This week in TV Guide: April 2, 1954

This week we get a brief glimpse into how the TV Guide empire was assembled, way back when. We're in Philadelphia, and just before the programming section, there's a preface called "Happy Birthday To Us!"

One year ago this week, TV Digest, Philladelphia's leading television magazine, was officially adopted by Triangle Publications and became the Philadelphia edition of TV GUIDE, a national television publication.

We've suffered "growing pains" . . . we've changed our size, undergone a face-lifting, enhanced our appearance with color . . . we've played "put and take" with ideas, always guided by the preferences of our readers.

We've grown! We've added many branches to our family tree until today we boast 19 sister books throughout the nation.

In this first year of our TV GUIDE life we've learned, time and time again, one must crawl before endeavoring to walk. But today we are confidently standing on a steady foundation and preparing not only to walk but to take giant steps in the months to come.

So, as we light the single candle on our Birthday No. 1, we immodestly point to our list of accomplishments in the past 12 months and lustily shout, "Happy Birthday to Us!".

The celebration continues on the
back cover.

The prose is so purple it would make the Minnesota Vikings proud. In there, though, is an unmistakable sense of pride in what's been accomplished over that last year. Twenty issues nationwide! This is how TV Guide came together, through a combination of new issues being created and current publications being acquired, until by the mid-90s there were nearly 150 regional issues.

After one year, you can see the magazine still evolving into its familiar format. Channel numbers, for instance, are shown in circles and squares, and the television week begins on Friday rather than Saturday. For every show with a familiar name (I Love Lucy, Dragnet, Studio One, The Jack Benny Show, Arthur Godfrey Time), you'll see twice as many (Meet. Mr. McNutley, with Ray Milland; James Daly in Foreign Intrigue; Rocky King, the DuMont staple, with Roscoe Karns) known only to God and classic TV buffs. There's still the New York and Hollywood Teletypes, recipes to enjoy while you're watching your favorites, and plenty of ads, local and national. Let's see what's up.

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On March 9, Edward R. Murrow's See It Now presented what is often considered one of the most important programs in television history; the episode in which Murrow takes on Senator Joseph McCarthy. The McCarthy era was in its fifth year as Murrow's show aired; it was, for the most part, McCarthy in his own words, punctuated by Murrow's righteous indignation. A couple of days later, McCarthy countered with an accusation that Murrow, before the war, had been involved with exchange student programs that had helped spread the Soviet message on an international level.

Following the broadcast, CBS offered McCarthy equal time to respond, and that's what we see Tuesday (10:30 p.m., CBS). Tonight's See It Now listing includes both McCarthy's telegram accepting the network's equal-time offer, and Murrow's response to it. "If I am correct in my position that you have consciously served the Communist cause," McCarthy says, alluding to his charge against Murrow, "it is very important for your listeners to have the clear-cut, documented facts so that they can decide whether or not you are truthful, as you attempt to make out, or are deliberately misrepresenting the facts." Murrow replied, "Regarding your statement that I have consciously served the Communist cause, I deny it utterly."

Here are clips from both Murrow's original show and McCarthy's response, as well as a subsequent program with Murrow's final word on the subject.




It's difficult to say just how much Murrow's broadcast had to do with McCarthy's downfall; some suggest that McCarthy's star had already started to dim, or that lawyer Joseph Welch, who famously asked the senator during the Army-McCarthy hearings if he had “no sense of decency,” were more important in McCarthy’s downfall. Regardless, two things are certain: first, that by all accounts Murrow came out ahead in the confrontation between the two; and second, that it was a milestone moment in the history of the young medium. If you were around when this TV Guide came out, you could see it all.

