to Alexander Scourby read from the phone book.

Perhaps the most interesting program of the day is on ABC's religion program Directors, which expands to an hour to present the one-act Passover opera "The Final Ingredient," about a Seder held in a Nazi concentration camp. (2:30 p.m.) The music is by the very interesting composer David Amram* with a libretto by Arnold Weinstein, based on a play by Defenders creator Reginald Rose; the opera was commissioned by ABC.

*Fun fact: David Amram also composed the score for The Manchurian Candidate, among other movies.

Specials like this are cultural as well as religious, and obviously the networks don't think the audience for them will be limited to those celebrating Passover. What's changed now? You could argue that programs for Christmas, Easter, Passover, what have you, are passe because not everyone shares those beliefs. You know what? They never did. Perhaps there were more who did back then, but even those who didn't allowed for their cultural importance. Again, what's changed now? Never mind; I'm sure I know the answer.

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Bob Newhart is scheduled to be the guest host for Johnny Carson this week on The Tonight Show, and therein lies a story. Johnny's involved in one of his periodic contract disputes with NBC, according to Richard K. Doan's Doan Report, and nobody's quite sure what the future holds. It all has to do with the recent AFTRA strike, which we covered here (you might remember it as the one that made Arnold Zenker a star). Carson honored the picket line during the strike, but, according to the excellent website Eyes of a Generation, in his absense, "NBC was airing Carson reruns without having negotiated a fee in advance, which his contract called for." Carson insisted that "My contract was terminated" because of NBC's actions, while the network maintained a more concilatory approach. ("We still hope Johnny will return.") Jimmy Dean has already done two weeks in Carson's place and Newhart is up next.

Behind the scenes, Carson's lawyer is supposedly talking with CBS, which is looking for its own late-night show (and finally settles on one with Merv Griffin), while NBC, having just signed Newhart to a new contract, has him waiting in the winds "in case the network decided to switch instead of fight the Carson battle." Of course, we know how this all ends; Carson returns to the show on April 24 (meaning Newhart isn't needed), and while various sources dispute the amount of money Carson was making before and after the walkout, he gets a nice bump in salary upon his return. In all likelihood, neither Carson nor NBC were probably ever serious about there being a split.

But this does create one of those "what-if" scenarios, doesn't it? Suppose NBC had moved on from Carson; after all, he'd only been hosting The Tonight Show for five years, the same length of time that Jack Paar had been the host, and while he was popular, he was hardly an institution at that point. Had Carson gone to CBS, that could have changed the entire dymanic of the late-night battle, or he might have stayed with the show for a few more years and then gone on to something else. Newhart had substituted for Carson several times; had he taken over the show, would he have ever had his succession of hit sitcoms? Would Merv have wound up back at NBC, the network he'd started out at? What about Steve Allen, who started Tonight? And let's not forget that Joey Bishop had started his own show on ABC the week before Carson's return (Carson supposedly waited a week to come back, so that he wouldn't upstage Bishop's debut)—does Bishop become a success? Does he still quit ABC in a contract dispute, ceding the slot to Dick Cavett? Does Jack Paar himself make a dramatic return somewhere? And does the talk show format ever get bumped back to an hour, changing the chemistry of the shows forever? One can only wonder.

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It's a week of specials, but we'll begin Saturday night with a couple of classic Barbara Stanwyck movies that are pretty special themselves. At. 11:00 p.m. on KXTV, it's Double Indemnity, with Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in one of the great noirs of all time. Or, you could opt for Stanwyck and William Holden in Golden Boy on KHSL; it's the second half of a double feature that begins at 10:00 p.m. with Day of the Badmen, starring—Fred MacMurray. No matter which way you turn, you can't lose here.

The Bell Telephone Hour ends its penultimate season with "El Prado: Masterpieces and Music" (Sunday, 6:30 p.m., NBC), a tour of Spain's famed El Prado art museum, led by the magnificent classcal guitarist Andrés Segovia. Among the priceless masterpieces at the El Prado are works by Goya, Velazquez, and El Greco. There's also a one-hour documentary on Humphrey Bogart on ABC (8:00 p.m.), narrated by Charlton Heston, that points out the continuing fascination with Bogart. I mention this because KTVU has an episode of the 1963-64 series Hollywood and the Stars earlier in the evening, and the introductory episode of that series was about Humphrey Bogart. Bogart has a dynamic presence on-screen, and I doubt his movies will ever not be popular. I wonder, though, whether the interest in him in the 1960s also has to do with the masculinity he projects—the "Bogart mystique," as it's referred to here—and whether people felt it was a quality in short supply in this hippie era. Just thinking out loud; don't pay any attention to me.

If I wanted to pursue that theory, I might be inclined to look at Monday's KRON-produced special "The Vanishing Cowboy" (7:00 p.m.). After all, read this description: "See the cowboy of today:

A man who's traded his pistol for a hypodermic needle to fight livestock diseases instead of Indians. A man who still ropes, herds and brands cattle in the age-old manner, but lives a life far different than his fictional counterpart—a life perhaps destined to disappear in our time." Note the repeated use of the word "man" as if to imply "real man" or "manly man"; you see it in the Bogart special as well. There are people who would probably call that toxic today. Again, I'm probably thinking too much here, but there are things. . .

