Around the dial

We’ll start off this week with a shameless self-promotion for the latest episode of Eventually Supertrain, in which I join Dan Budnick to discuss our favorite topic of conversation, Bourbon Street Beat, And don’t miss Dan and Amanda talking about Masquerade—plus a surprise!

Speaking of podcasts, Ed Robertson’s TV Confidential is always recommended, and in his latest episode, he welcomes actress and director Michelle Danner, and pays tribute to Robert Conrad and Kirk Douglas.

Jodie returns to Garroway at Large with video links to a 1962 science series that Dave Garroway hosted for NET after having left Today. Titled “Exploring the Universe,” it’s further proof of the relentlessly inquisitive and eclectic Garroway, and it comes to us courtesy of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, which has a growing collection of programs dating back to the early days of national educational television.

“Of Late I Think of Cliffordsville” is the episode up for review at The Twilight Zone Vortex, and as Jordan tells us, it’s another one of those nasty time-travel stories that reminds us the past is seldom the way we remember it. Oh, and did I mention that it also features the Devil? Take it from me, this is not going to turn out well.

On Wednesday I wrote of Orson Bean, who died last week; Inner Toob shares a retrospective of Bean as well (and how could I have failed to mention his memorable performance as Mr. Bevis in The Twilight Zone?), along with some personal remembrances. And while you’re at it, check out A Shroud of Thoughts for Terence’s wonderful look at Bean’s career. Bean once said that he was someone famous simply for being famous, which as Terence says, is far from the truth. It’s clear that Bean’s career touched a great many people

At Cult TV, John dips into the world of Monty Python with “The War Against Pornography,” an episode that demonstrates how even (especially?) comedy can give us a shrewd (and hilarious) insight into the times from which it comes. Now that I think about it, “especially” is probably the right word.

We all have things in life that give us great pleasure, although we’d be hard-pressed to say why. In the case of our friend David at Comfort TV, it’s the 1977 series Magic Mongo, a production of Sid and Marty Krofft. I have no memory whatsoever of this show, which I’m perfectly willing to blame on the World’s Worst Town™.

The Hitchcock Project continues at bare•bones e-zine, and this week Jack takes us to the sixth Hitchcock episode written by Sterling Silliphant, “The Canary Sedan,” with Jessica Tandy and Murray Matheson. As always, it’s fascinating to find out how the scriptwriter adapts a short story into a teleplay—what he adds and subtracts, alters or changes outright, and the effect it has on the story. TV  

Orson Bean / Robert Conrad, R.I.P.

Orson Bean used to talk about how he was one of the few entertainers who'd been blacklisted by both sides; in the Fifties, it was for being a communist ("I wasn't a communist. I was horny for a communist girl and she dragged me to a couple of meetings."), while in the 2000s it was for being a conservative ("It’s harder now to be an open conservative on a Hollywood set than it was back then to be a Communist," he once told his son-in-law, Andrew Breitbart). He might have been bitter about it, but he seemed more amused than anything.

Several years ago, someone wrote of Orson Bean that "I never could figure out who the guy was, So far as I knew, he never had done anything of note. He was on the show because he was a celebrity, and he was a celebrity because he was on the show. . . He was the compleat artificial man." Not only was this needlessly cruel, it was completely false. Bean had been a fixture in clubs and on Broadway since the Fifties; he starred on Broadway in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter with Jayne Mansfield, and was nominated for a Tony for Subways Are for Sleeping. He appeared at the famous New York club The Blue Angel on a bill with Nichols and May, Harry Belafonte, and Eartha Kitt, and he recorded a comedy album at another famous club, The Hungry I. He counted as friends everyone from Lenny Bruce to Jonathan Winters to Henry Fonda, appeared in series such as The Twilight Zone, Studio One, The Love Boat, One Life to Live, and Murder, She Wrote, and displayed his skills as a raconteur on The Tonight Show, both with Jack Paar and Johnny Carson. (He subbed as host for Carson more than 100 times.) He played the voice of Bilbo Baggins in Rankin-Bass' animated version of The Hobbit, and Frodo in the sequel, The Return of the King, and was a regular on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. All that, and he still had time back home in California to do community theater. I wish I'd been so artificial.

