This week in TV Guide: March 3, 1956

On the cover this week is a man who, once upon a time, was one of the most familiar faces on television: Hal March, host of the nation's top-rated program, The $64,000 Question, every Tuesday night at 9:00 pm CT on CBS. (Lynn Dollar, pictured next to March, is the show's "assistant.")

Hal March has that important quality that often makes the difference between a successful quiz show and one that comes and goes in a matter of weeks: likability. Contestants feel comfortable around him, and audiences like him because he's, well, human. One night he forgets to ask a contestant the $32,000 question, another time he accidentally gives the answer as well as the question, and then there was the time he almost forget the sponsor plug before signing off. . .

But, like Donald Trump in a completely different context, March doesn't seem to be hurt by these flubs. In fact, he's increasingly moving beyond quiz shows to other areas of entertainment. He's already appeared as himself on Perry Como's show, played a forger on Omnibus, acted opposite Maurice Evans and Vivian Blair on stage, and even made the big screen in the Warner Brothers movie It's Always Fair Weather. (We just saw him in an old Burke's Law episode last month, in which he played the killer.) The talk now is that March might be headed for Broadway, and more movies may be in store as well.

The scandals put all of that to an end, of course; although there's no evidence that March was involved in fixing games (if anything, the pressure to rig the show came not from the producers, as was the case with other quiz shows, but from Revlon, the sponsor), there's that taint of guilt by association, and with it March's opportunities begin to try up. There are the odd guest star bits here and there; he's good, not great, but very natural in his technique. By 1969, though, things seem to have turned a corner, and March signs up to host a game show called It's Your Bet. But only a few weeks into taping, tests show that March has lung cancer, and he dies in 1970, only 49 years old.

l  l  l

If you've partaken in TV Guide's "As We See It" editorials over the years, then you know that one of their enthusiasms has always been for "quality" television; therefore, it's safe to say they're very enthusiastic about NBC's programming the next couple of weeks.

It begins this week with the network's telecast of George Bernard Shaw's witty "Caesar and Cleopatra," starring Claire Bloom and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Tuesday night on Producers' Showcase (7:00 p.m.), and continues next week with Laurence Olivier's big-screen version of Richard III* and Hallmark Hall of Fame's "The Taming of the Shrew." The programs face steep competition, especially "Caesar and Cleopatra," which has to deal with Burns & Allen, Arthur Godfrey and I Love Lucy on CBS. And while the editor, probably Merrill Panitt, points out that TV Guide "is far from a highbrow publication," he adds that they are "grateful for any sort of programming that tends to enlarge television's scope." How, for example, could one say that they don't like Shakespeare or The $64,000 Question unless they've seen them?

*For what it's worth, Richard III was the first three-hour telecast of a film ever in the United States; it was also the first time that a movie had ever aired on television (on a Sunday afternoon, so as not to affect the ratings) and opened in American theaters on the same day.

NBC should be thanked, Panitt concludes, "for gambling money and prestige on the theory that viewers want such fine fare." I suppose at some point they did, although even in the Golden Age documentaries suffered, and Voice of Firestone dragged down the ratings of every show on the network that night. Quality television has been said to have made a comeback on cable in the last few years, and indeed there is no doubt a high quality of drama available for viewing. But as for the classics, I don't think we'll be seeing them anytime soon. Not even on PBS.

l  l  l

What else is on this week? Saturday night means one thing in many households: The Lawrence Welk Show (8:00 p.m., ABC), known at the time as The Dodge Dancing Party. Welk is the subject of an unbylined profile this week, and if you need any evidence of his popularity, consider this anecdote: Last year he and his orchestra played five nights a week at the Aragon Ballroom in Ocean Park, California grossed the maestro $100,000, which in today's dollars comes out to nearly $1.2 million. (Or "Ah-One point-Ah-Two" million, if you prefer.) Besides that, there's his income from his television show, and then the royalties from all those records he sells. So in other words, he's doing all right.