Let's look at something else, like Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, in their first television special (funny how the ads always like to point that out), presented by Singer as part of their continuing series of "Singer Presents" music specials; others in the past and future include Frank Sinatra, Elvis (his comeback special), Tony Bennett, and Burt Bacharach. (Monday, 9:00 p.m., CBS) Herb had some really big hits back then; the special features hits like "A Taste of Honey," "Lonely Bull," "Tijuana Taxi," and more. Oh, and note the special offers in the ad, including $75 off of a new Singer color TV. Who knew?

On Tuesday, a CBS News Special entitled "Inside Pop—The Rock Revolution" (10:00 p.m.) features Leonard Bernstein "exploring the world of pop music." Usinghis piano and recordings, Bernstein shows what he thinks is, and isn't valuable in today's sound. We also see performances and interviews with Herman's Hermits, Brian Wilson, the Hollies, Janis Ian, Tim Buckley and others, (And an ad on the page for "significant new talent" Janis Ian's new album, courtesy of Verve/Folkways. The ads in this issue are great!) By the way, you can see that special here.

Wednesday, the Hallmark Hall of Fame presents Jean Simmons, Claire Bloom, and Keith Michell in "Soldier in Love," the story of the friendship between Queen Anne and her friends John and Sarah Churchill*, the first Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. (7:30 p.m., NBC) If you want something a little less highbrow, you might check out tonight's Batman (7:30 p.m., ABC), which stars David Wayne as Jervis Tetch, the Mad Hatter, in his first and, I believe, only appearance. You can see the exciting conclusion tomorrow night, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.

*Fun fact #1: John and Sarah Churchill were the ancestors of Winston Churchill. Fun fact #2: Winston Churchill's daughter, actress Sarah Churchill, was the first host and occasional star of Hallmark Hall of Fame.

Thursday, the hottest fashion model around, Twiggy, is the subject of an ABC profile (8:00 p.m.), shot cinema-verité style by fashion photographer Bert Stern in New York, during the first of three show on her U.S. tour. Yes, fashion models used to go on tour; now I suppose they make reality shows. In non-specials, Dean Martin features twice tonight; first, in the movie Toys in the Attic (9:00 p.m., CBS), an adaptation of the Lillian Helman play that, according to Judith Crist, is decidedly not special (it's "strictly from fantasyland and leads straight to disastersville."). Better to stick with Dean's variety show (10:00 p.m., NBC), with a great guest lineup of Peggy Lee; comedians Buddy Hackett, Guy Marks, and Rowan and Martin; and singer-dancer Dorothy Provine.

Friday's CBS movie is a rerun of the political thriller Advise and Consent, based on Allen Drury's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, directed by Otto Preminger, with an all-star cast including Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, Don Murray, Walter Pidgeon, Lew Ayres, Franchot Tone, Peter Lawford, and Burgess Meredith. (9;00 p.m.) Not withstanding Judith Crist's thumbs-down ("a mechanically contrived tale that promises much and delivers a bland morality tale"), it's an entertaining-enough movie, although the script has some outrageous factual errors; I find it falls far short of Drury's novel, which itself has become somewhat stale over the years. Premimger wasn't one for sticking to the story, though; he wanted to cast Martin Luther King Jr., if you can believe it, as one of the senators (King reportedly did consider the offer); when someone pointed out to him that there were no black senators at the time, Preminger replied, "Well, there should be." He also offered Richard Nixon the role of vice president; Nixon refused as well, and the role went to Lew Ayres

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No MST3K update this week, but here's an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea that would have made a splendid "cheesy movie": "Nelson must defeat an ingenious adversary who has learned to control vegetable growth—and who's planning to create a conquering army of plant creatures. Nelson: Richard Basehart. Ben/John Wilson: William Smithers. Crane: David Hedison. Morton: Bob Dowdell. (Sunday, 5:00 p.m., KOVR) I don't think the Satellite of Love could have done any better. TV  

The Apollo 13 astronauts on The Tonight Show, 1970

Beginning with Apollo 11 in 1969, the U.S. manned space program scheduled seven missions to land men on the moon, ending in 1972. Six of them succeeded; the seventh was Apollo 13. 

It's ironic, I suppose, that Apollo 13 became the most famous of those seven moon mission other than Apollo 11 itself, because technically it was a failure. It didn't accomplish its mission of putting two of its astronauts, Jim Lovell and Fred Haise, on the moon's surface. However, it became a triumph in a different way: by putting together an emergency plan on the fly, a plan that required everything to go right, Apollo 13 became a triumph of human ingenuity and determination.

The Apollo 13 astronauts—Lovell, Haise, and Jack Swigert—received a hero's welcome when they returned; their dramatic flight had united the world in a way that few events have since. One of the honors they received—and, in the realm of American culture, it was an honor—was their appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on June 3. The response from the audience, as well as from Johnny and Ed McMahon, indicates how much these three men had touched the hearts of Americans, and how the astronauts themselves had come to understand the significance of their mission—perhaps even more significant than had it been a "success."

