This week in TV Guide: June 26, 1965

Back when I first started my TV Guide collection, it wasn't to provide sociological analysis of '60s television and how it reflected American culture and vice versa.  Northing that deep or pretentious.  It was simply because I liked paging through them, finding shows I remembered, shows I was sorry I didn't remember, and shows that I thought never should have made it to the air.  It was a miniature time capsule for me, a chance to relive some days and experience others for the first time, and it remains a simple pleasure to do so.

Since we're in the midst of the summer rerun season and there isn't a lot of depth in these issues, I thought I'd go back to those former days and just see what jumps off the page of this issue.  Maybe there's some good stuff in here, maybe not.  Let's see.

***

Here's something you wouldn't see on network TV nowadays.  At 8:45 am CT on ABC, it's the Irish Sweeps Derby horse race, live via Early Bird satellite from Dublin, with Jim McKay and Irish sports announcer Michael O'Hehir providing the call.  It wasn't that unusual for ABC, in particular, to provide Saturday morning sports coverage from overseas, as they did during Ford Motor's campaign to win the 24 Hours of LeMans.  The Early Bird, which was quite famous at the time, had only been up since April and live television coverage from Europe and Asia was a novelty at the time, leading me to suspect ABC covered the Derby not just because it was a big race, but simply because they could.  Lending credence to this theory is a mention in "For the Record" that Comsat is set to start collecting fees for the use of the Early Bird, ending the free run that had existed prior to then.

Here are highlights of the race, by the way, which was won by Meadow Court, partly owned by Bing Crosby.  I'm surprised a tape of the race wasn't found in his basement.

***

No Sullivan vs. The Palace this week, as Palace is preempted by the Coaches All-America college football game, live from Buffalo, New York.  This was one of the more unusual post-season all-star games, coming as it did more than five months after the end of the college football season.  For a football fan like me it was a real treat, a much-needed antidote to the endless stream of baseball throughout the summer*, and a signal that football season was just around the corner.  It was sort of a companion to July's College All-Star game, which pitted the NFL champions against an all-star team of seniors.  And besides, Chris Schenkel and Bud Wilkinson usually announced it, which meant it had to be a big game, right?

*This was long before I'd come to appreciate the subtleties and nuances of baseball, which in turn was long before the drug scandals and increasingly slow pace of the game drove me away again.

It's no surprise that all-star games like these don't exist anymore.  For one thing, the NFL would never permit their expensive new rookies to endanger themselves playing in meaningless college exhibition games when they could be playing in meaningless pro exhibition games.  And the whole all-star experience has waned across all leagues, given that the proliferation of televised sports has made household names out of almost everyone - it used to be, for example, that people who lived in American League cities only got to see National League players at the All Star Game, or on the occasional Game of the Week telecast.

Games like this may not be missed, but they're still missed, if you know what I mean.

***

I mentioned the single-season series The Rogues a couple of weeks ago.  It's on KCMT, Channel 7, at 10:30 Sunday night, rather than it's normal 9:00 Sunday timeslot.  Channel 7, an NBC affiliate that also carried various ABC shows, broadcast the previous day's Lawrence Welk at 9:00 instead.  Some people thought the failure of The Rogues, a clever and humorous show that starred Gig Young, David Niven and Charles Boyer, was because the show was too sophisticated for viewers.  In Channel 7's case, I can believe it.

Anyway, this week's episode is entitled "The Boston Money Party," and features Young's character (the three stars rotated turns as leads) "posing as the owner of a New England textile plant, to trap Paul Mannix, the 'wolf' of Wall Street."  An unscrupulous one, no doubt, as the rogues seldom scammed someone who didn't deserve it.  An attraction of this episode: it was written by William Link and Richard Levenson, the creators of Columbo and countless other clever shows.  Since I've talked about this show twice now, it's only fair I give you a glimpse of it to demonstrate why it's worth your while.  So here's the very episode we're talking about, "The Boston Money Party."