(By the way, I didn't name the person who wrote that, but I know who it was. I don't see any point in giving that person any publicity, even if it comes from being an idiot. I will tell you that it was not someone who writes regularly about television, which just goes to show you shouldn't dabble in things you don't know anything about.)

Unquestionably, what he was best known for—the show that our unnamed critic refers to—was his many years as panelist on To Tell the Truth. He was smart and witty, urbane and good-natured, a humorous and warm presence on the show ("Elegant Kitty Carlisle on my right with a feather boa. Peggy Cass on the other side."), and drew funny little cartoons on the card each panelist used to indicate who they thought was "telling the truth."

I'm usually saddened by the death of someone I've watched and liked, as you'll see below, but when I heard that Orson Bean had died as the result of being hit by a car, I was a bit stunned as well. Yes, he was 91, and yes, it was unexpected, but it affected me in a way that most of these celebrity deaths don't. For years I'd and listened to him talk, not only about Hollywood and show business, but about how he'd found God, how he'd moved politically from the left to the right (like Ronald Reagan, he'd insist that he didn't leave the Democratic party, but it left him). He was one of those people about whom you say that the world seems just a little better place with him around, and it saddens me that he isn't, and that his death seems so needless.

I don't know if that's how he'd want to be remembered, though, so I'll leave you with a couple of fascinating stories. One occurred while he was performing at The Blue Angel in the 50s: "A guy named Bud Howard introduced the acts and played the piano in between. One day I came in early and he said, 'Listen to this song I knocked off.' He played Fly Me to the Moon. I said, 'That's great, but what are you going to do with it?'" (Give it to Frank, natch.) The other concerns his son-in-law Andrew Breitbart who, like Bean, started out on the political left. One night, Breitbart noticed a book by Rush Limbaugh in Bean's bookcase.  "Why in the world would you have a book written by some fascist right-winger on your bookshelf that anybody could see?" Breitbart asked him. Bean replied, "Andrew, take that book and read it. Just read it." The rest is history, and there's no political point that I'm making here; it's just quite a story, from a man who lived quite a life.

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The one and only time I saw Robert Conrad in person was at the 2018 Mid Atlantic Nostalgia Convention. He was in poor health then, a shadow of the robust, charismatic James West, and if that was the Robert Conrad you’d come to see, then you were asking for disappointment. Or maybe not.

See, the thing about James West was that no matter what megalomaniacal villain he confronted, no matter what fantastic plot for world domination he foiled, no matter what outrageous steampunk invention he faced, he knew that to fail was not an option. That requires a kind of inner determination, a resolve that (with apologies to Paul McCartney) when you’ve got a job to do, you’ve got to do it well* or you die trying. There is no in-between. It’s the same thing when you play a character like that, and especially when you insist on doing most of your own stunts. You’re laying it all on the line for everyone out there to see, and if you can’t pull it off, you’re going to look like a fool. Perhaps it was a combination of ego, insecurity, and supreme confidence, but Conrad took that bet, and pulled it off.

*Well, that and good scriptwriters.

And that brings us back to his appearance at MANC. He was obviously ailing, but he declined staff offers to make him more comfortable by cutting back on the time available for his fans to meet him. It wouldn’t be right if he did that; those fans had come to see him, had paid money to do so and had spent time in line waiting, and he wasn’t going to disappoint them. No, he wouldn’t quit until everyone who’d wanted an autograph or a picture or a chance to shake hands had had the opportunity to do so. He wasn’t going to leave any fans disappointed. And you don’t do that without that same inner determination, that will to finish the assignment. So maybe there wasn’t such a difference between James West circa 1965 and Bob Conrad circa 2018. They were the same man, after all.