This clip, and it is well-worth watching in its entirety, is interesting on so many levels. Aside from it being a time when Americans actually believed in heroes, it tells us much about its time. You notice that male hairstyles are getting longer, and sideburns bushier. Although the suits we see are still relatively conservative, Johnny's raspberry-colored shirt shows how color is becoming a more important part of men's fashion. (Note the cufflinks, a standard part of every well-dressed man's wardrobe back then.) And Johnny still does the live lead-in to Ed's live commericals; imagine hosts doing that today.

The astronauts are terrific, displaying a wry humor to go along with their military bearing (although Lovell was the only one of the three to be on active duty, all three had been in the service at one time or another). I wouldn't presume to know what was going on inside any of them, but outwardly they're completely at ease, comfortable chatting and joking with Carson, and it must have made it easier for Johnny in turn. Neither he nor Ed are phoning it in; both show a genuine interest in the mission and in what the astronauts were going through at the time. They've seen many celebrities come and go through that set, and these men are the real deal.

And speaking of that set: it's so modest, compared to Carson's later sets, just a desk, chair, and couch, along with a simple backdrop of different colors. It's a refreshing break from the ubiquitious nightime skyline that's become a part of every talk show since, and the couch is a reminder that these were conversation shows, with guests remaining after their time in the chair, engaging with the rest of the panel. It's adult television, and it's satisfying; Graham Norton seems to have taken this lesson to heart, and I wish more would do so. If it's interesting, you might even be able to justify spending 90 minutes on it. TV  

This week in TV Guide: March 6, 1965

As my enforced series of encore presentations continues, we're up to an interesting issue: so interesting, in fact, that I've already encored it once. I promise you, however, that there's even more new in this week's look, along with some features you might recognize from the past.

The brooding visage of David Janssen graces this week's cover.  Janssen is in the second of four seasons playing Dr. Richard Kimble the hero of the hit ABC series The Fugitive. As Arnold Hano notes, Janssen the actor shares many similarities with Kimble the fugitive, among which is a lack of comfort with his surroundings. His friend, novelist Bernard Wolfe, comments that "David is not a fanatically dedicated person. If he were, all this grueling work would have more meaning for him. But he is not dedicated. He has great doubts as to the ultimate aim of it all, as to where it is leading him."

Janssen in fact houses a number of torments: his heavy drinking, which Janssen claims has diminished while doing The Fugitive, but would always remain a part of his life; his ulcer (caused, Janssen wryly notes, by "thinking"); his heavy smoking (two to three packs a day); and the fatigue of his grueling schedule of 14-hour days filming a show in which he is in virtually every scene. When told that executive producer Quinn Martin "speaks grandly of five more years" of The Fugutive, Janssen dully replies, "Five more years? Contractually, I suppose I would have to put in five more years, but—" The Fugitive ran just about the right length of time; David Janssen, who died of a heart attack at age 48, died way too young.

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Personally, I don't think you need a reason to show a picture of Sophia Loren, but this week we have one. On Saturday, WTCN presents the TV premiere of Two Women, the movie for which Loren won her Oscar for Best Actress. Channel 11 advertised the movie accordingly.

Now, take a good look at that ad.  Notice anything strange about it?  The placement of that "TONIGHT 10 P.M." strip looks just a little suspicious, don't you think?  Especially when compared to the same picture, unedited:

While this picture might be considered somewhat modest today, I'm sure that 1965 Midwest sensibilities might have been offended by the amount of Sophia's cleavage on display. Two Women is an art-house movie (and Loren was the first Best Actress winner in a foreign-language film), so it's likely that many people in the Twin Cities hadn't seen it; Loren's sexpot image was well-known, however, so the station might have thought a little judicious editing was in order.

Alternately, because it probably wasn't seen widely and viewers didn't know what it was about, perhaps the station just wanted to create the impression that there was more to see than meets the eye. Or is that too cynical a thought? I'm just sayin'.

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During the 60s, the Ed Sullivan Show and The Hollywood Palace were the premiere variety shows on television. Whenever they appear in TV Guide together, we'll match them up and see who has the best lineup..

Ed Sullivan: Scheduled guests include singer Ella Fitzgerald; Duke Ellington and his band; singer Rita Pavone; singer-dancer Roy Castle; comics Stiller and Meara; the two Carmenas, balancers; and comedian John Byner.

Hollywood Palace: Host Eddie Fisher welcomes actress-vocalist Connie Stevens, comedian Jack Carter, the Marquis Chimps, the Arirang Korean ballet troupe, comedy pantomimist Ben Wrigley and the Kuban Cossacks, dance team.

This contest was pretty much over at the start. With Ella and Duke headlining the Sullivan show, Palace was already going to have to come up with something big to top it. Eddie Fisher, Connie Stevens and Jack Carter are OK, but the royalty that the Palace needed was already spoken for. Crown Sullivan as winner for the week.