By the way, you'll (hopefully) remember that last week I brought up the practice in TV Guide of often crediting the writer of a particular episode, and you can see that in spades Sunday night.  Besides the mention of Levenson and Link, we also find out that this week's episode of Bonanza, "The Flapjack Contest," was written by Frank Cleaver, and that host Rod Serling penned this week's Twilight Zone, "The Bard."  Later in the week, we'll see that The Alfred Hitchcock Hour's "The Return of Verge Likens" (which was actually on MeTV a few weeks ago) was written by James Bridges, and the Kraft Suspense Theatre presentation of "Connery's Hands" was written by William Wood.  I still think it's a nice idea.

***

My mother watched soap operas when I was a kid, as I suspect did many mothers of many sons and daughters.  I'm fairly well-acquainted with many of them, but here's one that doesn't ring a bell - it's ABC's A Time For Us, a spin-off of the soap Flame in the Wind (which I hadn't heard of either), which has its debut this Monday.  It was only on for two years, if you count the two shows as one (as does the always-reliable Wikipedia), so I guess I'm not all that surprised.

Still, it's interesting - soap operas engendered such a passionate following among their loyal viewers, it's always interesting to run across the ones that didn't really catch on.  Still, if you're curious, here's an extended clip from an episode, sponsored by Dristan nasal mist, and Sleep-Eze, for a good night's sleep.


Speaking of soaps, here's the listing for Thursday's episode of General Hospital: "Steve hires a new staff member."  How could they stand the suspense?

***

Wait just a minute, you say!  You just said there wasn't any Sullivan vs. The Palace this week!  Well, that's what you get for believing everything I write.

Actually, we're cheating a little here, since the Hollywood Palace episode we've got is last week's, as it appears on WKBT, Channel 8 in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, a CBS affiliate who also dabbles in that wacky cross-affiliate programming.  They air Palace on Tuesday night at 10:30, right after your late edition of the local news, but we don't care, do we?

Sullivan:  TVG doesn't call this a rerun, but it doesn't say it's live either.  At any rate, Ed's guests this week are Tony Bennett; puppet Topo Gigio; rock 'n' rollers Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas; comic Jackie Vernon; the singing Kim Sisters; magician Johnny Hart; the two Carmenas, acrobats*; and Africa's Djolimba song and drum ensemble.

*My wife, upon hearing this lineup, suggested that the two Carmenas would be followed by the two Buranas.  If you don't get it, look it up.

Palace:  Host David Janssen introduces vocalists Edie Adams and Vic Damone; comedians Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks; Les Surfs, a singing group from Madagascar; the Harlem Globetrotters; Tim Conway; the knife-throwing Zeros*; and the Princess Tajana trapeze act.

*Let's hope that refers to the number of errant throws they make.

I'd say that one Edie Adams and one Vic Damone equal one Tony Bennett, and Jackie Vernon and Tim Conway probably offset themselves, as to the the acrobats and the knife throwers.  But the reason the Palace wins this week is the supporting cast: Reiner and Brooks, who may not do their "2000 Year Old Man" routine but do have a very funny bit on filing income taxes, the 'Trotters, who were very funny in those days, and Janssen, who's probably not that at ease in a hosting role, especially when his team of "Hollywood Dribblers" take on the Globetrotters.  But why speculate on it?  Here, watch the show for yourself:

***

Fred Astaire had essentially retired from Hollywood a few years ago, limiting his appearances to rare (and critically acclaimed) variety specials, but he and his current partner Barrie Chase are back this week in a comedy on NBC's Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre called "Think Pretty."  "Record company owners Fred Addams* [played by you-know-who] wants to win over female talent manager Tony Franklin - he's trying to sign one of her clients to a recording contract."  Fred and Barrie do a few dances, and Fred sings the title song.

*I wonder - since this was up directly against ABC's The Addams Family, did they perhaps spell Fred's character's last name that way on purpose?

And yes, here's a clip of one of their dances.  You knew that was coming, didn't you?


***
Saturday night at 8pm, CBS carries Secret Agent, which in England (and on DVD) is known by its original name Danger Man*.  I've written in the past about this show, the precursor to Patrick McGoohan's magnificent The Prisoner, which had a pretty successful run of its own.  I wouldn't have noticed this series back in 1965 - particularly this week, I would have been watching the football game - but you can bet I notice it now.

