Around the Dial

I've always enjoyed Alfred Hitchcock's shows on television.  When I was younger, I found them sinister and spooky; watching them on DVD, at my advanced age, I can also appreciate the irony, dry wit and humor that are present in many of them as well.  bare bones reviews one of those this week, the delightfully ironic "Who Needs an Enemy?"  This is one I haven't seen yet, but I need to catch it the next time it's on MeTV.

CultTV has a typically thought-provoking article that features Leonard Rossiter, star of many British series including The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.  In this one he's writing about another of his series called Rising Damp, but makes a comment about what we see on '70s television that really resounds with me: "the 1970s were a frankly awful time."  That can apply either to the programs themselves, or the world they depict.  As I've mentioned before, I've no great love for the '70s, but as always your mileage (or opinion) may vary.

Last Sunday my wife and I were watching Columbo on the aforementioned MeTV, an episode in which Forrest Tucker played the victim du jour, and I remarked that F-Troop, the series in which he starred, would have been far, far less funny had it not been for his co-star, Larry Storch (with which my wife agreed).  So I was pleased to read The Flaming Nose's tribute to Storch on his 92nd birthday.

This week Television Obscurities has a review of the TV Guide from January 9th, 1965.  It's a typically good report, with a very interesting article about noted television critics and their thoughts on the year's new series.  Not surprisingly, they tore into Gilligan's Island; not surprisingly, most of those critics now live on in obscurity while Gilligan remains a show beloved by its generation.  The rest of the review is excellent as well, particularly a bit on Danny Kaye.

Between his two big hits, Father Knows Best and Marcus Welby, M.D., Robert Young starred in yet another series, Window on Main Street.  It wasn't a success, and this week Television's New Frontier: the 1960's gives us some insight into why that might have been the case.  Heard of this show before, but never knew much of anything about it until now.

A new blog I'm following, Envisioning the American Dream, has one of many tributes to Donna Douglas, the much-loved Ellie May from The Beverly Hillbillies (another of those series the critics hated), who died last week.

And that will do it for today - be sure and come by tomorrow for further adventures in TV Guide-land! TV  

Bess Myerson, R.I.P.

How do the lyrics to the song go? "Lovely to look at,/Delightful to know"? That, even more than "Here She Is," is what comes to mind for me, because Bess Myerson was indeed lovely to look at - even more so than she was the day she became Miss America.

I first heard of Bess Myerson primarily through her involvement in politics.  She had been commissioner of consumer affairs in New York City and later a candidate for the U.S. Senate.  She had been a companion of Ed Koch during his successful campaign for mayor of New York, and served in his administration, and was an adviser to three U.S. presidents.  She became involved in a huge scandal, dubbed the "Bess Mess," that involved adultery, financial collusion, and ultimately a trial involving charges that included corruption and bribery, in which she was ultimately acquitted.  And, of course, she had once been Miss America.

I knew all this, but then one night I saw my first rerun of the classic I've Got a Secret on GSN.

And I said to myself: ah, so that's Bess Myerson.

She was a striking presence - two inches shy of six feet tall, elegant, sophisticated, and beautiful.  Her presence lit up a show that already featured the comfortable friendliness of host Garry Moore, the warm humor of Bill Cullen, the acerbic wit of Henry Morgan, and the goofy charm of Betsy Palmer. Even in such august company, she fairly shimmered in her sleek dresses and fashionable hairdo.  Looking at her, you could easily believe she'd been Miss America who'd also played the piano at Carnegie Hall, hosted parades and pageants on television, risen through the ranks in both entertainment and politics - hell, you'd have believed anything anyone wanted to tell you.  She had class, as did so many TV personalities of the time, and so few today.