Robert Conrad had his detractors, those who said he had a chip on his shoulder, that he suffered from short man’s disease, that he insisted on doing it all because he was basically insecure. He didn’t suffer fools, which is a drawback in an age that prizes sensitivity. Discussing the various run-ins he’d had with people over the years (which had earned him several lawsuits), he put it simply: if you’re nice to me, I’ll be nicer to you. If not, well. . . He starred in several TV shows that were failures, but he had two that were hits—Hawaiian Eye and The Wild Wild West, successes that most actors would gladly accept. He lampooned his own tough guy persona in a series of Eveready commercials, daring you to knock that battery off his shoulder.

I was planning to write about Wild Wild West in my next “What I’m Watching,” but I’ll get ahead of myself here and mention that it’s a tremendously enjoyable show to watch every Friday night, and I’m glad we were able to watch the entire first season, with episode instructions by Conrad, while he was still alive. It doesn’t make any difference, I know, but somehow it still seems meaningful. And every time I watch James West, I think back to Robert Conrad at MANC, determined to make sure everyone left satisfied. After all, it wasn’t just his fans coming to see him; he’d come to see them as well. And, as he does every Friday night, it was a mission he successfully completed. TV  

What's on TV? Sunday, February 11, 1973

February 12 is Abraham Lincoln's birthday, and in commemoration there are no fewer than five Lincoln specials on TV this week. On Tuesday, NBC celebrates with The Great Man's Whiskers, the story of how Lincoln came to grow his beard, with Dennis Weaver as Honest Abe. The rest are today: Lamp Unto My Feet's "No Lonely Mountain Peak" is a musical tribute, with Met Opera baritone Sherill Milnes performing the Gettysburg Address; WPIX has Abe Lincoln in Illinois, with Raymond Massey in his signature role; and NET Playhouse has D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln biopic. (Various PBS stations also carry A Look at Lincoln, with actor Dick Blake as the 16th president. It was a time for heroes, and speaking of which, who wants to miss Peter Cushing as Doctor Who in Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D., starring the Daleks.

The week's issue is the New Jersey-Pennsylvania edition, with New York City thrown in for good measure.

This week in TV Guide: February 10, 1973

On January 28, 1962, NBC broadcast a White Paper called "The Battle of Newburgh," Newburgh being "a tiny, declining upstate New York city." The story that emerged was of a town run by a city manager, Joseph Mitchell, who had launched a "crackdown on chislers," which among other things denied welfare benefits to unwed mothers who continued having children, provided free bus tickets to send welfare recipients back to their home states, placed all able-bodied welfare recipients on the city's work crews and required welfare recipients to register at the police station." Jack Gould, the influential New York Times columnist, called it a "scorching indictment" of Newburgh's policies. And, eleven years later, residents claim the city still suffers from the effects of its night on national television.

I don't bring this up to discuss whether or not Newburgh's policies were correct (although I can't believe anyone named Mitchell could be that bad). No, what I find interesting about this is how different things might be if it happened today.

I'm thinking specifically about a couple of instances, although there are more. In 1982, nine years after this article appeared, former U.S. Army Chief of Staff General William Westmoreland brought a $120 million libel suit against CBS over a CBS Reports documentary entitled The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception. The documentary, which aired on January 23, 1982—five days short of 20 years after the original broadcast of "The Battle of Newburgh"—claimed that "Westmoreland had contributed to the public reaction to Tet by manipulating intelligence about enemy strength in order to create the impression of progress." Westmoreland countered that there had been no political motivation behind the intelligence reports. The case went to trial in 1984, and the following year, with jury watchers predicting Westmoreland would lose, the two sides settled out of court. You can read more about Westmoreland v. CBS here.

The second case this calls to mind happened in 1992, when two producers for ABC News went undercover at Food Lion grocery stories in the Carolinas. (Full disclosure: we shopped at Food Lion the year we lived in Raleigh. Not that it comes into play here.) The report that emerged from this undercover work, which aired on the network's Prime Time Life (remember that?) alleged that "Food Lion’s meat department at those stores required employees to engage in unsafe, unhealthy or illegal practices, including selling old meat that was washed with bleach to kill odor, selling cheese that had been gnawed by rats and working off the time clock." As part of the report, the network used hidden camera footage taken by the reporters. Food Lion sued in July, 1995, arguing that ABC used "illegal newsgathering methods." including falsifying information on the producers' job applications, to obtain their information. This case also went to trial, and in December 1996 a jury ruled in favor of Food Lion, awarding the grocery chain $5.5 million in punitive damages for fraud. It all wound up in the U.S. Court of Appeals, where the fraud claim and damage award was overturned; however, they also ruled that the ABC reporters trespassed in that they didn't have permission to videotape secretly. That case you can read about here if you're so inclined.

