June 8, 2015
What's on TV? Wednesday, June 10, 1970
June 6, 2015
This week in TV Guide: June 6, 1970
***
I've always remembered something my 10th grade social studies teacher said. It was before class, on a day when us students were talking about what we wanted to do with our lives - what colleges we hoped to be attending, what jobs we wanted to have. "You know," he said, "a few years ago you wouldn't have been having this conversation. You'd have been wondering when you'd be drafted, and whether or not you'd wind up in Vietnam."
He was right; the military draft had ended less than four years ago, and although we'd wind up having to sign up for selective service before we were out of college, by 1976 the idea of being drafted to fight in a foreign war was the furthest thing from our own plans. But in June 1970 the draft was a very real thing and, as the TV Guide listing for the June 6 ABC News Special "The Draft: Who Serves?" notes, men of draft age have four choices: "consent to induction, hope for deferments, refuse to report (and risk imprisonment) or leave the country."
The military draft was one of the stormiest parts of the antiwar movement, and I think the main reason protests over the Gulf Wars have never reached a critical level is that there is no draft to spread the threat around, to make the prospects of fighting more immediate for every young man and woman of a particular age. That's what having an all-volunteer army has done for us, and as early as 1970 the prospects of such an army were under discussion in this special, as well as various inequities already existing in the draft, and the possibilities of increased future deferments. Roger Peterson, the veteran ABC correspondent who was a native of the Twin Cities and started his television career at KSTP, is the primary reporter for a special that, as much as anything, shows us how much American culture has changed in the intervening 45 years.
***
Another program that highlights how times have changed is The Today Show from Thursday, as baseball writer Leonard Koppett discusses one of the most controversial aspects of the game: the reserve clause.
The reserve clause was a standard part of the player contract, and its very simplicity belied its contentiousness. It stated that once a player's contract with his team expired, the team continued to retain the rights to that player. Although he could not play for them unless he was under an active contract, the team could still trade him, send him to the minor leagues, sell him to another team, or release him. Only in the last case, if he was released, would he be free to sign with the team of his choice. In all other aspects his ability to earn a livelihood was entirely at the whim of the team holding his contract.
The clause was always controversial; for owners, it was the principal means by which salaries were held under control and teams held together. For players, it meant being locked into service with a club until and unless they decided otherwise. If the player did change clubs, he had little if any say in where he would wind up unless he'd been given his unconditional release. If that were to happen, he would become what was known as a "free agent," and it didn't happen very often. The reserve clause was often the target of reformers; when the Branch Rickey and the Continental League made noises about challenging the two existing major leagues, the abolition of the reserve clause was a fundamental part of their plan.
 |
| Flood v. Kuhn reaches the Supreme Court in 1972 |
*Blackmun also authored the equally incomprehensible opinion in Roe v. Wade, for what it's worth.
It would not be until 1975 that the reserve clause was essentially abolished, when an arbitrator ruled that any player who played without a contract for one season became a free agent. The players and owners would later agree to the terms of free agency in a future collective bargaining agreement.
***
This week's letters section is dominated by responses to an article in the May 16 issue written by Vice President Spiro Agnew*. The article, entitled "Another Challenge to the Television Industry," continues Agnew's attack on the objectivity of television news, which he describes as "manufactured news: revolutionary theater brought into millions of living rooms by the networks." "How much disorder, how many of these illegal demonstrations which pockmark the country would ever take place if the ever-present television camera were not there?" Agnew holds out hope that the networks will eventually understand their implicit obligations to the welfare of American society, that "most of the leaders of this great industry are willing to accept the responsibility of citizenship along with its benefits.
*It's the cover story, with the cover illustration painted by Norman Rockwell, no less.
*An argument similar to some of mine, in which I've cautioned that television is neither good nor bad, but morally neutral. However, I diverge from Butler, who writes that TV "has yet to make" human nature. True, but it has an immense power to shape it.