*Admit it though, Johnny Rivers singing Secret Agent is way cooler than the theme that was used under the title Danger Man.

This week's episode, "Whatever Happened to George Foster?", doesn't play into the Prisoner theme in the way that some other episodes do, but it's a strong one in its own right.  And speaking of familiar faces in unfamiliar roles, isn't that Bernard Lee playing the heavy?  You know, "M" - as in the James Bond movies? Glad he finally turned away from his life of crime.

***

Hawaii Five-0 isn't on yet, but we still have a double-dose of Jack Lord this week.  First, on a Dr. Kildare rerun (written by Harold Gast), Lord plays a doctor who fears rheumatoid arthritis may end his surgical career, just as it once ended his professional football career.  I'll bet we get Jack in full-on bitter mode here.  Question for any of you doctors out there, though: if his character had rheumatoid arthritis as a young man, bad enough that it stopped him from playing football, how was he ever able to become a surgeon in the first place?  I'm no doctor, I'm just wondering.

Later that week, Jack's back in an episode of his very good modern-day cowboy series Stoney Burke, which runs as a syndicated rerun at 10:15pm on Duluth's KDAL.  In this episode, a rodeo colleague of Stoney's is killed while riding a Brahma bull.  How does Stoney figure into it?  Let's find out:

***

And that note on The Doctors and the Nurses  Well, in a TV Guide article earlier in June, the humorist Art Buchwald wrote about how the show could have survived being on opposite ABC's new hit series The Fugitive.  His suggestion, as you can see here, was that a man would be brought to the Doctors/Nurses emergency room, "and as one of the doctors took the sheet off him, the audience would discover he had one arm.  Just before he dies on the operating table he would gasp, "I am the one-armed man the Fugitive is looking for.  Richard Kimble is innocent and I killed his wife."

As it turns out, a very funny letter to the editor from Arthur Joel Katz, former producer of The Doctors and the Nurses, suggests (likely tongue-in-cheek)  that he proposed just such an idea.  "A one-armed man comes into the hospital, confesses to Zina [Bethune, one of the nurses] that he killed David Janssen's wife, and dies.  The policy broadcast the news, but Janssen suspects a trap and doesn't believe it.  Thereafter, Zina sets out in search of David, but at every town she gets off the back of the bus just as David gets on the front.  The only trouble with this story is that I couldn't sell it to the writers.  Thus The Fugitive continues his adventures in oblivion, while we just fade into it."

The Doctors and the Nurses was originally just called The Nurses when it debuted in 1962, before doctors were brought into the mix to increase the dramatic possibilities, and the show's name was changed accordingly. Here's a look at the original version:

***

Well, how did we do this week?  I confess that when I started out, I had no intention of providing videos of almost every show I mentioned, but it just turned out this way.  Twenty years ago, or even ten, something like this - offering such a substantial amount of programming from a single TV Guide that was nearly fifty years old - would have been unthinkable.  And I suspect this only scratches the surface; how many other episodes that didn't catch my eye - like Wednesday's episode of CBS' Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, "Lucy Makes Room For Danny" - reside somewhere on YouTube or another streaming service?


As I say, this is just a wonder.  Who could possibly have imagined it was possible?  Certainly, when I picked up this issue to work on, I had no idea.  We'll have to try it again sometime, don't you think? TV  

Mitchell's Top Ten, #5: The Prisoner

This is another of those stories that can’t be properly explained without drifting back to my misbegotten youth. It began late one summer when I was in high school in the World’s Worst Town™. For the past few weeks I’d noticed a listing on Channel 8, the PBS station*, for a late Sunday night program called The Prisoner. Since it kept appearing, it had to be a series; and it had these bizarre descriptions in which nobody had a name, only a number. It was summer; there was no reason to get up early on Monday morning; thus emboldened, I decided to stay up late one Sunday night and see what this strange show was all about.