Now this is an interesting bit of counterprogramming. On Sunday's Famous Film Festival (6:30 p.m., ABC), it's the first of a two-part showing of the aforementioned G.B. Shaw's aforementioned Caesar and Cleopatra, made in 1945 and starring Vivien Leigh and Claude Raines. Now, let's think about this for a minute: if you've got a color TV, you can see NBC's Monday night production in color (the big-screen edition, although filmed in Technicolor, will be shown in black-and-white), and you won't have to wait until next week to find out how it ends. Even though the movie version airs one night earlier than its TV counterpart , I know which one I'd be watching. 

Monday is a fine day for music lovers, beginning with the premiere of The Gordon MacRae Show" (6:30 p.m., NBC). The star of Carousel and Oklahoma will host the 15-minute program (in color!) each Monday, as part of the half-hour block that includes John Cameron Swayze's Camel News Caravan. Meantime, young Roberta Peters is the guest soloist on Voice of Firestone (7:30 p.m., ABC). Peters, one of the greatest sopranos ever (as well as one of the most popular), is a frequent presence on television over the years, appearing on Ed Sullivan's show a record 65 times. 

On Tuesday, The Phil Silvers Show (7:00 p.m., CBS) presents one of the greatest episodes in sitcom history, "The Court Martial," in which Bilko winds up defending a chimp that's accidentally been inducted into the Army. Silvers himself called it "the funniest half-hour on television, unconditionally." Probably the funniest segment of this hilarious episode occurs during the court martial (which would have been funny anyway), when the chimp, given the name "Harry Speakup" by the induction center, begins acting up and Silvers, completely in character, ad-libs to the chimp's antics. You can see the other actors in the scene trying valiantly to keep from laughing, but Silvers never breaks stride. How wise they were to let the camera keep rolling. Unfortunately, the clip of this that used to be online has been taken down, but I'd be surprised if most of you haven't seen it.

Once Walt Disney made the decision to produce programming for television, it was just a matter of time before other studios followed suit, and we can see one early example of this on Wednesday with M-G-M Parade (7:30 p.m., ABC). The half-hour show, hosted for the final time this week by actor and future U.S. Senator George Murphy (next week, Walter Pidgeon takes over as host), is one of MGM's first ventures into television. They don't really get it, though, at least not with this series, which combines clips from vintage MGM movies of the past, and plugs for upcoming MGM releases. (This week, for example, Judy Garland sings in an excerpt from The Harvey Girls, and we see previews from the new movie Meet Me in Las Vegas, with Cyd Charisse and Dan Dailey.) Eventually, the studio succumbs to the show's bad reviews and adds more extensive, condensed versions of its classic movies. The series runs for another two months before fading from our screens.

For four seasons, the CBS anthology series Climax! presented various tales, mostly of the mystery type; it was later known as Climax Mystery Theater. However, this Thursday the show presents a real change of pace with "The Louella Parsons Story," based on her autobiography The Gay Illiterate. (7:30 p.m., CBS) Parsons, America's most influential (i.e. loved and/or feared) gossip columnist from the early '30s into the '60s, achieved a level of stardom as great as that of some of her subjects, and she maintained a feud with her hated rival Hedda Hopper for decades. What makes this show so unusual is not just the subject matter, but that following the story, there's a tribute from stars of the industry, emceed by Jack Benny and featuring Gene Autry, Charles Boyer, Rock Hudson, Susan Hayward and John Wayne, among others. An odd hybrid of genres, no?

It just didn't work out for Barry on Brooks. 

Friday on Our Miss Brooks (7:30 p.m., CBS), Connie (Eve Arden) tries to collect a $1,000 prize, despite the fact that the penalty for gambling is dismissal from the school. Our Miss Brooks is the subject of this week's review by Robert Stahl, who focuses on the changes to the show's format for this, the fourth and final season. Gone is the familiar public school, replaced by a tony private one; gone too is Mr. Boynton, Eve's long-time romantic interest, replaced by a physical education teacher (played by Gene Barry). And gone as well, says Stahl, is any subtlety the show might have had; "It would seem that Miss Arden and her writers don't have too much respect for their viewers' taste and intelligence," opting instead for unbelivable situations and slapstick humor. The changes have done nothng to improve the series, according to Stahl; while the producers, in an effort to rectify their mistake, have since brought back the Boynton character ("Barry has apparently read the writing on the blackboard because he has already fled the show"), it's a case of too little, too late. "Some of the situations might be funny if only the writers would lay off the slapstick." Instead, it's the show itself that gets laid off at the end of the season.