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Let's see—we've covered Saturday, so what does the rest of the week have? The big movie of the week is a really big one: ABC's Sunday night presentation of Judgment at Nuremberg, starring Spencer Tracy, Oscar winner Maximilian Schell, Burt Lancaster, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland and a cast of thousands. It's a long movie, starting at 8:00 p.m. CT and running for three and one-half hours. And it's a heavy movie—preachy at times, as one might expect from writer Abby Mann and director Stanley Kramer. But less than 20 years after the end of World War II, it's also a portrait of a world still trying to come to grips with the horror of the Holocaust, and a country (Germany) trying to sort out its moral responsibility.

On Monday, Bing Crosby reunites with his old friend Phil Harris on Bing's sitcom (8:30 p.m., ABC); Harris is Bing's former vaudeville partner, who shows up with his new act: a trained crow, who may be responsible for a rash of neighborhood jewelry thefts. Following that, Jerry Lewis doubles as director and star in a rare dramatic role on Ben Casey (9:00 p.m., ABC) He's Dr. Dennis Green, a new resident at County General and an "irrepressible clown" (no surprise there), but Casey takes a dim view of it all, endangering Dr. Green's hopes to go into neurosurgery.

Tuesday kicks off with a special Red Skelton (7:30, CBS) entitled "The Red Skelton Scrapbook," hosted by Ed Wynn and featuring Red performing some of his most famous sketches and pantomimes. At 9:00 p.m., NBC presents a news special, "The Pope and the Vatican," covering the concluding days of the Second Vatican Council and the radical changes (termed aggiornamento, or "bringing up to date") coming to the Catholic Church. Vatican II had its critics even then, but could they have imagined the havoc this would create in the decades to come.

Wednesday night it's the "first annual" Grand Award of Sports (8:30 p.m., ABC), presented live from the New York World's Fair, and hosted by Bing and Kathryn Crosby. The format: "Panels of outstanding sportsmen have selected 20 winners" from a list of 83 nominees representing "the world's top athletes". The nominees included football stars Jim Brown and Johnny Unitas, boxer Cassius Clay, baseball's Sandy Koufax, basketball greats Wilt Chamberlain and Oscar Robertson, and hockey stars Bobby Hull and Gordie Howe. At the show's end, one of these winners will be chosen to receive the "Grand Award," presented by former astronaut John Glenn. That picture on the right is from the John H. Glenn archives; it's one of the Grand Awards, presented to Glenn "for his work as chairman of the Grand Award of Sports inaugural telecast." I can't find another listing for the "Grand Award of Sport"; it's my guess that it was either replaced or folded into the Victor Awards, which began (coincidentally?) the very next year, 1966.

Gloria Swanson makes her TV comedy debut Thursday on My Three Sons (7:30 p.m., ABC), playing an old vaudeville friend of Uncle Charley, while another Gloria—Gloria Stewart—guests with her husband Jimmy and their twin daughters on Password (7:30 p.m., CBS). And tonight's Tonight Show (10:30 p.m., NBC) bears some looking into, as Johnny has a scheduled guest lineup that includes Bob Hope, Hedda Hopper, Richard Chamberlain, Carol Lawrence, Barbara Parkins, and Harve Presnell.

A rerun of Have Gun—Will Travel attracts some interest on Friday (7:30 p.m., WTCN), with Paladin's assignment being to act as Oscar Wilde's bodyguard. John O'Malley plays Wilde. And not to be outdone by Johnny, Jack Paar has a pretty good show himself (9:00 p.m., NBC), with Peggy Lee, plus Mike Nichols and Elaine May.

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Looking at the TV Teletype, there's a note that on April 11 the ABC program Directions '65 will be telecasting David Amram's Holocaust opera The Final Ingredient, commissioned by the network,*  based on the teleplay by the famed Golden Age writer Reginald Rose. "Set in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, The Final Ingredient relates the story of a group of inmates who attempt to hold a secret Passover Seder inside the camp, and their quest for the final ingredient, which lies just outside the camp walls."  It sounds intriguing; I know Amram's music primarily from his soundtrack for the movie The Manchurian Candidate. As this article points out, ABC conceived of this as a "Passover Opera" that might be presented annually—almost a Jewish counterpart to Menotti's Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors. But it didn't become an annual broadcast, at least as far as I know. It's available for viewing at the Paley Center.

*I'm not positive, but I'm fairly certain this was the final opera commissioned by one of the big three American commercial television networks. After this, it would be up to PBS.

We'll also learn that the Smothers Brothers are guests on Jack Benny's season finale April 16 on NBC; Jack will probably be limiting his appearances next season to hour-long specials, which indeed he does. And if your appetite for awards shows hasn't been sated by the Grand Award of Sports, you'll be glad to know that the Grammys are coming up in a one-hour telecast on NBC May 18, in which most of the winners are expected to perform their Grammy-winning songs.

Neil Hickey reports on CBS's series The Nurses, which has just been retooled with the addition of a couple of doctors; it's now called The Doctors and the Nurses. The nurses (Zina Bethune and Shirl Conway, left) are now supporting players to the doctors (Joe Campanella and Michael Tolan). According to producer Herb Brodkin, the move was made to improve ratings and dramatic potential; since nurses can't diagnose patients, there just weren't enough stories to carry the show. Says Brodkin, "Part of the problem was that, in making things happen in a story, nurses are handholders."