William H. Race of Palo Alto, California (home of Stanford University) takes issue with Agnew's accusation that television encourages demonstrations: "How then does he account for the past two decades of demonstrations in Latin America and Europe, where TV played little or no role? With that reasoning, one might as well blame television for the war it is covering in every news broadcast." Michael Woodhouse of Ewa Beach, Hawaii agrees, writing that Agnew ignores "the real cause for demonstrations: an immoral war or a polluted environment." Sally Ann Yater of Easton, Maryland counters that her family is living proof of Agnew's argument. "I wholeheartedly agree with the Vice President", she says, and adds that "my family goes for days, sometimes weeks, without finding anything worth-while on TV."
The letters section is usually a representative sampling of the correspondence TV Guide receives, which indicates how divided the country is on the issue and, by extension, illustrates the social turmoil enveloping the nation. Not unlike what we're going through today, perhaps, although the letter writers were a lot more civil about it back then.
***
As we know, the Emmys used to be presented at the conclusion of the first-run television season, rather than prior to the beginning of the new season. Therefore, we're not surprised to find the 1969-70 awards scheduled for Sunday, June 7 on ABC. For the last time, the show is bi-coastal, with awards presented both in Hollywood (hosted by Bill Cosby) and New York (Dick Cavett), and it's a most intriguing lineup of nominations. Once again, the categories are Drama, Comedy and Variety series, joined by Best New Series, Best Single Dramatic Program and Best Single Music/Variety Program (the later two comprised of special programs and regular episodes of a series).
Here are the nominees in various categories; as is usually the case here, I'll give you the winners at the end.
Best New Series:
The Bill Cosby Show (NBC)
The Forsyte Saga (NET)
Marcus Welby, M.D. (ABC)
Room 222 (ABC)
Sesame Street (NET)
Best Drama Series:
The Forsyte Saga (NET)
Ironside (NBC)
Marcus Welby, M.D. (ABC)
The Mod Squad (ABC)
The Name of the Game (NBC)
NET Playhouse (NET)
Best Comedy Series:
The Bill Cosby Show (NBC)
The Courtship of Eddie's Father (ABC)
Love, American Style (ABC)
My World and Welcome to It (NBC)
Room 222 (ABC)
Best Dramatic Actor:
Raymond Burr, Ironside (NBC)
Mike Connors, Mannix (CBS)
Robert Wagner, It Takes a Thief (ABC)
Robert Young, Marcus Welby, M.D. (ABC)
Best Dramatic Actress:
Joan Blondell, Here Come the Brides (ABC)
Susan Hampshire, The Forsyte Saga (NET)
Peggy Lipton, The Mod Squad (ABC)
Best Comedy Actor:
Bill Cosby, The Bill Cosby Show (NBC)
Lloyd Haynes, Room 222 (ABC)
William Windom, My World and Welcome to It (NBC)
Best Comedy Actress:
Hope Lange, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (NBC)
Elizabeth Montgomery, Bewitched (ABC)
Marlo Thomas, That Girl (ABC)
***
It doesn't seem as if we've discussed much actual TV this week, does it? In addition to the heavy issues we're looking at, it's because we've entered rerun season; almost every series has started showing repeats, while the summer replacement series haven't yet made their debut. Nonetheless, there are still some things to look at with our quick hits.
One carryover from the '60s is the variety show, and the airwaves are still full of them, from the long-running Jackie Gleason, Ed Sullivan, Andy Williams, Dean Martin and Red Skelton shows to the relative newcomers: Jim Nabors, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell. If you're a celebrity looking to make a TV appearance and you can't find one this week, you've got no excuses.
There are also specials: NET presents a "relevant" version of Hamlet on Friday night, one that mixes the ancient and the contemporary, while CBS presents a repeat showing of the latest "Peanuts" special, You're in Love, Charlie Brown, and ABC gives us the latest in their series of specials on The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.
As for sports, for the second week in a row we see the finale of horse racing's Triple Crown with the 101st running of the Belmont Stakes. There's no Triple Crown at stake this year, as High Echelon gallops through the slop to an upset victory. On Sunday afternoon, CBS' NFL Action presents films of the final American Football League game ever played - the 1969 Championship Game between the Raiders and Chiefs, which the Chiefs win on the way to victory in Super Bowl IV. Now that the NFL and AFL are officially merged, it's OK for NFL Action to admit the AFL exists, I guess.