l  l  l

According to the Teletype, Mister Peepers, which ends its three-season run in June, will be reborn as a weekday show, airing Monday through Friday afternoons. Wally Cox, of course, will return in the title role, but it's not certain how many other original cast members will join him. This never happens, for whatever reason, but I'm not surprised; the show had dropped in the ratings after Peepers had married his sweetheart (as shows often do), and it's difficult to imagine that it could have continued for long at a five-a-week pace. In reruns, maybe, but original episodes? On the other hand, it could have become television's first comedy soap. Think of the possibilities!

There's also an item about how sometimes the squeaky wheel does get the grease; ABC has fielded viewer complaints about the number of commercials in its Afternoon Film Festival, which interrupted the movie every five or six minutes. The new plan: limit the breaks to every ten or eleven minutes. There are also plans to have host Allyn Edwards give news headlines during some of the breaks. According to the always-reliable Wikipedia, Afternoon Film Festival also suffered from a lack of variety; ABC's deal with the J. Arthur Rank Company for 35 films meant that some titles were repeated every two or three weeks. 

And The Johnny Carson Show, which airs Thursday nights on CBS, will be wrapping things up at the end of the month. The sponsors have cancelled, and the show went through seven directors ("through no fault of Carson's") during its 39-week run. It returns as a daytime show through the summer, and later Carson will begin a five-year run as host of Who Do You Trust? before going on to even bigger and better things.

l  l  l

Finally, we're always up for a good discussion on censorship, and this week we look at what gives a network censor headaches. A similar article appeared in a 1980 issue, and though there's a vast difference between the shows of the mid '50s and early '80s, the censor's job is pretty much the same. The censor in question is Stockton Helffrich, Director of Continuity Acceptance for NBC, and he strongly believes that one of the jobs of a censor is not to censor. "We are not kill-joys, spoilsports, crape-hangers or wet blankets," and part of the philosophy is that "children should be able to reach adulthood as really mature people without prejudices." What that means is that much of their work deals with censoring "racial stereotypes, religious oversimplifications, unkindness toward the physically handicapped, ignorance regarding the emotionally disturbed."

However, censors also represent the interests of sponsors, which means if your favorite show is brought to you by Your Gas Company, you probably aren't going to see someone commit suicide by sticking their head in an oven. If the show is sponsored by a billiard company, the script can't suggest that pool halls are the exclusive domain of underworld characters and shady punks. While the sponsors' interests clearly need to be taken into account, Helffrich warns against "authors and producers [indulging] in fearful knuckling under." In other words, don't self-censor yourself - let the professionals decide what ought to be included.

Oh, there's the occasional "low neckline," but Helffrich says those are "an exception on current TV," and there's no discussion of profanity; I suppose that isn't even an issue in 1956. For Helffrich and his three dozen colleagues (and assistants working with them), it's a never-ending job, encouraged by the occasional constructive letter from a viewer that "has made us take pause and try to do better." TV  

This week in TV Guide: March 12, 1954

T

his week is kind of a mixed bag here at Retro TV Guide Headquarters, as we like to call it. (Well, OK, it's only me that calls it that, and just now is the first time I've ever done so, but let's think of it as literary license.) There's no one dominant topic, but a lot of smaller ones that, I think, adds up to a pretty good assortment.

And since St. Patrick's Day is this coming Wednesday, what better way to celebrate than with a toast to WGN-TV's up-and-coming young singer, an Irishman named Michael Delaney Dowd Jr., better known to one and all as Mike Douglas. He's recently been voted Chicago's favorite male singer in the TV Guide poll, no surprise since he's a familiar face on TV as as the host of WGN's Hi Ladies as well as one of the singers on DuMont's Music Show.