*Yes, even though we only had one commercial station (KCMT, Channel 7, about which I’ve written frequently), we did have a PBS affiliate, which was based in Appleton. It’s thanks to them that I first started watching Sesame Street, even though I was probably out of their demographic; that’s how bad the programming on Channel 7 was.

And when that episode was over, all I could think of was what the hell was that?

Things haven’t been quite the same since.

I don’t know where, in the 17-episode run of The Prisoner, I came in; it was in the second half, for sure, because the final episode ran on the Sunday prior to the first Monday after school resumed, so I probably only saw the final five episodes or so. I remember this because that final episode (which I was determined to see, despite having to get up early the next day) was so bizarre, so utterly unlike anything I’d ever seen before, that it agitated me to the point that I couldn’t go to sleep for a couple of hours afterward.

But it wasn’t only me; The Prisoner wasn’t quite like anything that had ever been on television before. It was another British import which had originally appeared in this country as the summer replacement for Jackie Gleason, and two more different programs couldn’t be imagined. The Prisoner changed the way I looked at a lot of things. I suppose it did that to a lot of impressionable youth. It captured the sense of the rebel against the system, which is what all of us were when we were in school, especially if the school’s system was repressive, inane, or both.*

*My high school certainly qualified on that account.

The Prisoner has a timelessness about it, though, that means you don’t have to be a young rebel to watch or appreciate it, and no matter how many times you see it you’re always picking up something new.

However, in order to truly appreciate The Prisoner, I think you have to go back even further in TV history, back to a modest half-hour espionage series called Danger Man.

Number 6 (Patrick McGoohan) with the
best Number 2, Leo McKern

Danger Man starred Patrick McGoohan as John Drake, a NATO agent who globetrotted on various assignments designed to preserve world peace. Although Drake was a tough cookie, he eschewed conventional forms of force, preferring to defeat his enemies not with guns, but though cleverness—and a good pair of fists, when necessary. Danger Man was a good, if not great, series, and when it reappeared in 1964 after a two-year break, it had expanded to an hour, and Drake was now a British secret agent.*

*In the United States the show was aired under the title Secret Agent, using Johnny Rivers’ hit single “Secret Agent Man” as its theme.

This new incarnation of Danger Man ran an additional three seasons, and ended only when McGoohan announced his plans to start a new series which he would produce, write, and star in, called The Prisoner.

One of the favorite occupations of Prisoner fans is to debate whether or not Number 6, McGoohan’s hero in The Prisoner, is the same character as John Drake. They are, after all, played by the same actor, and Number 6 is introduced to us as a secret agent who has resigned from the service. McGoohan always denied that the two were the same, possibly because he didn’t own the rights to "John Drake," and therefore couldn’t safely use the character in his new series.

I prefer to think that the two are one and the same (although I won’t go to the mat over it), because it makes so much sense to watch the three series one after the other: the two versions of Danger Man followed by The Prisoner. Drake and Number 6 do in fact share a lot of characteristics, including an unshakable integrity and a quirky cynicism, both of which can at times work to undercut his devotion to his job. Obviously you can watch and enjoy The Prisoner without the Danger Man prologue, but I think you find yourself with a much deeper appreciation of Number 6's character if you accept the earlier series as backstory.

The other controversy surrounding The Prisoner deals, of course, with the ending. The first time I saw it I was dumbfounded. I mean, I got what he was trying to say (SPOILER ALERT: Number 6 is Number 1), but I just couldn’t see how that could be. I was too literal-minded to fully understand the concept of allegory, and I’d never encountered that kind of hallucinatory abstractness. It was by far the most sophisticated level of storytelling I’d ever seen before, and it deeply influenced my artistic outlook.