Bess Myerson's story was another of those that was uniquely American.  As Miss America she experienced hostility that is hard to comprehend today, simply because she happened to be Jewish. She missed out on many of the endorsement opportunities that other winners had had, from sponsors leery of having a Jewess as commercial spokeswoman. She turned that to her advantage, speaking out throughout the country against prejudice and discrimination, and over the years became a familiar face in print ads as well as on television.  And, as I said, ever lovelier.

After I became hooked on the old Secret reruns, I'd thought to write to her and let her know how much I'd admired her on the program, how I'd been taken by her presence and what she represented.  As is so often the case with me, I never did that, although at least in this case I'd tried, searched the web for an address that I might use to contact her.  Maybe I didn't try hard enough, or maybe it just wasn't there, I don't know.  I  read in some of the obituaries that she'd suffered from dementia in her last  years, and that sad news eased my regrets, at least a little, in that she probably wouldn't have been able to respond anyway.  Nonetheless, as I've said before, don't be afraid to contact those people who've made an impact on you over the years, because they may be more accessible than you think.

Our lives are composed of many things, events and circumstances that conspire to make us who we are, for better or worse.  Athletes often say that it's necessary to experience both the ups and the downs to be able to have fully lived the sporting life, and I would suppose that applies to all of us. Bess Myerson certainly lived both sides of a lifetime packed with events, both accomplished and messy, that few of us can even imagine happening to us.  That makes for a complete life, the good and the bad both, a life that was fully experienced by her, and appreciated by many of us.  Regardless of the pitfalls that may have accompanied that life, there is much to be said of it which was good - and so if you get a chance, on television or YouTube, to watch one of those I've Got a Secret reruns, or any of the other shows on which she appeared, odds are you'll sit back when it's over and say to yourself: ah, so that's Bess Myerson.

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A brief note: as part of the experiment I mentioned on Monday, I'll be shifting the "Around the Dial" feature to Friday during the weeks that include four posts.  The TV Guide piece will continue to appear on Saturday, with the accompanying program listing on Monday, the essay on Wednesday, and Around the Dial on Friday.  We'll see how it goes, but let me know if you have any thoughts.

What's on TV? January 5, 1972

I thought I would try a little experiment this week.  I'm not saying it's going to last all year, but the TV listings I've included off-and-on the last few weeks have proved to be a popular feature, and that's led me to wonder whether or not it should be a weekly occurrence.  Now, this would not replace the Tuesday long-form essays I've been doing (or at least trying to do) since the start of the blog - I'd expect that "What's On TV?" would appear every Monday, with the essay appearing either Tuesday or Wednesday, and "Around the Dial" continuing on Thursdays.

I realize this would boost content to four days per week, which can be a daunting thing to contemplate.  On the other hand, doing the listing like this is fairly easy, and doesn't consume a lot of time.  As a matter of fact, the only drawback I can see is that I can't use it as a substitute for the essay any more.  I suppose that on those weeks when I'm really pressed for time, I can resort to a "best-of" piece; after all, with three-plus years of this blog under the belt, I should have at least a couple of articles I can rehash if needed - as long as I don't do it too often.

So let me know what you think.  Would you like to see this as a regular part of It's About TV?  Would you miss the longer stories if I found I had to cut back on them?   Or would you rather I only did the listings occasionally?  Feel free to let me know in the comments, via e-mail, or through the Facebook page.  In the meantime, enjoy these programs from Wednesday, January 5, 1972.

This week in TV Guide: January 1, 1972

If you want a quick but trenchant history of politics in the later half of the twentieth century, you could do worse than to look at two pictures in TV Guide's review of the year 1971.

The first picture, from August 15, shows President Richard M. Nixon delivering his speech in which he announces a 90-day freeze on wages and prices.  The second, from one month earlier, is of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's secret groundwork preparing Nixon's historic trip to China.  The story told by these two seemingly unrelated events could fill a book, but even a brief overview can go a long way to explain the evolution of the conservative political movement and the eventual election of Ronald Reagan.