It's been a long road to this point for Douglas; he hit it big in 1945 as a guest on Strike it Rich, where he parlayed the song "Strange Music" (from the Broadway hit Song of Norway) into a stint as singer with Kay Kyser's band, which morphed into a role as the voice of Prince Charming in Disney's Cinderella, and a radio show heard over 500 stations nationwide. Following that was a tour with an old Kyser colleage, the comedian Ish Kabibble, as what was called "a poor man's Martin and Lewis." A friend of his who worked at WGN urged Douglas to audition for the station's show Luncheon Party. The station's general manager saw him, said "Sign him up!" and the rest is history.

    Mike Douglas and friend

Except it isn't, not yet. Douglas might have been riding high in 1954, but as rock and doo wop took over, his career, like so many crooners of the time, foundered. He moved to California, was house singer in a nightclub, toured from venue to venue; he and his wife flipped their home to make ends meet.  And then the Douglas luck clicked again; in 1961, an old friend from those Chicago days hired him to host an afternoon talk-show host in Cleveland. His obituary in The New York Times tells the rest of the story: Within two years the show had branched out from Cleveland to other Group W stations in Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco and Pittsburgh. "By 1967 it was the most popular show on daytime television; the 14 minutes of commercials on the 90-minute show produced about $10 million annually for its creators." The show runs until 1981,* and Douglas lives happily in retirement until his death in 2006, on his birthday. And that is the rest of the history.

*The show's longtime producer, Roger Ailes, first met Richard Nixon when Nixon appeared on the Douglas show in 1968; the rest of his story is history as well.

t  t  t

Now it's on a review of "The Program of the Week." and as regular "It's About TV" readers can attest, that frequently means a visit from your favorite critic and mine, Cleveland Amory. Of course, we're still a few years away from Cleve's weekly column, but even so, this week's Program of the Week is well worth checking out: the "rollicking TV comedy" Our Miss Brooks, starring Eve Arden as "America's No. 1 Schoolma'am."*

*I should also mention here that a reader took me to task a few months ago for ignoring Eve Arden when writing about an issue which featured her on the cover. I wasn't about to make that mistake again.

There's ample reason why Our Miss Brooks is such a hit, starting with Arden herself. Her "wry acceptance" of the various predicaments into which her students find themselves, combined with her own penchant for madcap antics, is a surefire combination that the viewing public finds irresistable on a weekly basis. And while Arden certainly has personal glamour in spades, she wisely plays down that aspect on TV, all the better to make more believable the increasingly unbelievable plotlines that the writers seem to cherish. It's true that the slapstick results in "a steady flow of laughs," but our unnamed critic suggests that toning it down a bit and making the people slightly more human and less caricaturish "could elevate this show into the sock category," which in Variety-speak means an even bigger hit.

Not to be lost in all this is Arden's excellent supporting cast, particularly Gale Gordon (above) as the pompous, often exasperated Principal Conklin, a precursor to his many, many years playing a similar foil to Lucille Ball. Bob Rockwell is "pleasant" as Mr. Boynton, the science teacher who remains the longtime object of Miss Brooks' affections, and Dick Crenna, as perpetual student Walter Denton, fits nicely into the slapstick nature of the show. Acknowledging that the show won't win any awards for intellectual content, it is nonetheless a "clever, funny" show, and Connie Brooks remains the high school teacher we all wish we had.

t  t  t

And now for one of my favorite sections, the TV Teletype, which as you know, comes to us from both New York and Hollywood. 

October 19, 1953 was hardly a date that will live in infamy, at least not on the scale of Pearl Harbor, but it was certainly an important date for Arthur Godfrey and Julius LaRosa; it was on this date that the Old Redhead bounced LaRosa from his radio program for allegedly becoming too big for his britches. ("Lacked humility" was the key phrase, an iconic instance of the pot calling the kettle black.) With that as the backdrop, the New York Teletype notes that Arthur Godfrey and Friends has fallen out of the Top 10 for "the first time in months," with a corresponding drop of eight ratings points. Last month the show was sixth in the ratings; this month it sits at 15th. Teletype editor Bob Stahl cautiously notes that "it's probably too early to draw any conclusions," but five months after the fact, the handwriting is on the wall. Godfrey remains a force in American entertainment, but never with the level of popularity or success he had prior to firing LaRosa. It has to be, to this day, one of the most spectacular cases of self-immolation on record.