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You remember how a couple of weeks ago I mentioned how popular boxing used to be on television? Well, here's the proof:

• Boxing (Friday, 10:00 p.m., NBC) The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports
• Boxing (Saturday, 9:00 p.m., ABC) The Saturday Night Fights
• Boxing (Monday, 10:00 p.m., DuMont) General Tire Bouts
• Boxing (Wednesday, 10:00 p.m., CBS) Pabst Blue Ribbon Bouts

Of the four nights of boxing, the one fight that stands out is Friday's bout for the world middleweight title, pitting middleweight champ Bobo Olson against welterweight title holder Kid Gavilan, from Chicago, Illinois. Writing for TV Guide, NBC's announcer Jimmy Powers calls this "One of the biggest matches of all time," and for once this isn't hype. It's only the fifth time the welterweight champ has moved up in weight to take on the middleweight title holder, and you have to remember this was a time when boxing had only eight weight classes, and only one champion in each of them, so you're seeing 25% of the world's champs tonight. In a tough, brilliant fight, Olson wins a majority decision to retain the middleweight title.

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One more thing about this issue that makes it challenging to find out what the TV week is all about: the program descriptions don't always give much of a description of what you can actually expect to see on the show. For instance, check out this one from Tuesday night's Red Skelton Show: "Comic antics and characterizations made famous by the popular comedian." Yeah, that helps a lot. Seriously, I suspect that with a show like Skelton's, which is live, the list of guests might still have been up in the air as the issue went to press, so we'll give this a pass. Besides, there are plenty of highlights we can still look at.

On Friday, Dave Garroway takes a break from Today to look back on the "good old days" in Chicago, where he learned his trade. (8:00 p.m. ET, NBC) Among the guests are other Windy City alums: Burr Tillstrom with Kukla and Ollie; actor and radio announcer Cliff Norton, the announcer on Dave's radio program (you might recall him as Boss on It's About Time); dancers Ken Spaulding and Diane Sinclair; and singers Jill Corey and Jack Haskell. The history of Chicago television, and its contributions to television history overall, is a fascinating one.

NBC continues on Saturday with a pair of shows that any classic TV fan will recognize: Your Show of Shows (9:00 p.m.), the 90-minute extravaganza with Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris, which a lot of people will consider one of the funniest shows ever done; and Your Hit Parade (10:30 p.m.), sponsored by Lucky Strike, counting down "the top tunes all over America, as determined by your hit parade survey." This week features yet another appearance from Kukla, Ollie and Tillstrom, along with regulars Dorothy Collins, Gisele MacKenzie, Snooky Lanson, Russell Ames, and conductor Raymond Scott.

Sunday sees Toast of the Town (8:00 p.m., CBS), which next year will change its name to The Ed Sullivan Show. An interesting theme for the show, one I wager you wouldn't see today, is that the show is celebrating its fifth year with its current sponsor; the listing doesn't actually tell you who that sponsor is, but since it's just you and me, I'll whisper in your ear the name "the Lincoln-Mercury Division of the Ford Motor Company." But I digress; the gimmick is that all of tonight's guests made their first television appearances on that initial Lincoln-Mercury-sponsored show, including Sophie Tucker, Ben Hogan, Eartha Kitt, Billy De Wolfe, Teresa Brewer, and Metropolitan Opera stars Roberta Peters, Cesare Valletti, Cesare Siepi and Fernando Corena. Opposite that on NBC is The Colgate Comedy Hour, hosted this week by Eddie Cantor, with singer Connie Rusmean sell and a "surprise mystery guest." And at 10:00 p.m., it's Loretta Young and her swirling dresses, in her eponymous anthology series, tonight co-starring John Hoyt and Aunt Bee herself, Frances Bavier.

Monday is I Love Lucy night (9:00 p.m., CBS); tonight Lucy "creates havoc in the Ricardo household" (since when is that new?) when she decides to write a novel. Lucy's far from the only familiar name tonight; Burns and Allen is on CBS at 8:00 p.m., 8:30 sees the long-running Voice of Firestone (ABC; it's listed only as "Concert," but I know what it is), followed at 9:00 p.m. by one of Jack Benny's old foils, The Dennis Day Show, with Charley Weaver (Cliff Arquette).* And at 10:00 p.m., t's it's the CBS anthology series Studio One with the drama "Stirmugs," a play that doesn't particularly mean anything except that one of the stars is the young Joanne Woodward.

*Something else you wouldn't see in later years: the show's description concludes with "Sponsored by RCA Victor." Lincoln-Mercury must not have greased the palm of someone at TV Guide.