If The Prisoner

McGoohan strikes one of several Messianic-type
poses during the series

changed the way I thought about writing, it also changed the way I thought about other things. I’d always bristled somewhat when it came to authority, but for the most part it had been a latent feeling. The Prisoner, with its celebration of the dignity and value of the human individual (“I am not a number! I am a human being!”) made a profound impact on me, and brought this attitude closer to the surface (not, always, to my advantage), eventually influencing everything from my attitude toward Corporate America to my feelings on the sanctity of life. I don’t want to overstate this, because there are a lot of things that have impacted me over the years, but there’s no question that The Prisoner deeply influenced my methodology of thinking: it taught me to look at things differently, to question authority, to look beyond easy answers, to question whether or not things could always be tied up neatly. Its emphasis on the individual nicely complimented my political ideology and its strong moral foundation would be compatible with my eventual conversion to Catholicism. (McGoohan himself was said to be a devout Catholic.)  This doesn't even begin to address the "Number-6-as-Savior" allegories that pop up during the run of the series. When you add that to its influence on my creative process, you can see how important it’s been to me.*

*I briefly considered ranking it #6, but my great respect for it prevented me from making a joke at its expense.

Perhaps three years ago I watched The Prisoner all the way through for the first time in several years, as a way of topping off my then-recent purchase of the Danger Man box set. I was surprised, and I suppose I shouldn’t have been, to find that the series was as fresh as ever. I’d forgotten the outcomes of some of the stories; others, while I remembered them well, caused delight in their twists and turns. It was a thoroughly satisfying experience.

It’s true that The Prisoner isn’t for everyone; its lack of a clear-cut ending, combined with its ambiguous and challenging themes, mean you really have to be in the mood for it, and you have to commit to staying with it for the long haul. And if it does win you over, you’re invariably going to wind up comparing other shows to it, often unfavorably. But on the upside, watching The Prisoner can make you not only cynical, but paranoid, and those are two qualities that can come in pretty handy nowadays. TV  

This week in TV Guide: May 25, 1968

As you're reading today's piece, I'm likely in our new home, waiting for our furniture to catch up with us. Fortunately, thanks to the miracles of technology, I've written this post weeks in advance!  Let's hope that the movie wasn't as big a fiasco as the story that follows.

***

In the long and occasionally glorious history of television, there have been many fiascos. Some of them, such as Turn-On and You're In the Picture, each of which ran for only one episode, have become synonymous with failure.  The program which we are about to discuss, which TV Guide calls "The worst disaster of the TV season," is not one of them.  In fact, it's likely you've never even heard of it.  That doesn't make Edith Efron's autopsy of a story any less fascinating, though - after all, most train wrecks are.

The program, a television play entitled Flesh and Blood, aired on NBC on January 26, 1968.  There were high hopes for the program, "a powerful and  compassionate drama of a contemporary American family": written by award-winning Broadway playwright William Hanley, directed by Oscar-nominee Arthur Penn, and starring Oscar-winner Edmond O'Brien and Emmy winners E.G. Marshall, Kim Stanley and Suzanne Pleshette, along with a very young Robert Duvall.  NBC had paid Hanley $112,500 for the script - the largest amount ever for a television script - and touted the coming special for the better part of a year.

In case the article's title didn't give it away, the show did not go over well.  I love the quotes the feature - "a compression of enough emotional depression and disaster to sustain a soap-opera series through 1970" (New York Times), "a grim, depressing piece" (Boston Record American), "a catalog of calamities" (Philadelphia Inquirer), "an unrelieved chronicle of human misery" (Denver Post), "a numbing two-hour tirckle of unsjpeakable secrets" (Time) - well, you get the idea.

So, Efron asks - what went wrong?  A number of things, as it turns out.  NBC wanted a prestige program, and thought they could get it by outbidding Broadway itself - except, as Hanley himself points out, the show never was headed to the Great White Way.  With its depressing subject matter, Hanley says, "[i]t wouldn't have lasted five minutes on Broadway."  The network executives saw Hanley as an award-winning playwright, but his awards had been for off-Broadway work, and he'd never had a box-office hit.  The cast, many of whom were going through personal problems of their own, never really learned the script, and often ad-libbed their lines.  Most important, perhaps, was the grim story itself.  Hanley, refreshingly candid about the whole thing, says that "I do have a very dark vision of life" that is not for everyone.