Of course, we rely on the sitcoms to deal with the issues of the day: The Brady Bunch debates what to do with 94 books of trading stamps, The Governor and J.J. investigates dirty books, That Girl wants to get to the bottom of Don's Las Vegas marriage, and Tom tries to master the art of finger sandwiches on The Courtship of Eddie's Father. Not to be outdone, dramas get their moment in the sun: Ed gets blamed for a fatal beating on Ironside, Welby deals with a young leukemia patient on Marcus Welby, M.D., Vietnamese war victims are treated by Gannon on Medical Center, and the primetime soap Harold Robbins' The Survivors returns for summer reruns, giving us all a chance to see if it's as big a bomb as it was in first-run.
***
And now the answers to our Emmy quiz. If you're reading this on a laptop or tablet, just turn it upside down. If it's a desktop, turn yourself upside down.
TV
June 5, 2015
Bud Kraehling, R.I.P.
 |
| BUD KRAEHLING ON WCCO IN THE EARLY 50S |
Bud was part of the Twin Cities' top-ranked news program of the era, along with other bonafide legends of television: Dave Moore, the anchor, Hal Scott, the sportscaster. As much as you could depend on Minnesota weather to change if you just waited a moment, that's how dependable he was. He stared out at an time when being the weatherman meant "he would stick magnetic clouds on the wall and draw on transparencies with a grease pencil." By the time he retired from WCCO in 1996, it was done with Doppler radar. Don Shelby, himself part of Minnesota TV history as the longtime news anchor for WCCO, Bud's station, gave a very insightful look at what makes a television weatherman a success. “The person who does your weather has to be the most likable of the entire staff. Bud was that, a happy-go-lucky guy. But when weather becomes news and you have to tell people danger is approaching, he took that very seriously. When his face turned serious, the whole community stopped what they were doing and listened.”
He was much-loved in the community*, with his warm screen presence, his humor, his ability to deliver a tornado warning with a sense of reassurance. When WCCO celebrated one of its landmark anniversaries on a gala show before a live audience - this was back in the late '70s and early '80s era when all the networks were celebrating similar anniversaries - the mere mention of his name, as part of that all-star news team, brought everything to a screeching halt, the audience rising and cheering until Bud was forced to stand and acknowledge the response. That's what Bud Kraehling meant to Twin Cities television viewers. In thinking about him today I realize he reminded me of my grandfather, a feeling I'll bet others had as well.
*A columnist once said that he'd become such an institution, his profile had even started to look like the state of Minnesota.
Unless you're from Minnesota, though, you probably don't know who Bud Kraehling was - but it's likely you knew someone like him, a local television icon that was more like a friend of the family. It was a time when local stations were really broadcasters, rather than merely transmitters of network programming. Ernie Kovacs started out on local television, and so did Dave Garroway, and many many others. Stations produced their own talk and variety shows, and oftentimes after-school dance shows for teens. They created their own children's programs, both in the morning and the afternoon, creating some of the most memorable personalities in the history of television, shows and stars that are still revered today. They aired their own news and information shows, and I'm not talking about the kind of news and information we get today, with its corporate smoothness and blow-dried bots, all operating from the same carefully scripted banter prepared by the same consultants, with content that would barely qualify as news even for illiterates.
I'm not saying you don't have local personalities like that today - particularly among weathercasters, who've always been audience favorites - but Kraehling and the rest of them were different. As I say, even if you didn't know him, you knew someone like him. And so we come not to bury Bud Kraehling, but to praise him, and those like him. What we mourn is the death of the world of local television, and one of the last living reminders of that era.
Here are two videos of Bud Kraehling, talking about the early days of television:
And in this video, part of a retrospective on WCCO's wild, famed Bedtime Nooz (introduced by Kraehling), you get a brief glimpse at the 2:38 mark of Bud's deadpanned explanation of how he puts his weathercast together: The rest of this video, and others like it on YouTube, are examples of the brilliance that could come from local television.
Finally, from the great Museum of Broadcasting in suburban Minneapolis, here is a tribute to Bud.