As I said, there are other cases; the always-reliable Wikipedia mentions General Motors' successful objection to an NBC report in 1993 (NBC fired the news director and reporter and publicly apologized); Philip Morris's lawsuit against ABC in 1994 (settled out of court); and Brown & Williamson's threat to sue CBS over a planned interview with whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand (CBS pulled the segment, but the movie version did earn Russell Crowe an Oscar nomination). The point I'm making here is that, in another day and time, Newburgh probably would have hauled NBC into court. I'm thinking specifically of this quote from George F. McKneally, former mayor of Newburgh, who says of writer-director Arthur Zegart (who'd become a good friend during the making of the report), "Zegart warned me the White Paper on Newburgh would not be particularly helpful for Newburgh or anyone who would be appearing in it. Zegart told me that NBC had made most of the people look like bad guys, so he decided to leave me out of the show." Now wouldn't that have looked good in a court document? Zegart, of course, denies he said that, but this probably would be best left for lawyers (and a jury?) to decide. Then, of course, there's the power of social media, alternative media, Fox News ("it's not uncommon," writes author Michael Krawetz, "to hear about 'those Communists who run ABC, NBC and CBS back in New York City.'")—well, as I've said so often, the possibilities really do write themselves, don't they? Yes, times—and news gathering—really have changed since then, haven't they?

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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. 

Friends, you're going to have to help me out a bit this week. The subject is M*A*S*H, in its first season, which Cleveland Amory, our man in action, says, "was one of those movies that was adjusted a bit much for television. So instead they made it into a television series, the idea apparently being that what will corrupt us if we see it once will not corrupt us if we see it every week. They've got a point, too. Anyone who sees this program every week is, from a corruption standpoint, around the bend." He praises good performances, especially from Alan Alda, McLean Stevenson, and Gary Burgoff. You'll notice that he does not praise the writing and plots; while the doctors toss off joke after joke while "hacking away" on anesthetized patients, "[t]he rest of us do not have the advantage of being anesthetized." He also looks askance on what we would see as the sexual harassment of the nurses by our heroes.

As for the plots—well, "[o]ne plot begins with Hawkeye acting strangely, another with Radar acting strangely, a third with Colonel Blake acting strangely. That produces, you see, a lot of suspense. Acting strangely is very hard to diagnose here." There's also a tendency to rely on chloroform as a plot mechanism, e.g. Hawkeye and Trapper John putting it in Major Burns' after-shave. It is, Cleve seems to be telling us, the only way in which we can sit through the outrageous developments that confront us in every episode.

And this is where I need your help. Obviously, I'm not unaware of M*A*S*H (Amory adds that when it comes to shows with asterisks in their titles, "[p]roceed at your own risk—or, in this case, at your own risque."), and it's not as if I've never seen an episode of it. I know that it's really an allegory for Vietnam, and that over the years the show became increasingly serious, until it becomes what we'd today think of as a dramedy. I never liked it, though, never—not the show, nor the smarmy Alda (a younger version of Robert Vaughn) nor, later on, the equally off-putting Mike Farrell, so I'm not in a position to be objective here. Was the early series really, as Amory suggests, tough to watch? Was the humor of suspect taste, and did it improve in future seasons when it became more serious and character-driven? Or was it better when it took itself less seriously, when it was content to simply be a comedy rather than to try and take itself so very seriously? I don't know, through there are strong opinions on both sides. Here's your chance to have your say on the matter.

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Let's take a really deep dive into the week's programming and see what we come up with.

Don't "strain" yourself, James Olson.