As always, the purpose here is not to take sides, nor to express strong opinions on ideological issues, though I certainly have those.  But these two issues play a central role in the events that follow, and it's critical to understand them in order to make sense of what will follow.

Nixon had been a bane of the liberal establishment ever since his role in the investigation of Alger Hiss while in the House in the 1950s, and in his role as Vice President, many conservatives had more confidence in him than they did in the President, Dwight Eisenhower.  That confidence was never extremely deep though, and it began to erode when Nixon engaged in detente, if you will, with the liberal governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, at the 1960 GOP Convention.  By 1968 Reagan, the governor of California, had inherited the conservative mantle from Barry Goldwater, but Nixon had enough establishment support to win the Republican presidential nomination, and the election. In 1971, however, some conservatives were already in rebellion against Nixon, discussing the possibility of running Vice President Spiro Agnew against him.*

*Agnew, you'll recall from last week, had made big headlines with his accusations of liberal bias against the media.

Which brings us to the issues at the top of the page.  Nixon's detente with Red China is anathema to Cold War conservatives who are outraged at the abandonment of America's long-time allies on Taiwan.  The wage-and-price freeze strike a similar discord with economic conservatives, who see Nixon's adoption of centralized economic policy as an alarming concession to Keynesian interventionist policy.*  In fact, this discontent is visible in a special edition of PBS' Firing Line on Friday night, as host William F. Buckley Jr. welcomes his brother, U.S. Senator James Buckley, conservative economist Milton Friedman, Ohio Representative John Ashbrook, former congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, and Reagan, to discuss the topic "American Conservatives Confront 1972."  "Conservative reaction to Administration policies" is a focal point of the program - interesting since the guests and the Administration are, more or less, members of the same party.

*"We are all Keynesians now."

In the end,  Ashbrook will challenge Nixon in the Republican primaries, and though his run doesn't gather a lot of traction, it shows the toll that Nixon's policies are taking on his conservative support.  And while Nixon wins a landslide victory in 1972*, Watergate percolates in the background.

*Footnote: on Tuesday at 7:40 p.m. CT, Senator Ed Muskie, the Democratic candidate for Vice President in 1968, purchases 10 minutes of airtime on CBS, where it is expected that he will formally announce his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.  The early front-runner, he is damaged by smaller-than-expected victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, and never recovers.

Politically speaking, many liberals will privately express the opinion that it's necessary to get rid of Agnew before going after Nixon, lest he become president if Nixon were to be impeached, and the revelation of corruption charges against Agnew while he was governor of Maryland will take care of that.  And as the net begins to close around Nixon, his conservative support was less than unanimous - first Ashbrook, then the brothers Buckley, and finally Barry Goldwater himself, call for Nixon's resignation, which becomes inevitable.  The ascension to the presidency of moderate Gerald Ford prompts the challenge by Ronald Reagan in 1976, and Reagan's eventual victory in 1980.

(Left) Nixon announces wage/price controls; (Right) Kissinger after his secret trip to Mainland China

Again, I'm not trying to take sides here, but to suggest that these pictures tell a lot of the story of what was, and what would be.  Whatever Nixon's crimes may have been, there's no doubt that the long-standing liberal hatred - dating back to the Hiss affair - propelled many liberals, while conservative passion for backing Nixon was far less charged.  And so it could be said that the year 1971 and the two issues pictured in TV Guide - wage and price controls and detente with China - personifies the transition of conservatism from Nixon in 1948 to Reagan in 1980.  It's likely that few people looking at this issue would have been able to predict how it all would turn out.

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As this might suggest, we're looking at another New Year's edition of TV Guide.  (And it seems as if it were only last week that we were going from 1969 to 1970.  I guess it's true that the older you get, the faster time seems to fly.)  We probably don't have to rehash all the New Year's programming available to viewers - you know the drill,  Parades, football, repeat.