And if you want even more stars? You'll have them on Tuesday, with Uncle Miltie (8:00 p.m., NBC); it's not Texaco Star Theater anymore, but The Buick-Berle Show. By either name, though, it has to be beat Jackpot Bowling. His guests this week are the great British actors Judith Anderson and Cyril Ritchard (and I can guarantee you wouldn't see them on Jackpot Bowling). Bishop Fulton J. Sheen's Life is Worth Living (8:00 p.m., DuMont) discusses "Three Times in the Nation's History," a warning about the challenges facing America, "Sponsored by The Admiral Corporation." (Yes, they bought ad space in the issue.) Make Room for Daddy, starring Danny Thomas, airs at 8:30 p.m. on ABC; meanwhile, on CBS, it's the aforementioned Red Skelton (I'm afraid that's about all I can tell you about it), followed at 9:00 p.m. by Roddy McDowell and Patricia Breslin* starring in another of the era's great anthologies, Armstrong Circle Theater. 

*Married, until her death, to Art Modell, owner of the Baltimore Ravens and the most hated man in Cleveland.

It's another of Arthur Godfrey's programs on Wednesday; Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts airs on Monday, and tonight it's Arthur Godfrey and His Friends (Wednesday, 8:00 p.m., CBS), with the McGuire Sisters numbering among the guests. At 9:00 p.m. it's Kraft Theatre (NBC) with Carlos Montalban, brother of Ricardo; Kraft Theatre runs from 1947 to 1958, and it leaves the air as the longest-running anthology series in history to that time. The panel show I've Got a Secret is on at 9:30 p.m. (CBS) with special guest Billie Burke trying to stump the panel, and at 10:00 p.m. it's This Is Your Life (NBC); you won't read who the honoree is in TV Guide because the show's live, but it's former Olympian and WWII hero Louis Zamperini, the subject of Laura Hillenbrand's 2010 book (and subsequent Coen Brothers movie) Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption.

Let's start Thursday with a look at some weekday afternoon programming that has nothing to do with soap. Since Philadelphia is the home of American Bandstand, we'll start over at WFIL, where at 3:00 p.m. Bandstand (it doesn't become American until the show is picked up by ABC in 1957), hosted by Bob Horn. In 1956 Horn loses his job after a drunk-driving bust;* he's replaced by Dick Clark, who hosts American Bandstand until 1989. If you're not a teen, you might opt for The Kate Smith Hour, also at 3:00, on NBC. Later in the afternoon, NBC has a double-bill of kids' shows, with The Pinky Lee Show at 5:00, followed by Howdy Doody (before it moved to Saturday monings) at 5:30. You've also got a pair of Westerns with strong kid appeal: Hopalong Cassidy at 5:00 (WFIL) and Gene Autry at 5:30 (WCAU). The prime time highlight is our old favorite favorite Dragnet (9:00 p.m., NBC); this week, Friday and Smith investigate a dead body in a hotel. It doesn't sound good. More on them next week.

*The Philadelphia Inquirer was doing a series on drunken driving at the time, and the arrest embarrassed the owner of both the Inquirer and WFIL: Walter Annenberg, also the publisher of TV Guide. Amazing how incestuous this all is, isn't it? 

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Finally, here’s something that—I suppose—we should be proud of, at least as a TV milestone: the first color commercial. It’s for Pall Mall cigarettes (see photo on left), and the plan is to show it on the first Pall Mall-sponsored show to be broadcast in color. (It was also filmed in black-and-white so it could be used right away.) Filming this milestone commercial was no easy task; it took 15 hours to film the 60-second ad, plus weeks of set construction, costume design, rehearsal, and so forth. The mastermind of the commercial is Peter Elgar, who made his trade through educational and religious films in Europe; he’d never done a commercial until 1951. “It is like making any other motion picture,” he says, “except that the finished film is 60 seconds long.”