Also from the New York side of the Teletype, NBC's planning a blog of Saturday morning kids' programming this fall: "The kid lineup will start at 8 A.M. with a juvenile version of Dave Garroway's Today show." Funny; I thought that's what we have right now." On the Hollywood side of the aisle, Charlton Heston, frequent star on CBS's Studio One (they call him "Studio One's gift to the movies"), has a big role coming up on the big screen: he'll be playing Moses in The Ten Commandments. And in a sign of things to come, the pay-TV company Telemeter say that "their 148 Palm Springs subscribers are averaging $10 a month for pay-as-you-see new movies on TV." That adds up to nearly $100 a month today, which adds up to a lot of Netflix subscriptions.

t  t  t

So far we've spent our entire time looking at the stories at the beginning and end of the issue, and we haven't even touched the content in the middle, what a lot of you come here for: the programming itself. Time to rectify that, don't you think? We'll start with the most provocative program of the week.

Monday night, the spotlight falls on Studio One's production of "Thunder on Sycamore Street," by Reginald Rose. (9:00 p.m,. CBS): 

"Neighbors attempt to run arespected citizen out of town when they learn that he is a former convict."

Now, anyone familiar with Rose's tendency to infuse his writing with a strong social justice message might read that description and suspect that there's more to the story than that—and they'd be right. In the story's original incarnation (based on an actual incident), the target of the vigilantes had been a black family moving into a white neighborhood. Not surprisingly, the network and sponsors demanded that the story be change. Rose complied, but subversely: until the play's end, the viewing audience would not be told why the family was being targeted; they would only know that neighbors were determined to run them out. 

As Eric Barnouw describes it in Tube of Plenty, "This evasive strategy turned the play into an extraordinary social Rorschach test. Comments indicated that viewers filled in the missing information according to their own predilictions. Some at once assumed he was a communist; others, that he was a Puerto Rican, athiest, Jew, Catholic, Russian, or Oriental." The revelation that he was an ex-con was almost secondary to this social experiment. Concludes Barnouw, "The sponsors found, with some uneasiness, that they had presented precisely the kind of controversial drama they had tried to avoid." The drama received widespread praise, with Jack Gould of the Times describing it as, next to 1984, "as fine a work as Studio One has done this season." 

Just think of how much more effective it might have been had TV Guide not spilled the beans in the description by telling you up front that the neighbor in question is an ex-con. Way to go, TV Guide; do you issue spoiler warnings with your subscriptions?

t  t  t

Good day!

What else? Well, since the start of TV Guide's television week is still Friday, we'll begin by looking in on the debut of an intriguing program with the intriguing title of Dilemma. (7:30 p.m. CT, WGN) The show, hosted by radio personality Paul Harvey (and created by Harvey's wife, Angel) presented a weekly "discussion on social problems." This week's panel consists of "Dr. Louis L. Mann of Mt. Sinai Temple, foremost leader of Reform Judaism; Dr. John Kane, head of the department of sociology at Notre Dame; Dr. Kenneth Hildebrand, minister of the Central Church of Chicago; and Dr Beryl Orris, expert in the fields of Inter-personal Relationships and Psychiatry." Now this is a show I'd like to know more about; did it air on DuMont, or was it strictly local? (Probably the latter.) How long did it run? What were the topics discussed each week? It's one of those shows about which you can't find very much information, except for this single line at the always-reliable Wikipedia, which describes Dilemma as "the [acknowledged] prototype of the modern talk show genre." Whether that's accurate or not, I don't know; the few articles that mention the show simply repeat the prototype assertion. What I do know is that I'd like to know more about it, and that's a dilemma of its own.