The whole thing's a prime example of how network executives, through ignorance, hubris, arrogance, stupidity - for starters - can foul things up.  One executive tells Efron, "Some people thought we shouldn't put it on.  But we thought we could get away with it.  What the hell, we'd paid for it, we'd publicized it.  And any special will get you some praise."  And they did get some - at least the critic Rex Reed liked it.  Soon after, NBC would announce a policy change regarding their dramatic programming, signing an agreement with Prudential Life Insurance to produce "five original 'upbeat' dramas" in the coming season - dramas that will be "exciting, hopeful and affirmative."

And here is where we come to the moral of the story.  Clearly we have a disaster here, and although there are many reasons why, pretty much everyone would agree that William Hanley wrote a flop.  Conventional wisdom might suggest that this would signal the end of Hanley's career, at least when it comes to television.

But you'd be wrong.

William Hanley went on to write over two dozen TV scripts, winning two Emmys and being nominated for three others.  He wrote the landmark TV movie Something About Amelia with Ted Danson, as well as adaptations of Tommy Thompson's bestseller Celebrity and Shana Alexander's bestseller Nutcracker: Money, Madness and Murder, and The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank.  When he died last June at age 80, his New York Times obituary describes him as an "uncommonly gifted writer" who "received critical acclaim as a Broadway and Off Broadway playwright in the 1960s and who later won Emmys for television scripts."  Of Flesh and Blood, the newspaper that had described it as " emotional depression and disaster" merely mentioned that it had received "mixed reviews."

So let that be a lesson to you: failure does not have to be permanent.  Time can heel all wounds, and people have short memories.  Flesh and Blood did not ruin William Hanley's career; it merely disappeared into the ether.  He didn't give up, and neither should we.

***

There are some great things teased on the cover of this issue (if you can get past the picture of Diana Hyland - more on that later).  We're given a preview of "Patrick McGoohan's puzzling, intriguing new summer series," and unlike so many promises, this one actually lives up to the billing.  The series in question is The Prisoner, McGoohan's legendary cult-fav that's part espionage, part sci-fi, part mystery, and completely compelling.

"It would be a grave error to pretend that this is anything other than a piece of entertainment of a certain type," McGoohan tells interviewer Joan Barthel, but at the same time it's clear McGoohan has something he wants to say about modern society.  "I've always been obsessed with the idea of prisons in a liberal democratic society," he says of the series, in which a former intelligence agent is kept captive by an unknown authority in an unknown place where people are known not by name but by number.*  "I believe in democracy, but the inherent danger is that with an excess of freedom in all directions we will eventually destroy ourselves."

*Many afficianatos of The Prisoner (including yours truly) believe that McGoohan's character, Number 6, is in actuality John Drake, the secret agent of McGoohan's previous series, Danger Man (the hour-long version of which was known in this country as Secret Agent). McGoohan always denied this, quite possibly because, since he didn't create Danger Man, he didn't own the name "John Drake" and would have had to share credit for it.

Speaking of America's obsession with opinion polls, McGoohan says that "[t]he reason we're so concerned with these polls is that we're so desperately concerned with saying, 'We're free!'  And I want to know, how free are we?  I think we're being imprisoned and engulfed by a scientific and materialistic world.  We're at the mercy of gadgetry and gimmicks; I'm making my living out of a piece of gadgetry, which is a television set, and anyone who says there aren't any pressures in it has never watched a commercial."

The Prisoner was one of the most puzzling, most controversial television programs ever shown.  Its ambiguity and its failure to provide a definitive end to the series outraged many, enthralled others, and confused most everyone.  And McGoohan wouldn't have had it any other way.  "I just hope there are a couple of thoughts in it somewhere that relate to the things that are going on around us, to our situation at the moment.  It will be interesting to see what viewers thing the symbols are.  I will say this: There are, within it, answers to every single question that can be posed, but one can't expect an answer on a plate, saying, 'Here you are; you don't have to think; it's all yours; don't use your brain.'"

***

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: Mike Douglas; Nancy Sinatra; Spanky and Our Gang; comedians Scozy [sic] Mitchell, Bobby Ransen, and Hendra and Ullett; the acrobatic Trio Rennos; the roller-skating Bredos; and the Muppets Puppets.