Which gets me to thinking: you can find collections of classic commercials all over YouTube (not to mention on DVD); I enjoy them myself. Their appeal, you have to think, is based on nostalgia: either for the product itself ("I played with that when I was a kid!") or for the actors who wound up being big stars. You have to remember, though, that with few exceptions, the people who saw those commercials at the time found them every bit as annoying as we find ours today. TV Guides of the era are filled with complaints about how much louder the commercials are than the programs they constantly interrupt. And don't forget that commercials back then were a lot longer; many of them, as we read, were one minute long, and some of them were even longer. The commercials that were integrated into the shows themselves, or were done by the stars themselves, could be more interesting, but that didn't hide the irritation they caused. And this from a time when there were fewer commercials interrupting our favorite shows than today (unless you're on premium cable).

And so I wonder, as Peter Elgar compares his commercials to 60-second movies, I wonder if he had any idea how much people would be cursing him and his progeny, from now to eternity? TV  

Around the dial

That picture up there reminds me of an old saying, or at least it was meant to be old; I think I first heard it on the miniseries Captains and the Kings. It goes, "Never tell people you don't think, or people will think you don't." Some days, we're headed in the direction of not thinking for ourselves at all. Are we there yet? Not sure.

It must be the week for old sayings; this week's Love That Bob! episode at The Horn Section is called "The Models Revolt," and that brings to mind a Wizard of Id strip from many years back, where Rodney the knight tells the King, "The peasants are revolting," to which the King replies, "You can say that again." This episode isn't revolting, though; once again it involves Our Hero and girls, and it's the first directorial appearance in the show of star Bob Cummings. It's a bit rough, but he'll get better at it rapidly.

You'll recall that The Twilight Zone Vortex is offering us monthly stories from the TZ comic book to help us get through the quarantine, and this month Jordan gives us a carnival and kewpie dolls, and you know that's not a good combination when you're in the Twilight Zone. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

At Garroway at Large, Jodie explains her recent silence on the blog front (although her Facebook posts continue to be hilarious), and demonstrates amply that it's no fun being a teacher during an epidemic. No fear, though; everyone's healthy, and as the Great Communicator himself might say, it's not an end, just a pause.

Rick reviews what looks like a really interesting book, Cinema '62, at Classic Film & TV Café. In it, authors Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan make the case that 1962 was the greatest film year ever; arguable, but certainly plausible. You know, someone should do a similar book about television. What year would you pick?

At A Shroud of Thoughts, Terence shares the details of the TCM Classic Film Festival: Special Home Edition, necessitated by you-know-what. Some very interesting films on tap during the April 16-19 festival; it's an excellent way to spend some more time with your TV.

Finally, don't forget to join Dan and me for another look at Bourbon Street Beat, along with more fun, at the latest Eventually Supertrain podcast!

As was the case last week, we're still doing well here; drop us a comment and let us know if things are well with you, too. TV  

TV Jibe: April Fool!

There's always been a next frontier when it comes to television: from smaller pictures to large, black-and-white to color, analog to HD, 2-D to 3-D. All interesting, to be sure, but what if you could not only see, but smell what you saw on TV? And imagine where that could lead.

That's the idea the BBC had on April 1, 1965—click here to read about one of the great April Fools' hoaxes of all time. And laugh, because we could use it. TV  

What's on TV? Tuesday, March 31, 1970

In this week's "As We See It," Merrill Panitt takes a moment to look at the dilemma of counterprogramming in children's programming. When Sesame Street took to the airwaves, the producers specifically asked educational stations not to program the show against CBS's Captain Kangaroo; there were so few good options for children to watch, they didn't want to automatically eliminate one of them by having them both on at the same time. "Unfortunately," Panitt notes, "a few stations have moved Captain Kangaroo in opposite Sesame Street. Sometimes there are good reasons for this, but we can't think of any reason more important than giving youngsters a chance to see both programs." There's no problem in Philadelphia, as we can see: WCAU dutifully carries the Captain at 8:00 a.m., while WHYY accommodates by showing Sesame Street at 9:00 a.m. (WLVT, the second NET affiliate in the area, doesn't visit the Street until 4:00 p.m.) And with that example of brotherly love between stations, let's look at the rest of what Philly viewers have in store.

This week in TV Guide: March 28, 1970

Is there a laugh to be found on the set of Laugh-In? Or is Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In? That’s Bill Davidson’s mission this week, as he goes behind the scenes of NBC’s groundbreaking variety show to find out if all that glitters is truly gold, or at least funny.