The Doan Report tells us that Johnny Carson's doing a 15-minute sit-in, in protest of the fact that many NBC affiliates around the country (including those in New York and San Francisco) don't carry the first 15 minutes of Tonight (which at the time ran for an hour and 45 minutes), choosing instead to run a half-hour of local news. For Carson, this meant about half of the nation would miss his monologue, a situation which justifiably caused him some distress—so much so, Carson claims, that it's preventing him from appearing on-air for the first 15 minutes of the program. His "sick-in" lasts for two nights, after which he agrees to discuss things with the network. The short-term solution is that Ed McMahon and bandleader Skitch Henderson vamp for the opening segment, with Johnny coming on at the bottom of the hour to do his monologue. Within a couple of years, that first 15 will be dropped altogether, giving the show a tidy 90 minute running time. That becomes the industry standard for talk shows, until Johnny cuts it back further to one hour in the 1980s. I don't think talk shows have been the same since, and I don't mean that in a positive way. Oh, and in case you're wondering, the NBC affiliate in Minneapolis-St. Paul, KSTP, currently shows the entire 1:45 show, on a 15-minute delay to follow the 10:00 news.

British satirist and social critic Malcolm Muggerage has a witty, but also very provocative, article on "The British Passion for American Television," and what he has to say might surprise you. I wrote about it at length here.

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Finally, we'd be real knuckleheads if we didn't pause to note a story on The Three Stooges, who are going strong as ever since their fueled-by-TV comeback. The emotional peak is a moving story about a 12-year-old girl being treated for emotional troubles. The girl spoke and wrote only in numbers, and when she became angry she "cried out numbers ending in 4." The stunned doctors eventually discovered that the numbers she used corresponded to the numbers on Three Stooges trading cards. The cards depicted "moods of violence" that the troubled girl herself was unable to articulate without the emotional release offered by the Stooges; in recounting the story, Moe Howard tears up.

It's interesting to note that although the Stooges (which at this point consist of Moe, Larry Fine, and "Curley Joe" DeRita) don't receive any financial compensation for their old movies, but the features and personal appearances sparked by the renewed interest in the movies more than make up the difference. Ah, the Stooges - loved 'em as a kid, love' em just as much now. TV  

Around the dial

Let's start this week with another edition of "The Hitchcock Project" at bare-bones e-zine. This week Jack's back with a follow-up on Emily Neff, the author of the short story "Partner in Crime," about which Jack wrote a couple of years ago. One of the many things I like about Jack's project is that he goes so far beyond what most episode guides provide - you not only find out about the episode, you learn about the original source material, differences in how the story is adapted, other versions that may exist, and - as in this case - background on the authors.

Of course we need to know seven things about Tina Louise - that should go without saying. And that's just what Rick gives us this week at Classic Film and TV Café. Did you know that prior to movies and television (and Gilligan's Island), Tina was a successful Broadway actress? Or that in 1957 she released an album called It's Time for Tina? Go to Rick's place (I've always wanted to say that) to find out the rest.

At Garroway at Large, Jodie looks back to the first time Dave appeared in a full-length article in TV Guide - it was the July 10, 1953 issue (the 15th issue in the magazine's national history!), and he appears on the cover with the ubiquitous J. Fred Muggs. As Jodie says, it's a nice reminder of just how big a star Dave Garroway was at the time, and for many years thereafter.

One of the things I always have to be careful about as a blogger is the constant temptation to give someone a piece of my mind. In the first place, I don't have that many pieces left, and second, the web is dominated with people who seem to dedicate their lives to shooting their mouths off, often in the most vulgar way. However, there are times when I'm tempted to make an exception - but at Comfort TV, David spares me the trouble by taking on "The Worst Entertainment Critic on the Planet," someone who understands nothing about classic TV. I have only one thing to add: what a bollock.

As if to belie what this twit wrote, at Criminal Element, Julia Keller writes about the detectives that were "Too Cool for TV" - five detectives from the classic era of television. Take that!

Here's a very cool story - DC Video's restoration of the oldest color videotape of Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. It's from August 24, 1964 - you can see a few minutes of the footage at the website. Those were the days - unless, of course, you're the worst entertainment critic on the planet, in which case television might as well not even have existed! TV  

This week in TV Guide: August 15, 1970

I almost didn't get this issue when I first saw it; I thought I already had it, was positive I already had it, and even after I failed to find it on my list, I looked two or three more times, checked this website multiple times, so sure was I that I'd seen the issue somewhere before, so afraid was I of commiting that dreaded faux pax of the collector, spending good money on something I already had.

Part of the problem, of course, was that Johnny Carson appeared on the cover of TV Guide 28 times, and there are just so many ways you can arrange a portrait of Carson, or anyone for that matter, before they start to run together. And this article by Merle Miller doesn't even tell us much, except that Carson and Company don't like to talk to people. That's the joke, get it? A talk show whose stars and staff don't talk. Miller, whose career as a movie and television writer was interrupted by the blacklist, spent hundreds of hours in the early '60s interviewing Harry Truman for a television project that never came about and whose best-known work will be the book Plain Speaking, an oral biography of the former president, probably found it ironic to be working on a story about people who wouldn't talk to him. Johnny's all interviewed out, the press agent for NBC explains, and a writer who wouldn't talk on the record said that one reason why Carson doesn't like his backstage people talking is that he likes people to get the impression he's responsible for all the material he uses on Tonight. "Don't ask me why." "I didn't ask him why," Miller notes.