Saturday's highlight is the television premiere of director Robert Wise's literate science-fiction thriller The Andromeda Strain (NBC, 9:00 p.m. ET). Judith Crist praises the qualities of the movie that I like myself: "its propinquity to fact rather than fantasy; its consistency of theme without the usual sex-schmaltz trappings that so often reduce sci-fi to soap opera or slickery; its high-class production values; and its terrible significance in relation to the truths of germ warfare and miltaristic puropse in space exploration." It's a faithful adaptation of Michael Crichton's "chilling and complex best-seller," with Arthur Hill very good as the lead scientist, and James Olson in an extremely effective turn against type as one of the good guys.

If sci-fi's a little plebeian for your taste, you'll probably want to go to Jean Cocteau's bizarre, wildly imaginative "fairy tale for adults," 1946's Beauty and the Beast (8:00 p.m., PBS). which Crist calls "an exquisite realization of the children's fairy tale that all ages can savor on a variety of levels." And if you happen to be living in Philadelphia this week, you've got a late-night choice: The Innocents (11:30 p.m., WPHI), a very creepy adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, with Deborah Kerr. At the same time, on WCAU, Jason Robards is Al Capone to Ralph Meeker's Bugs Moran, in The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, which for the genre is a pretty good movie. It just goes to show that Saturday really is movie night, isn't it?

On Sunday, CBS gets down with the star-studded Duke Ellington . . . We Love You Madly (9:00 p.m.), a brilliant tribute to the jazz great, with a glittering lineup including Count Basie, Ray Charles, Sammy Davis Jr., Louis Bellson, Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, Chicago, Billy Eckstine, Paula Kelly, and Joe Williams. Later, it's the premiere of a Jack Webb series that, frankly, I don't remember. It's called Escape (10:00 p.m., NBC), and it's a four-episode anthology series about "people caught in life-and-death situations." It's on right after Columbo, and we were living in the World's Worst Town™—is it possible that KCMT didn't carry it? After all, they used to show Sanford and Son on Sunday nights to show Lawrence Welk, so anything could happen. But that's getting beyond the point, isn't it? We were talking about Escape, and tonight Ed Nelson is a World War II submarine captain being hunted by a Japanese destroyer. At 10:30 p.m., a time that the nets ceded back to the locals, WOR has the syndicated revival of This Is Your Life with Mrs. Spencer Tracy as the surprise subject. (I'll bet Katharine Hepburn isn't one of the guests.) There's another episode of TIYL on earlier in the day where the subject is Anne Baxter; I don't know about you, but I think there was something more interesting about it back in its original run, when it was live and TV Guide didn't list who the honoree would be.

Does Ed Nelson look like a talk-show host to you?

Monday's Laugh-In has a pretty good guest lineup (NBC, 8:00 p.m.), with Ernest Borgnine in a Sherlock Holmes spoof (he's Watson; don't ask me who's playing the lead), plus appearances by John Wayne, Don Rickles, Arthur Godfrey, and Slappy White. And no, Hogan's Goat (8:00 p.m., PBS) isn't a story about Sergeant Carter forgetting to set the timers for the bombs on the Adolf Hitler Bridge—instead, it's a television adaptation of William Alfred's 1965 play about Irish-American politics in late-1800s Brooklyn, starring Robert Foxworth and Faye Dunaway. And you remember Ed Nelson as captain of that sub? Well, he must have made good on that escape, because he's playing a radio talk-show host whose wife is murdered in Tenafly (NBC, 9:00 p.m.), the pilot for the private detective series starring James McEachin. I always liked McEachin's character; there was, in fact, something very likable about both him and his character, and the show was created by Columbo's Levinson and Link; too bad there were only four other episodes as part of one of NBC's Mystery Movie nights. For something completely different, go to NET Opera Thetare (PBS, 9:00 p.m.), and Thomas Pasatieri's rending opera The Trial of Mary Lincoln, based on her 1875 insanity trial. Mezzo Eliane Bonazzi stars as the widowed First Lady, with Wayne Turnage as her son Robert, the plaintiff.