Rumors abound*, as they always do in Hollywood, that tension seethes just under the surface: rancor between stars, bitterness over stars leaving for film careers, tension between the writers and performers, between Rowan and Martin, and between Rowan-Martin and the producers, George Schlatter and Ed Friendly.

*Just like horses gallop, sheep graze, and geese fly south for the winter. It is, apparently, what rumors do.

According to Davidson, based on his three weeks of observation on set, along with that from an undercover reporter (!), most of the rumors are exaggerated. There is tension, to be sure, but not more than one is accustomed to seeing on the set of a busy television program. Schlatter dismisses stories of bitterness on the part of departed cast members, with the exception of Judy Carne, who complained about her salary. (“Judy’s enormous talent does not extend to her knowledge of the economics of television.”) He also doesn’t worry that the defections will weaken the show’s appeal; “On this show, if we don’t bring in fresh new people, we die. We lose a Goldie Hawn and we find a Lily Tomlin; we lose an Arte Johnson and we find a Johnny Brown.”

The one area in which the rumors do seem to pan out is the tension between the co-hosts and producers. Says Schlatter, “The one thing Dan and Dick have in common is hatred of me.” Some of it is relatively small; for example, the hosts wish people would refer to the show by its official title, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, rather than the commonly used Laugh-In. The larger point of dispute, however, concerns credit for the show’s concept. Dan Rowan claims it originates with a 1963 pilot the duo did for ABC; Schlatter says that in 1967 he and Digby Wolfe came to Friendly, who at the time was VP of programming for NBC, with a “kooky idea” for an alternative comedy show without hosts. When NBC insisted that the show at least have hosts, Schlatter says, Friendly brought in Rowan and Martin, and—well, you know the rest. (Friendly was so pleased with his matchmaking that he quit the network to become Schlatter’s partner,)

Davidson suggests that the evidence, so to speak, tends to favor Schlatter’s version of the story; their 1963 pilot (as well as their 1965 NBC summer replacement show) was relatively conventional, whereas Schlatter had long been attracted to such avant-garde fare as Ernie Kovacs, and was responsible for hiring most of the talent. Rowan and Martin added their non sequitur bits from their nightclub acts, and: magic! Says Rowan, “The guts of this show came from our 17 years of hard work in the toilets of America. We finally got a chance to stand up and say, ‘Here’s what we do,’ and suddenly all the announcements are about Schlatter hiring so-and-so and NBC doing so-and-so, Why can’t it be The Rowan and Martin Show, just like it’s The Carol Burnett Show and The Bill Cosby Show?” Counters Schlatter, speaking of cast members such as Hawn, Johnson and Tomlin, “Who would even know them or want them if they weren’t with us?” In fact, suggests Davidson, neither Rowan-Martin nor Schlatter-Friendly have had that much success without the other, suggesting that it’s all mostly a team effort.

All well and good. What I find interesting, looking back at it all from the perspective of 50 years, is that for all the discussion of how Laugh-In represents “a TV landmark,” the show today appears rather tame. While it do much to make popular “the one-line gags, the quick cuts, the fantastic pacing,” the show lacks the timelessness of an Ernie Kovacs, or even Carol Burnett. Despite the many guest cameos (including Richard Nixon), it lacks the clips of musical and comedy acts that has make The Ed Sullivan Show such a treasure trove of cultural history. The humor, which was “iconoclastic and bawdy” back then, is tame compared to other shows today. Even the pacing and blackouts for which the show was so famous were done, and done better, by Monty Python’s Flying Circus, another show which has aged much better. In fact, one critic commented when the complete Laugh-In was finally released on DVD a couple of years ago, it’s remarkable how mild and conventional the show really is. Watching it today, one is tempted to say—as James Lileks said once about Christmas cartoons of the 1960s—that nostalgia is the prime appeal of the show. Without that, how many people would actually care?

Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In spawned many performers and writers who went on to greater things, and shaped the future of television in a unique way. It was, for a time, the number-one show on television. However, it was also a show of its time, a show that looms large in the cultural history of the 1960s and ‘70s, but shrinks outside that bubble. Perhaps that was always its destiny, to be remembered more for what it did than what it was.