June 3, 2015
Jackpot Bowling Starring Milton Berle: January 16, 1961
 |
| SOURCE: DREW FRIEDMAN |
Much the same can be said about entertainers. Bob Hope has often been cited as an example of someone who didn't know when to quit, with the result that his final appearances on television can be pretty embarrassing. And yet for those who love what they do, how difficult it must be to turn away, to admit to yourself what others might be saying behind your back, that you're all through, you don't have it any more. Bill Bradley, who was an all-star basketball player before going to the U.S. Senate, once said that an athlete owes it to himself to experience the entirety of his career, the downs as well as the ups, and that the worst thing he can do is walk away before he's sure there's nothing left in the tank. Put that way, it's hard for me to criticize anyone for staying too long at the fair. I just trust that when it becomes obvious I don't have it anymore as a writer, one of you out there will tell me.
All of this brings us, in a roundabout way, to this episode of Jackpot Bowling Starring Milton Berle from January, 1961. There's something just painful about the whole concept of this - Mr. Television reduced to being a warm-up act for a bowling show - and it doesn't get any better as the episode starts. The look and feel of it is all wrong: you've got a band, a live audience, a celebrity guest - everything you need for a variety show, except that your backdrop is a bowling alley. Then Berle walks out to great applause and starts in on his monologue, which has absolutely nothing to do with bowling; this one, just four days before the inauguration of John Kennedy, has a lot of political jokes. You wonder, watching it, whether Berle loved the limelight so much that he simply couldn't walk away, even to the point of fronting for a couple of bowlers.*
*This may well be; Berle wasn't known for having a small ego. However, according to the always-reliable Wikipedia, it was NBC, "desperate to burn off its 30-year contract with Berle" which the network had entered into during the peak of Berle's popularity, that insisted on putting Berle into the show. Berle himself had had enough after six months and left the show.
Berle's monologue carries with it the whiff of desperation, of a big-league comedian trying to fight his way out of the minors. (Of course, I've never been Berle's biggest fan, so I could be wrong here.) But the show actually isn't as embarrassing as all that. Chick Hearn, who would go on to great fame as the announcer for the perennial champion Los Angeles Lakers, does a very good job announcing the bowling matches that follow, and while the bowling isn't great compared to the power bowlers of today, it's not horrible. Between matches Berle interviews a celebrity, who then goes on to roll for his or her favorite charity. He then presents checks to the winner and loser at the end of the program.
The show I've included below is one of five that exist from Berle's time as host. The celebrity of the week is the British blonde bombshell Diana Dors, with her then-husband Richard "Dickie" Dawson in the audience. The interview is standard TV patter, nothing that you wouldn't see on Bob Hope's show, with Berle winding up as the butt of most of the jokes. The final match, between "King of the Hill" Jim St. John and challenger Al Thompson, generates some real tension, as the two trade strikes into an extra frame.
In short, the show isn't nearly as bad as the concept sounds, but there's something sad about it all the same. I suppose you could say that it indicates the growing maturity of television, that a man who was once the medium's biggest-ever star could, a little over ten years later, be reduced to this. And there's nothing wrong with looking at it that way, I suppose, but I'll close this with the same thought which I expressed at the beginning - it's painful to watch someone who's stuck around too long. Milton Berle would be a fixture on television for years afterward as a guest star on programs that belonged to others, but with the exception of an ill-advised comeback in 1967, he would never again helm a show of his own. "Mr. Television" was, indeed, long gone, as were the early days of TV.
June 1, 2015
What's on TV? Tuesday, June 4, 1968
I mentioned in Saturday's piece that primary coverage continued for far longer than anyone had expected, but this isn't just a reference to the assassination of RFK; the California primary wasn't decided until midnight Pacific time, and for the most part the networks continued their coverage until Kennedy had been projected as the winner and had made his victory speech. ABC, preparing to go off the air, held on while they tried to pin down the breaking news. NBC and CBS, according to most sources, had ended their coverage but returned as soon as it had become apparent what had happened. Considering that it would have been after 2 am in the Central time zone, I do wonder whether or not the local stations had time to sign off before the network broke in. Regardless, it was indescribable late night drama. But what was on the rest of the day in the Twin Cities? Let's take a look.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)