The most interesting aspect of Miller's story is his look behind the scenes at one episode he witnesses up close. For example, James Coco, one of Johnny's guests, fresh from his performance in the play "Last of the Red Hot Lovers" for only a few weeks, has "confidence in every pore of him, and he has a great many pores; he is a chubby man." On the other hand, Maureen Stapleton, a star for over twenty years, sits pale, clinging to the edge of a table with a white-knuckled hand. "I might as well leave right now because I'll never make it. I'll never be able to walk out there on stage, not in a million years." Dennis Weaver, who's been in both Gunsmoke and Gentle Ben, isn't quite that nervous but, writes Miller, "I could tell that, Given a choice between going on stage and wrestling Gentle Ben, he'd take the bear, every time." Of course, they're all just fine with Johnny on stage; Maureen Stapleton was "warm and witty and wonderful. It didn't matter if she had said most of the same things to a talent co-ordinator six hours before or if Carson's best lines had been handed to him four hours before."

I don't know how people looked at talk shows back in 1970*, whether they were aware of the extent of the work that writers and talent coordinators did. (After all, I can't recall ever thinking that Johnny came up with all those lines himself, and I think a lot of people knew Dick Cavett himself had worked as a writer.) Still, perhaps there were people who were surprised to find out that this is how talk shows operated. Perhaps Merle Miller wanted to let Carson and his people know what happens when you don't cooperate with the press. Or maybe it was just a case of plain speaking, of telling it like it is.

*I know, I know: they looked at them on their television sets. (Rim shot.)

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SOURCE ALL: HADLEY TV GUIDE COLLECTION

The ad on the right is for Richard Doan of the Doan Report, the feature that for many years ran at the front of the programming section of TV Guide and from which I frequienty quote. I mention it because it shows how different TV Guide is in 1970 from the fanmags of the day, as well as the TV Guide of today.

The emphasis is on Doan as a serious journalist - the black and white photograph, grainy, with Doan in his shirtsleeves, probably a white shirt and tie, taken in the newsroom. The stark text with the pronounced whitespace, listing his credentials in the industry: columnist, critic, program director, research company vice-president. An encyclopedic knowledge of television. Most important, a trusted source of news and insight into the television industry for the 32 million adult readers who turn to TV Guide every week.

No discussion about how many celebrities he hangs with, how chummy he is with the insiders, how with-it and down he is. In short, everything that a writer from today's TV Guide would be.

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As some of you may have noticed, I now have my own personal troll; I can't even say that the troll belongs to the blog, because said troll seems to have picked out me personally. He goes by the handle of Ray G., and in last week's "This Week" comment section he proudly proclaimed that "When you let your rightist political views enter into your articles, I can't stand you. I will not be reading your blog, and will spread the word about it." Now, I'd probably have been more bothered by this if, as I mentioned in my reply, he hadn't said essentially the same thing on June 6, when he also called me "revolting." My crime, apparently, was that I'd attacked PBS, and for that I deserve to lose the right to write about classic television forever.

With this in mind, I'm a bit hesitant to include this next item, which happens to be about PBS. Yes, I know Ray G. said he's not reading the blog anymore, but he said that once before and you all know what happened, so who knows? Anyway, the reason I mention this is that PBS has been controversial almost from the very moment it was created, and prior to the actual creation of the network the idea of a government-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting was controversial, so any discussion of television that includes the political and cultural dynamics of the time is bound to include it.

SOURCE: CTW

The item is from the aformentioned Doan Report (written for the vacationing Richard Doan by Andrew Mills), and mentions an attack on Sesame Street from Arnold Arnold, an educational consultant speaking recently at a conference of the American Management Association. Arnold "called the program a failure and quoted a number of other authorities who agree with his opinion." One of those who agreed with him elaborated, saying that Sesame Street "is not imagination; it is more acurately labeled as fradulent." For example, while chldren from poverty homes did know their numbers, they didn't know what they meant; "They couldn't relate the numeral '3' to a group of three apples." Says Arnold, this type of learning is equivalent "to that achieved by a fairly bright parrot."

In an argument that could be made today with respect to how children learn through computers and cellphones, Arnold argues that "preschool children learn primarily 'through direct contact with people and by active manipulation of materials.'" Sesame Street doesn't provide this opportunity; there's no chance "to conjecture, to solve problems, to be creative." Thus, says Arnold, it doesn't teach - however, not only does it pretend it teaches, it spends big money telling people it does. "It's a promotional campaign without parallel," Arnold says of the $6 million spent on ads and PR, with the end result that moms no longer feel guilty about letting TV act as a babysitter because they're convinced Sesame Street is educational. It's not right, because as far as innovation goes, concludes Arnold, Sesame Street "stands on a par with the invention of the dunce cap."