The Orange Bowl, on New Year's night, does pose an interesting matchup - the second #1 vs. #2 game in a little over a month.  It's not the Game of the Century, as was the Thanksgiving game between Nebraska and Oklahoma, but this showdown for the national championship between undefeateds Nebraska and Alabama promises to be epic.  Unlike that Thanksgiving game, however, this one fails to live up to its billing, as Nebraska takes its second consecutive championship, beating Alabama 38-6.  The Sugar, Cotton and Rose Bowls fill out the day.


On Sunday, the NFC and AFC championship games are held (on CBS and NBC, respectively), with the winners to meet in the Super Bowl.  In the second year of the post-merger NFL, the Dallas Cowboys and Miami Dolphins defeat, respectively, the San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Colts.  Two weeks hence, the Cowboys will win their first Super Bowl, defeating the Dolphins 24-3.  ABC presents a prime-time NBA game on Monday, while Channel 11 has a Minnesota North Stars hockey game on Wednesday.  And that's all the sports for the week in this pre-ESPN era.

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I've mentioned Virginia Graham before.  As the host of women-oriented talk shows (Girl Talk, The Virginia Graham Show), she's a fixture on television.  But she hits the trifecta on Friday, appearing all over the place.  On her own syndicated show (3:30 p.m, Channel 5) she welcomes George Burns and singer Jane Harvey as her guests, in a tribute to singer-songwriter Johnny Mercer.  She's also a guest on the syndicated daytime talk show Mantrap* at 9:30 a.m. on Channel 9, discussing Peter Marin's book Understanding Drug Use, and she winds up the evening appearing on the syndicated show Juvenile Jury (6:30 p.m., Channel 4), defending the right of grandmothers to wear miniskirts.

*Hosted by Canadian television personality Alan Hamel, the future husband of Suzanne Somers.

Three different shows on three different channels, all in one day.  Quite an accomplishment.

***

And now, the cultural portion of the week, with a couple of common themes. - PBS and Russian writers.

First, on Monday night, PBS presents a rerun of NET Opera Theatre, Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame (The Queen of Spades), with a cast that - I'll be honest - I don't recognize.  I would have enjoyed seeing this harrowing opera, though.

Then on Thursday, live television drama returns, at least for one night, on PBS' Hollywood Television Theater, as husband-and-wife Rip Torn and Geraldine Page star in a pair of short dramas by Chekov.  Live dramas seem to come back every few years as a novelty, but with the exception of NBC's live musicals from the past two years, they haven't made a lot of traction.  More's the pity.

Finally, the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein musical Show Boat has begun to pop up in opera theaters over the last few years, but it took until 1972 for this 1951 movie classic to make it to the small screen.  It debuts on NBC's Monday Night at the Movies, starring Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel and Ava Gardner, and featuring Gower and Marge Champion's dance routines, which TV Guide critic Judith Crist says "have a brilliance of their own."

It certainly doesn't take 20 years for theatrical movies to premiere on television nowadays; sometimes they appear on TV so quickly, it's hard to remember whether they were ever in the theater or not.  But there's no question that PBS has fallen down on the job when it comes to providing cultural programming.  I think I've covered this before, but let's be honest - PBS isn't any different from the commercial networks nowadays, and if they have to choose between serving the public and bringing in the ratings, we know which way they'll go.  I've got a book about that somewhere on my shelf, and I'll get to it one of these days.

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Some random notes to close out the week.

A classic segment of Rod Serling's Night Gallery on NBC Wednesday night: Elsa Lanchester in "Green Fingers," one of the better stories in the series, with a great payoff.

Also on Wednesday, the last episode of Anthony Quinn's only television series, The Man and the City, in which he plays a big-city mayor.  It never stood a chance, going up against Night Gallery and CBS' Mannix.

Henry Fonda's final television series, The Smith Family, is also going off, at least for the fall season, though it will come back in the spring.  That was a show that never really was able to figure out what it wanted to be - family comedy, police drama, family drama, police comedy.  Then again, it only had 39 episodes with which to work.