Hollywood Palace: Co-hosts Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme (Mrs. Lawrence) introduce comics Tim Conway and Corbett Monica, dancers Szony and Claire, and the Mascotts, German head-balancing act.

Perhaps these lineups are indicative of the beginning of the end of variety shows, for neither is very strong.  The Palace, airing on Thursday night for a spell instead of its traditional Saturday night timeslot, is a rerun; Sullivan's show just sounds like a rerun, because we've seen it all before.  One point for Ed due to the Muppets, and Mike Douglas is always pleasant, but Steve and Edie, along with the very funny Tim Conway, are enough to carry the day.  The verdict: The Palace, somewhat indifferently.

Better to go with Dean Martin, airing opposite the Palace.  Deano's guests are singer Eddy Arnold, Phil Silvers, Janet Leigh, the Mills Brothers, and comedian Jeremy Veron.  I think that one would be hard to beat.

***

In 1968, Memorial Day was still celebrated on May 30; the holiday wasn't moved to its current fourth-Monday-in-May status until 1971. Then, as now, Memorial Day meant one thing for many people: the Indianapolis 500.

Besides the date, there were other things different about 1968. The race wasn't televised live, but instead was presented in highlight form on Wide World of Sports a couple of weeks later. No, if you wanted to follow the race, there were only two ways to do it: either on the radio, or via closed-circuit in a movie theater. And if you did, you'd have seen and heard how Joe Leonard, in one of Andy Granatelli's legendary turbine cars, leads the race only to have his car fail with 10 laps to go, leading to the first of Bobby Unser's three 500 victories.

In lieu of live race coverage, Channel 11 has something else in store: the Indianapolis 500 Festival Parade, taped Tuesday evening, with Garry Moore alongside Sid Collins, the famed radio "Voice of the 500." Unlike so many things, the 500 Festival Parade is still around, and still on TV - it will be on NBC Sports Network the day before this year's race.

***

Well, ABC is at it again.  How many times have I written that ABC's talking about moving their evening news broadcast to prime time?   Several times, at least.  They even did it once, though that didn't last long.  This latest idea is to move the broadcast to 9:30pm CT, and to start their prime-time programming at 6:00pm rather than the then-starting time of 6:30.  It "could be fully competitive with the morning paper," says Bill Sheehan, second-in-command at ABC News.  It never happens, though.  ABC's news remains in the traditional time slot, against Walter Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley.  It won't be until ABC Sports head honcho Roone Arledge takes over the news department and introduces World News Tonight in 1978 that the network finally catches up - and passes - the rest.

***

This week's cover girl, as we mentioned earlier, is Diana Hyland, currently appearing as "the nymphomaniacal drunk minister's wife" in ABC's prime-time soap Peyton Place, and author Burt Prelutsky is in love with her.  She's got it all - a dazzling smile, lovely blue eyes, and legs that won't quit.  She's interesting, too - she believes in flying saucers, said good evening to Nikita Khrushchev at the UN and was winked at by Fidel Castro, and has remained 27 for the last five years*, the previous time when she was interviewed by TV Guide.  "I lied then," she tells Prelutsky.

*According to the always-reliable Wikipedia, Hyland was born in 1936, which means she was in fact 27 - in 1963.  She told the truth then; she's lying now.

She's a dedicated actress, and a successful one - "everything I've ever tried I've done well," she says.  Her Peyton Place director, Walter Doniger, calls her "an elegant, brigt, witty dame" who's also svelte, sophisticated, and a nonconformist.  In fact, she only has two vices - she owns 200 pairs of shoes, and she smokes three packs of cigarettes a day. 

I don't know if that last vice is significant or not.  Flash forward to 1977: she's in a happy relationship with John Travolta, she's signed to play Dick Van Patten's wife in Eight Is Enough - and she's diagnosed with breast cancer.  She dies in March of that year, aged 41. 

***

The Teletype tells us that Elvis Presley will be highlighting a special for NBC.  I suspect they're talking about this.  The rest, as they say, is history.

***

Finally, is it possible that the most interesting item in this week's issue is not an article, but an advertisement?

Hmm.  Could be. TV