SOURCE: PBS

I don't get any particular pleasure out of all this. As longtime readers know, I've written about Sesame Street before; it wasn't on when I was of proper viewing age, and didn't start to really watch until I was in high school in The World's Worst Town™, when I watched it out of self defense because there was absolutely nothing else worth watching. I enjoyed the program's wittiness and jokes designed to amuse the parents, I have enormous affection for the Muppets, including an abiding love for Ernie, Bert, and the Cookie Monster, and even today I get a big charge out of bits like "Monsterpiece Theatre."

Sesame Street first premiered in November of 1969, so the show's less than a year old at this point and this may be one of the first negative stories to feature in the popular press. As such, it's significant, and it deserves to be mentioned here. Now, if Ray G. has a problem with it, that's his perogative. I love my readers, all of them, even the ones who disagree, because they (1) care enough to read, and (2) care enough to comment. In Ray's case, though, he's already quit reading for the last time twice, so if he decides to come back again I hope one of you will get ahold of me and tell me what I'm doing wrong.

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While we're on the education front, on Sunday afternoon, it's a repeat of the controversial ABC documentary "The Eye of the Storm" on teacher Jane Elliott's "blue-eyes-brown-eyes" experiment in racial hatred with her Riceville, Iowa class of third graders. As this article details, the experiment began on the day after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, as an effort to explain to her small charges why somoeone would want to kill the man they had recently made their "Hero of the Month." By dividing the class into two groups based on eye color, and by rewarding and punishing the two groups accordingly, Elliott hopes to demonstrate to the children what it was like to live in a society plagued by discrimination. During the course of the two-day experiment, she sees "children who were cooperative and thoughtful turn nasty and vicious," and she realized that she had “created a microcosm of society in a third-grade classroom.” This is the third year that Elliott has conducted the experiment, and the first time that it has been filmed for television; PBS's Frontline will return in 1984 to visit with members of that class to see how the experiment affected their lives.

I'm of two minds about this kind of experimentation, especially in elementary schools. On the one hand, I'm all for teaching critical thinking in schools rather than what often takes place in the classroom. On the other hand, I'll admit to being very uncomfortable with the idea of experimenting on third graders, when their minds are particularly impressionable to whatever you happen to be teaching them (I'm thinking here of James Clavell's The Children's Story as an example) and especially if their parents don't know what's going on. There's a fine line between education and indoctronation, and it doesn't only happen when you're nine years old.

In the meantime, Jane Elliott remains a controversial figure to this day, becoming nationally renown as a facilitator of diversity training and an anti-racism activist. Ironically, a 2003 study at the University of Georgia suggested that the Blue-Eyes-Brown-Eyes exercise could exacerbate problems that didn't previously exist, and "can also lead to anxiety because people become hyper-sensitive about being offensive or being offended." I ask you, who could have imagined that people today would be hyper-sensitive about being offended?

And to think it all begain with this experiment. Ah, that's the '70s for you.

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Sue Bernard is called the Starlet's Starlet, and so that should be worth at least a moment's notice. Dick Hobson describes her as a rarity, the starlet "who actually works at her trade" with a regular daytime role on General Hospital and nighttime gigs on shows such as Room 222 and "The Joe Namath Special." She was a child actress, appearing on Playhouse 90 and Father Knows Best. Oh, and as was the case with last week's starlet, Carol Lynley, she's graced the pages of Playboy, this time as December, 1966 Playmate of the Month. (Again, I'm taking their word for it.)

Since this article, most of her work has been in the form of documentaries and as the author of six books, and works at promoting the work of her late father, the photographer Bruno Bernard; her Playboy photos were taken by one of her father's apprentices, the famous Mario Casilli. Although I don't partake of the portfolios of these men's work, I don't look down on them; after all, Felix Unger took pictures for Playboy as well, remember?

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And now the week in viewing pleasures.

The honors in sports go to ABC's weekend coverage of the PGA Championship from Southern Hills in Tulsa. We read about the PGA a few weeks ago when it was played in July, but by this time we're seeing the tournament settle in to its traditional mid-August spot. Dave Stockton, known today as one of the great putting doctors in golf, wins the first of his two PGA titles; he's the only player to break par in the brutal 100⁰+ heat, finishing at -1 and defeating Arnold Palmer and Bob Murphy by two shots. On Sunday, Chet Atkins is the guest on Evening at Pops (PBS, 10:00 p.m.), and on the replay of Friday night's Merv Griffin Show which several affiliates offer (having preempted the Friday airing), longtime announcer and sidekick Arthur Treacher says farewell to Merv; the show's preparing to move to Hollywood, and Treacher, who loves New York, doesn't want to move with it.

Monday night at 8:30 p.m., Channel 4, WTAE in Pittsburgh, has a British film I quite admire, from the "Kitchen Sink" era of realistic drama. It's the 1961 black-and-white movie The Mark, which garnered the first and only Best Actor Oscar nominaton for Stuart Whitman as a convicted child molester now rehabilitated and out of prison but struggling to acceptance in the wider world. Maria Schell co-stars as a sympathetic woman who becomes his girlfriend, and Rod Steiger turns in a surprisingly effective performance as the humane psychiatrist who treats him. Whitman has never been what I'd call a great actor, but I've never seen him give a better performance. If it's not your cup of tea, tune in to CBS at 10:00 p.m. for The Wild Wild West, as Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford guest star in the story of a town terrorized by a ghostly rider. And on a replay of NET Festival (10:00 p.m., NET), it's a report on how movie music is no longer for background only. Examples include the use of "Eleanor Rigby" as a sequence in the Beatles' Yellow Submarine.