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Throughout the 60s and early 70s, TV Guide's weekly reviews were written by the witty and acerbic Cleveland Amory. Whenever we get the chance, we'll look at Cleve's latest take on the series of the era. 

Cleveland Amory already harbors a grudge toward Paris 7000, the ABC series starring George Hamilton as a troubleshooter based in the American embassy in Paris. It has to do with one of his personal favorites, Barbara Anderson, one of the stars of Ironside, “a girl with whom we’ve been going steady every Thursday night since any of you can remember.” Seems she was guesting on an early episode of Paris 7000, “just visiting a show, for heaven’s sake, the first time we’ve ever seen her on another show, and before we get a good look at her, she’s dead.” Thrown out a window, apparently. “She was a stewardess, you see, in Paris for the first time, and she’d fallen in love with him. Honestly, in love with George Hamilton. No wonder this show is going off the air. There’s no reality We ask you, in real life would a girl like Barbara Anderson fall in love with George Hamilton? It’s like asking would you rather read just any critic, or read us? The answer is obvious. Thank you.” Well, when you start off on the wrong foot like that, there’s nowhere to go but down.

This is one of those shows, says Cleve, that challenges you to justify its existence—as far as he can tell, its sole purpose is “to find something for George to do. He went down, you’ll recall, on the Titanic—or rather The Survivors—and ABC apparently had to keep on paying him. So they decided to shoot this show around him. Our feeling is they should have done the reverse.” The premise is that Hamilton is there to help Americans who find themselves in trouble and, if they can’t find Roger Moore or Patrick McGoohan or Richard Bradford or Steve Forrest to help them out (my interpretation), they enlist George. However, Amory notes, “With allies like George, who needs trouble spots?” There are plenty of them in Paris 7000, though; “in fact, the first show we were telling you about was all one.”

The key word here seems to be believability (Amory notes that one of the writers of that Barbara Anderson episode was named Guerdeon Trueblood, and it was directed by Jeannot Szwarc; “Why should we believe it?”), and even though you might be able to understand why Barbara Anderson would be attracted to Hamilton, there’s also the episode in which Diane Baker guest-stars as a German refugee who enlists Hamilton “to help her re-enter East German and find her long-lost brother and her accent.” By the end of the episode, Amory recounts, we’ve encountered “majors, colonels, security men, East German undergrounders and even Russians.” Some of them, he says, are unbelievably good, others unbelievably bad. But, like the show itself, they share one trait: they’re unbelievable.

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Television's real Nanny

I knew that QBVII, the 1975 ABC TV-movie, would be a waste of my time the moment Ben Gazzara, at his smarmy best (or worst), started tomcatting around while he was married to Juliet Mills. Seriously—this requires a suspension of disbelief I’m not prepared to invoke for anything that isn’t labeled Science Fiction, and even then I’m not so sure.

The winsome Miss Mills, daughter of the distinguished actor John and sister of the Disney star Hayley (and subject of many a young boy’s crush), is co-starring in ABC’s midseason replacement Nanny and the Professor as the aforementioned nanny, Phoebe Figalilly by name, whom Richard Warren Lewis describes as “a composite of the most commercial elements of Mary Poppins, the good witch Samantha, Jeannie, Dr. Dolittle and The Flying Nun.” Which raises the immediate question: why would a classically trained actress and member of a distinguished acting family, with stage credentials at Stratford-on-Avon, London’s West End, and Broadway, sign up for this—well, fluff?

Well, the money, for one thing. “Working in the theater in England you really don’t get paid anything,” she tells Lewis. As a star in plays such as She Stoops to Conquer, Mills was making less than $200 a week, not to mention falling behind her more famous family members careerwise. “It’s never much bothered me,” she says, “But I’ve been very much poorer than any of my other relations.” It was, in fact, her father, who urged her to consider it. “He thinks that to do a series in America is still the greatest way to get exposure. Millions of people see you and you can make a great deal of money.”

Thanks to the intervention of Fox’s VP of Sales, David Gerber, the rocky initial pilot (which included a kangaroo “in a very important part”) was reshot, minus the roo and with an entirely different cast except for Mills. Gerber went as far as to buy out the house at London’s Garrick Theater to free her up for the shoot. With ABC in their then-annual ratings crisis, the network bought the concept, and she got the call to be in Hollywood and ready to go in four days.