Channel 11 has a surprisingly gritty movie in its late-night slot on Monday- the 1962 British kitchen-sink drama The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, starring Tom Courtenay and directed by Oscar-winner Tony Richardson.

Opposite the movie is David Frost's late-night chat show, and one of his guests - long before the fame of the movie A Christmas Story - is humorist Jean Shepherd, who was funny a long time before that movie came out.

And last but not least, a letter to the editor from Margaret Marshall of Monroe, Michigan (try saying that five times fast), who wants to know "why on most topical series seen weekly in street scenes there is usually an abundance of gorgeously clad girls on hand."  It seems, according to Margaret, that "there are no ordinary-looking folks in TV land."  To which the editor replies, "You mean it's not that way in Monroe?"

Great answer.  Of course, living in Dallas, we're used to seeing sights like that every day. TV  

Ringing in the New Year - it's Around the Dial!

Happy New Year, everyone! It's the first day of 2015, the fifth year of this blog, and while it's a day when everything is new, there's nothing new about the high quality of the classic TV blogosphere.  Let's get started!

Betty White was a mainstay on NBC's coverage of parades from the '50s to the '70s (as you might remember from some of the TV listings you've read here), and the Broadcasting Archives at the University of Maryland remembers this with vintage pictures of Betty hosting the Rose Parade.  A classy presence compared to some of the parade hosts of today.

TV Gems takes a moment for Dick Dale, one of the featured performers on The Lawrence Welk Show for almost 30 years, who died recently.  As Tom points out, Dale's passing didn't get much attention, presumably because most media sources don't think anyone remembers the Welk show anymore.  Well, we remember it here - it was a standard in my grandparents' house on Saturday nights when I was growing up.  I can't say I was ever a big fan, but it's a pity television doesn't have any room for shows like it anymore.

Time travel is always an appealing theme on television and in movies, and this week Rick at Classic Film and TV Cafe flashes back to the best time travel movies.  A very good lineup, and you can catch many of them on television from time to time, although I'm appalled that he doesn't include Dr. Who and the Daleks or Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D.  Just kidding - I have a fondness for them as bastard children of the Doctor Who series, but that's about it!

Classic TV Sports combines two of my favorite things - sports and television - and it's been a great read this year.  In fact, Jeff's final post of 2014 gives some highlights of the blog's third year, and if you haven't read all of these I'd suggest you take a moment to do so.

I didn't know that Mary Tyler Moore started out as a dancing elf, did you?  Happily, Michael's TV Tray corrects this defect in my knowledge, with a vintage clip of MTM playing the elf in a commercial for Hotpoint appliances, in commemoration of her 78th birthday.  I thought that was familiar - our cooktop is a Hotpoint.  And it only looks as if it might have been in a MTM commercial.

Comfort TV points out that New Year's Day isn't really fertile ground for television shows, and in fact the day has always - to me - meant parades and football more than anything else.  But it is a time for new beginnings, which is the theme of David's 2015 project - looking at classic television series in which the main characters start out in their new lives in the first episode.  That should be fun!

Robert at Television Obscurities continues his tremendous series on TV Guide, week by week, for the 1964-65 television season, with the issue that closes out 1964.  I've got this issue in my collection as well, and earlier in the year I'd scheduled this for my year-end review as well.  But after seeing how great Robert's recaps are, I thought I'd wait for a year so I wouldn't have to compete!  He also was very kind to link to one of my TV Party! articles, which I'd be pleased to have you check out.

Finally, Television.au has a very interesting article on the advent of pay-TV in Australia, back in 1995.  It may have taken awhile to get started but once it did, it expanded quickly.  It's getting harder and harder not only to remember the days before pay-TV, but to remember how different the culture of that time was.

I think that's good to get you started for the new year, don't you?  But come on back Saturday, and we'll look at the first new TV Guide review of 2015! TV