Just between you and me, I've got a great idea for a movie—let's take a guy, say, William Shatner, and put him in an airplane flying at 37,000 feet, see? And something weird happens on that plane, see? Strange voices, strong winds, funny things, you know what I mean? Waddya think? (Pause) You mean it's already been done? With Shatner? No problem! We'll just change a few things in the script, have it be some supernatural thing in the cargo hold instead of a gremlin on the plane's wing, throw in anyone who's been on the last ten years (Roy Thinnes, Chuck Connors, Lyn Loring, Buddy Ebsen, Tammy Grimes, Jane Merrow, Paul Winfield, Will Hutchins, France Nuyen), and call it The Horror at 37,000 Feet (Tuesday, 9:30 p.m., CBS). What more can you ask for? Per Judith Crist, it was unavailable for preview.

Wednesday is St. Valentine's Day, which I guess explains the Jason Robards movie on Saturday, and what could be more fitting than the lineup on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour (8:00 p.m., CBS): Joe Namath, a dozen Playboy centerfold playmates, and a cameo appearance by their boss, Hugh Hefner. No? OK, let's go back to the movies; how about Sammy Davis Jr. as "a bumbling disciple from hell" trying to lure Jack Klugman to the land of fire and brimstone in Poor Devil (NBC, 8:30 p.m.) As was the case with Horror at 37.000 Feet, this was unavailable for preview, and, speaking as a fan of Sammy, it's probably for the best. The late movie on ABC's Wide World of Mystery (11:30 p.m.) is The Screaming Skull, with David McCallum in "an eerie tale about a murderer whose victim (his wife) returns to avenge her death. Dick Cavett's wife Carrie Nye plays the wronged woman. Though there are differences in the plot, it has at least a passing resemblance to another Screaming Skull, made in 1958, known and loved from MST3K.

An American Family continues Thursday on PBS (9:00 p.m.), and, according to The Doan Report, Dick Cavett will be devoting his entire February 20 show to an interview with the now-divorced Louds and their five children, to try and figure out why a family would choose to lay bare their lives on national television. And PBS can use all the publicity it can get; Doan also reports that President Nixon has slashed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's $70 million request in half, leaving the funding level as it has been for the past two years. Too early to tell what the effect will be on the CPB, but the worst-case scenario is that "the money crimp might force CPB to wipe out the PBS network."

Come Friday, we've got a little In Concert vs. The Midnight Special action going. In Concert (11:30 p.m., ABC) has the Hollies, Kenny Loggins and Jim Messina, and Billy Preston, while The Midnight Special (1:00 a.m., NBC) counters with Mac Davis as host, and guests Helen Reddy, the Hollies, Waylon Jennings, Billy Preston, and Billy Paul. Now, I think you can see where this is going, so let's think about it for a minute: both programs have the Hollies (performing different songs; "Amazing Grace" and "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" on Concert; "Magic Woman Touch" on Special), and both have Billy Preston ("Blackbird" and "Outa-Space" on both, plus "That's the Way God Planned It" on Concert). That leaves us with Loggins and Messina vs. Mac Davis, Waylon, Billy Paul, and Helen Reddy. Even with the numerical advantage that Special has, we'll have to go with In Concert this week. Or you could skip them both and watch Monterey Pop, which follows In Concert on WABC; that features a few stars of its own, including Jimi Hendrix. If your taste runs more to the classics, then you can't go wrong with Bogie and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (11:30 p.m., WNEW).

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In an otherwise uneventful sports week, there's one event that I think deserves to be singled out. This weekend NBC carries the final two rounds of the Bob Hope Desert Classic (Saturday and Sunday, 5:00 p.m.) from Palm Springs. It's one of the most popular tournaments of the year, with a cast of celebrities that might rival that Duke Ellington special. But that's not what's noteworthy about this tournament. No, even though the Hope isn't a major championship, neither I (watching on television) nor anyone else watching the tournament will ever forget it. The tournament is won by Arnold Palmer, shooting a 3-under-par 69 in the final round to edge Jack Nicklaus and Johnny Miller by two strokes. The win breaks a two-year victory drought for Palmer, who last won at the 1971 Westchester Classic, and it is the 62nd and final regular tour victory of The King's illustrious career. It is, indeed, a hell of a day.