Tuesday's first run of NET Festival (8:00 p.m.) is "In the Name of Allah," a "colorful" documentary of Moslem life in the city of Fes, Morocco, includng "a look at modern French-build areas of Fes, where young Moslems are rebelling against the traditions of their ancestors." Were this documentary to be done today, I rather suspect it it might have a slightly different tone. Later on NET, Firing Line (9:30 p.m.) presents a debate over capital punishment with Truman Capote, who comes up with the provocative suggestion that all murder cases be tried in Federal courts.

Wednesday the race issue appears again, in the Group W special "The Man Nobody Saw," (KDKA, 7:30 p.m.) It's based on the Kerner Commission Report on race relations, and under the guise of a courtroom drama tells the story of a man (Arthur French) repeatedly rejected by "a white society that ultimately impelled him to commit crimes against that society. As the drama unfolds, it becomes evident that it is not Richardson who is on trial, but rather the 'white establishment.'" The drama is followed by a discusion between blacks and whites about the questions raised by the play, and one of the things these programs makes clear is that for all the discusions about race today, (1) they're nothing new, and (2) you get the feeling nothing's changed. Whether or not that is, in fact, true, is another matter. It is, however, all-pervasive in 1970,

Also on Wednesday, NBC's The Virginian presents "High Stakes," an episode from 1966 starring Jack Lord. Why, you may ask, would they present a four-year-old rerun? Well, for a series that's been on the air since 1962, they've got quite a stockpile of episodes to choose from, and during rerun season you're not going to simply rely on the last couple of years. Additionally, when you just happen to have an episode that features an actor who's now starring in a very popular TV series of his own, even if it is on another network - well, that doesn't hurt, does it?

On Thursday the guests on This is Tom Jones (ABC, 9:00 p.m.) are Anthony Newley, Peggy Lipton, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and John Byner. Newley's singing some of his songs, including "What Kind of Fool Am I," "On a Wonderful Day like Today," and "Who Can I Turn To?"; the man wrote a hell of a lot of hits, didn't he? Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers (NBC, 10:00 p.m.) features "Marty Feldmen as a traffic cop who things he's a matador and Charles Nelson Reilly as a matchmaker who runs his place like a used-car lot," and Joan Rivers is the guest host for the week on The Tonight Show, a reminder of how her relationship with Johnny Carson went south, and how as much as we might enjoy Johnny in front of the camera, he really was not a very nice man.

Herman's Hermits star in the CBS Friday Night Movie "Hold On!", which Judith Crist describes as "11 numbers barely connected by plot," and goes on to add that "This is a film designed for teen-agers who undoubtedly wouldn't be caught dead watching such teeny-bopper stuff." She feels unsophisticated seven-year-olds might tolerate it.

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Finally, an article by Dr. George Weinberg on those one-parent shows. They're nothing new to television, although in 1970 the single-parent family is never the result of divorce; it's always because the parent is widowed or comes into custody of the children through unusual means. But what do they tell us?

Well, we find that single-parent families are affluent. The fathers are rich, the mothers have good jobs, they all live in comfortable surroundings with helpful friends and neighbors and often employ live-in help. They also enjoy remarkably healthy social lives; although permanent relationships often escape them, their romantic escapades provide fodder for storylines and humorous situations.

The children of single-parent families are well-behaved and intelligent, and they enjoy loving relationships with their sole parent, often bordering on that of two adults. Rarely do we see the territorial possessiveness of a parent that children demonstrate in real life when they feel their position threatened by the appearance of an interloper; the son in The Courtship of Eddie's Father who actively looks for a mate for his dad is an outlier indeed. Only occasionaly, as in Family Affair, do we see the children struggle with the memory of the deaths of their parents.

It sounds as if this is a negative review of the single-parent show as unrealistic, preposterous, existing merely to provide easy plot devices for the writer, but in fact there are many worthwhile aspects to these shows as well, Dr. Weinberg points out, among which is an example of what parenting should be and too frequently isn't. He cites an episode of Mayberry R.F.D. in which Sam (Ken Berry) "discovers from small signs that  his son is removing himself and losing zest for their relationship, [and] he sets out systematically to recover the boy. The story is the father's struggle to make contact again - perhaps a struggle that should be more familiar to us than it is." It is, says Weinberg, an episode that stands "in contrast to shows that thrive on depicting neurosis and violence."

These one-parent shows are watched more or less equally by men, women and children because, Weinberg posits, they offer some promise of the daily life that we once envisioned, a life that seems increasingly "gone and irretrievable." There's an honesty, a devotion to value, a kindness that is generally the chief motive of one or another of the charactors. Weinberg has hopes that programs like these can help reduce the gap between the generations, can improve the relationships between parent and child. There has been a sudden increase in their number on America's TV screens, and they will have ain increasing influence on the next generation of childhood television viewers. TV