I've noticed that NBC Opera Theatre, which generally aired on Sundays throughout its run, was occasionally shown on Saturday in these early years (capitalizing on the popularity of the Metropolitan Opera Saturday matinee radio broadcasts?), and this Saturday 3:00 p.m. the presentation is a new opera, The Taming of the Shrew, by the American composer Vittorio Giannini. It's based, obviously, on Shakespeare's play, "with additional material from Romeo and Juliet and the Sonnets." What's particularly interesting is that the lead, Petruchio, is played by none other than actor and musical theater star John Raitt, father of Bonnie. (I've never considered Raitt as an operatic voice, although he was a very good singer.) It's a pity this opera isn't performed more; from what I can tell, this was only the third production (it debuted in 1953), and it received both popular and critical acclaim—Olin Downes, writing in the New York Times compared the opera favorably with Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, high praise indeed.

Sunday means Ed Sullivan, of course, and on Toast of the Town (7:00 p.m., CBS), Ed welcomes pianist-comedian Victor Borge, Leslie Caron in a scene from Lili, Montgomery Clift, star of From Here to Eternity, dancer Hal Le Roy, Dorothy Hayden's Irish Steppers, Goodsmith Brothers dog act, dancer Peg Leg Bates, and—none other than the aforementioned Julius LaRosa! (and Godfrey really, really hated Sullivan for having LaRosa on so often.) Opposite Ed on NBC, it's the Colgate Comedy Hour, with Jimmy Durante as this week's host, joined by Eddie Cantor, Robert Montgomery, and opera star Patrice Munsel. Included in the festivities is Montgomery's dramatic narration of the history of Durante's theme song "Inka Dinka Doo," and Muncel's operatic treatment of it. I'll bet that was fun.

Monday also marks the debut of CBS's Morning Show (7:00 a.m.), the first in a long, long, long list of failed efforts by the network to unseat NBC's Today, a list that will come to include Jack Paar and Dick Van Dyke; for now, however, we'll be content with Walter Cronkite, Charles Collingwood, Frank Reynolds on the local news break, and the Baird Marionettes. Well, the morning isn't big enough for two chimps.

Sounds like my kind of show, doesn't it?

Tuesday night is TV's potpourri in a nutshelll: Bishop Sheen talks about "man and his role in the universe" on Life Is Worth Living (7:00 p.m., DuMont), Terry (Sherry Jackson) looks for a career as a child actress on Make Room for Daddy (8:00 p.m., NBC), Edward R. Murrow takes a look at the stories behind the headlines on See It Now (9:00 p.m., CBS), Fred Allen searches for today's talent on Judge For Yourself (9:00 p.m., NBC). and Robert Q. Lewis hosts the panel show The Name's the Same (9:30 p.m., ABC). 

On Wednesday at 8:00 p.m., it's NBC's version of Kraft Theatre*, with "You Touched Me," a comedy written by Tennessee Williams and Donald Windham—and you'd have to figure that if it's a comedy, Williams would need a co-author. He was the theater's golden boy when this play hit Broadway in 1945, but according to the Times, "Every playwright is entitled to a slight fall from grace occasionally. "You Touched Me!" is Mr. Williams's." Ouch.

*Kraft sponsored two half-hour anthologies under the same name; in addition to NBC's Tuesday night version, another, completely different episode airs Thursday on ABC. Hey, it's the sponsor's money; they can do whatever they want.

Finally (and I'm never going to get used to the idea of Thursday as the end of the week—not until we start getting a three-day weekend all the time), a lot of people will be tuned in to You Bet Your Life (7:00 p.m., NBC) just to hear Groucho's witty repartee with contestants. But is it all as spontaneous as it seems? Not according to the ad for next week's issue, the ad for which reads: "Groucho Marx: Are His Ad-Libs For Real?" The answer, apparently, is no, but that's for another week; we've had just too much fun here.

t  t  t

OK, one more. Saturday's matinee movie on WNBQ (11:30 a.m.) is A Boy, a Girl and a Dog. I don't know what it's about, but if there's any justice in the world, it ought to start, "A boy, a girl and a dog walk into a bar". . . TV