She very much misses London from the home she rents just three minutes from the studio (the end of her eight-year marriage doesn’t help); her new friend, Steve McQueen’s wife Neile, helped her pick out a puppy for company. She’s hired a nanny of her own to look after her five-year-old son Christopher—one who, like her own character, “could just muck in.” And while she admits to being totally ignorant about how American television and its ratings system works, she’s philosophical about everything. “If Nanny isn’t picked up [for the fall], I’ll be going home this spring. It won’t break my heart.”

Nanny is in a tough time slot, opposite Hee Haw on CBS, but it survives that initial half-season and makes it to the fall schedule, where it’s moved to Friday nights. In 1971 it’s moved again, to Monday nights, where it’s plagued by a lack of affiliate support and departs the airwaves at the end of December. It’s fondly remembered by people of a certain age, though, and so is Juliet Mills, who goes on to a long career in the theater and television, including almost 10 years on the NBC soap Passions, where she plays a character with magical powers as well. She even wins an Emmy for QBVII, which goes to show that there’s some magic in Juliet Mills as well, even if she wasn’t able to save it from being VI hours of my life I never got back.

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A couple of newsy-type notes before we kickoff some of the shows of the week: the Smothers Brothers are hunting for a comeback after their ignominious sacking by CBS last year; they're supposedly in "hush-hush" negotiations with ABC for a summer series, with the only stumbling blocks being "agreement by the Smotherses to be good boys, submit tapes well in advance of air time, and not give the network any CBS-type troubles." I'm shocked, shocked, that they'd be balking at that. In any event, the show does in fact become a reality, with The Smothers Summer Show debuting on Wednesdays starting in July 1970; the show's destroyed in the ratings by Hawaii Five-O and leaves the air in September.

My, he looks Senatorial, doesn't he?

Another show that's on the way: NBC's working to bring Hal Holbrook to the network in a series based on A Clear and Present Danger, the TV movie featuring Holbrook as a U.S. Senate candidate. This report also becomes fact, with The Senator premiering in the fall as one of the elements of The Bold Ones, replacing The Protectors. It's also a one-season show, but Holbrook does manage to cop a Best Dramatic Actor Emmy.

But enough of the future; what does this week bring us? Sunday is Easter, and what tipped me off to that was Saturday night’s feature on KYW, King of Kings, starring Jeffrey Hunter as the Messiah, with Robert Ryan as a much-too-old John the Baptist (he should have been about Christ’s age), Siobhan McKenna as am affecting Mary, Harry Guardino as a smug, insufferable Barabbas (not unlike many of the roles he plays, to be honest), Rip Torn as a confused Judas, and a dignified Ron Randall as the centurion who witnesses several of the events in Christ’s life, and ultimately becomes a witness to Him; it all takes place under a magnificent score by Miklos Rozas. The ad proclaims King of Kings as “the greatest Biblical epic of all times,” and at three hours, it had better be, since you’re going to start watching it at 11:20 p.m. 

Sunday features several Easter programs, including church services live from St. Peters Square (NBC, 11:00 a.m., hosted by Douglas Kiker), and Boston (CBS, 11:00 a.m.) The sporting life returns Sunday afternoon with a regular season NHL clash between the Boston Bruins and Detroit Red Wings (CBS, 1:30 p.m.), while the NBA playoffs tip-off with game three of the Eastern Division semifinals between the Baltimore Bullets and New York Knicks. Ed Sullivan and his guests Bobby Gentry, David Frye, Marty Allen, Nancy Ames, George Kirby, Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, and Gladys Knight and the Pips tour VA hospitals in Denver and San Antonio to thank Vietnam vets.