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Things being what they are nowadays, I suppose pornography is as good a way as any to end this week's issue. What am I talking about with that provocative statement? Well, don't blame me; it's all the fault of CITY-TV, the small-budget, community-oriented UHF station operating out of Toronto. Jack Batten tells us the story of how this cable station (which is still around, and isn't so small anymore) has created a niche for itself with its avant-garde programming: there's Free for All, "a live, two-hour show on Sunday nights that invites anyone with a beef or a cause to air it in the Hyde Park soapbox style"*; The Money Game, a nightly investments show; Greed, a live Saturday night amateur talent show; and a full two and a half hours of news and public affairs every night in prime time from 8:00 to 10:30 p.m.

*Sounds a little like the inspiration for Johnny LaRue's Street Beef, doesn't it?

And then there's the late night movie show on Fridays. It's called The Baby Blue Movie, and its fair includes I Am Curious (Yellow) and All the Loving Couples—unedited and uncensored. "When we cooked up the idea of running restricted movies," says the station's managing director, Moses Znaimer, "we figured it as a loss leader something that'd attract attention to us but wouldn't necessarily make money because advertisers would hardly want to be associated with the smut." But, surprise! The Baby Blue Movie is the station's most popular program, and ad space is so hot that the stations can force sponsors to advertise on weaker programs in order to get on the movie.*

*Commercials in a pornographic movie? Commercium interruptus, I suppose.

As for how the station was able to get the movies past the censors, that's another story. "The head of Morality phones us the day before we went on the air," the station's lawyer, Jerry Grafstein, says. "He sounded very heavy, very threatening, and he told us he didn't like what he'd heard about our plans for the Baby Blue." The station cut 100 seconds from I Am Curious (Yellow) ("I thought it was tragic to interfere with a director's work that way," Granstein comments, "but our backs were against the wall.") The station heard nothing from the police department's Morality Squad. Later, they ran the movie again, with the cuts restored. Still later, there was the movie How to Succeed with Sex (directed by MST3K fave Bert I. Gordon), which Grafstein describes as "real hard-core pornography"—crickets. "We're beginning to feel safe," he says.

So viewers love it, advertisers love it, and the Morality Squad doesn't seem to care. In fact, there's only one group out there that seems upset about The Baby Blue Movie: bowling-alley operators. "They're mad because on Friday nights their customers are packing it in early to get home for the Baby Blue." TV  

Around the dial

It's a good week for retrospectives here at the old homestead. Let's start at The Last Drive-In with a comprehensive look back at the career of Piper Laurie, featuring some wonderful pictures. We think of her in movies, but she's done a lot of TV during her long and glorious career.

Next up is James Garner, who claims his share of movie and TV credits as well. He's the subject of the James Garner Blogathon at Reelweegiemidget, and you'll want to click through to a week's worth of enjoyable essays on this most enjoyable actor.

William Holden is an actor I've always liked, and of course, he features in one of the greatest of all time movies about television, Network. But at Classic Film and TV Café, Rick reminds us of a movie that's not nearly as heavy, and has a lot of action besides: The Devil's Brigade.

Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) is one of those shows I read about and hear about all the time, but I've never checked it out, sad to say. But if anyone can talk me into it, it's Fire-Breathing Dimetrodon Time; see what's what with "The Glorious Butranekh."

Gene Reynolds, whose credits as a television creator and developer include M*A*S*H and Lou Grant, died this week at the age of 96, and at A Shroud of Thoughts Terence has a retrospective on the many, many series that he was involved in over the years. What a career.

Speaking of careers, what a career Kirk Douglas had. What a life! I always think of him as a dangerous actor, full of fire and energy and capable of anything at a moment's notice. He mostly appeared on television as himself, promoting or spoofing his movies, which themselves are on TV all the time. At The Lucky Strike Papers, Andrew has a short but sweet appreciation that ends with a quote on death that we should all keep in mind.

Short but sweet this week, but you know what that means: even more to look at next week. And, of course, a TV Guide to keep you entertained tomorrow. TV