There's not a whole lot to report on Monday, but I couldn't let it go by without mentioning that our very own (well, sort of, anyway) Cleveland Amory is one of Dick Cavett's guests (11:30 p.m., ABC). Tuesday's highlights include a musical adaptation of Goldilocks (8:30 p.m., NBC) starring Bing Crosby and his family; Mary Frances gets to play Goldie, but in this version she doesn't shoot the Cheshire Cat. Speaking of which, I'm not even sure he makes an appearance in this version, set in a "swingin' place" that includes a bear family playing golf (Bing and Nathaniel,* natch), and "a militant bobcat starting a protest march." Riiiiight. Paul Winchell and Avery Schreiber supply additional voices. And over at Red Skelton's show (8:30 p.m., CBS), we've got the Original Caste singing "One Tin Soldier." Yep, the times are a' changing.

*Nathaniel was no mean golfer himself; he won the 1981 U.S. Amateur championship, a tournament won by Jack Nicklaus, Bobby Jones and Tiger Woods; it once counted as a major championship (and should still.)

As a tribute to the late Kenny Rogers, I mention this appearance by Kenny and the First Edition on The Johnny Cash Show (Wednesday, 9:00 p.m., ABC), where they perform “When I’m on My Journey,” “Ruby,” and “Ruben James.” Johnny’s other guests are Roy Orbison (who sings “Crying,” “Only the Lonely,” and “Pretty Woman”; too bad he didn’t do any hits) and humorist Shel Silverstein. That’s on against a Bill Cosby special on NBC, and I don’t have any problem deciding which one to choose.

I rather like the attitude of It Couldn’t Be Done (Thursday, 7:30 p.m., NBC), a salute to the marvels of American achievement and engineering, hosted by Lee Marvin, with music by the 5th Dimension and Steve Mills. Vintage footage and interviews cover the construction of such landmarks as Mount Rushmore, the Golden Gate and Brooklyn Bridges, Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal, and the Alaska Highway. It’s a nice reminder, especially today, of our history of what we can do when we put our minds to it. And, unfortunately, a show with a topic that's becoming all too common in 1970: David Susskind's topic is "Where Did We Fail—Parents of Junkies" (9:00 p.m., WHYY),

Friday night starts off with an NBC Science Special (7:30 p.m.) on "The Unexplained" puzzles of science, from UFOs to life on other worlds to Stonehenge. It's hosted by 2001 author Arthur C. Clarke with a script by Clifton Fadiman and narrated by Rod Serling. And it's a night of specials at CBS, starting at 7:30 with a repeat of 1965's Cinderella—the Lesley Ann Warren version, with Stuart Damon as her prince, and a cast including Walter Pidgeon, Ginger Rogers, Celeste Holm, Jo Van Fleet, Pat Carroll and Barbara Ruick as the evil stepsisters. At 9:00 p.m., Don Knotts gets a chance to show the network what he'd do with his own variety hour, with Juliet Prowse, the Establishment, Andy Williams, and special guest star Andy Griffith. And you don't think that ad over there refers to any other show on television, cough—Laugh-In—cough, do you? That's followed at 10:00 p.m. by Like Hep!, Dinah Shore's chance to show the network that she's with it just like the kids out there, with Lucille Ball, Rowan and Martin, and Diana Ross along to lend a hand. And Flip Wilson guest hosts on The Tonight Show (NBC, 11:30 p.m.), with Louis Armstrong as one of his guests.

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Finally, after all that's been going on lately, I think we're entitled to wrap things up with a laugh or two, don't you? Since April Fools' Day falls smack in the middle of this issue, the editors thought it might be fun for TV Guide to lampoon itself with an evening of "not quite the real thing" listings (written by Roger J. Youman), with some very funny results. Not all of them are home runs; a bit that points out how television is dominated by shows that are simply variations on the same theme (a sentiment with which Cleveland Amory would surely agree) works the first time, but by the third or fourth go-round (Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and Dick Cavett all have the same five guests, simply listed in a different order), you kind of want to shout, "We get it, we get it!"

Nevertheless, when the descriptions drift into the truly absurd, the parody works wonderfully, as in this family musical written by—Rod Serling?

This one is a spoof of the current naming craze in Hollywood (both movies and people):

 
I don't remember this ever happening to Dr. Welby:

How dare he!

I guess it really is all relative, isn't it? They only neglected to mention that it was written by Sterling Silliphant.

You can see the whole spread here. As I say, very funny. If they're not careful, these could wind up on Laugh-In.  TV