As promised in my comment below to Bobby, here's a little more on Eartha Kitt, who died late last month. Most people remember her as the Catwoman, or as the singer of the "sultry" (as all her obits seemed to describe it) "Santa Baby." She also dabbled a bit in politics, getting herself banned from the White House by LBJ during the Vietnam War. But here she is from the December 18, 1955 performance of Salome on CBS's Omnibus.
(N.B.: As the TV Guide close-up mentions, this is the original Oscar Wilde play, from which Strauss' opera was based.)
We haven't dipped into the Hadley TV Guide archives for awhile, and I can't think of a better time to do it than Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving 1962 fell on November 22, which would take on an entirely new and darker significance a scant 12 months later. Holiday programming actually started earlier in the week, on Saturday, when Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers (8:00 Central, ABC) celebrated with an evening of Thanksgiving music, including "Thank the Lord for This Thanksgiving Day," "Bless This House," and "By the Waters of Minnetonka." (Bet you didn't know there were so many Thanksgiving songs, did you?)
Perry Como's Thanksgiving show aired on Wednesday (8:00, NBC), which TV Guide referred to as "Thanksgiving Eve." Thomas Mitchell was the special musical guest, and the theme for the program - a fitting one - was "There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays."
Ah, Thanksgiving Day itself. And what would it be without parades and football? Well, there was plenty of it on Thanksgiving 1962, starting at 9 am. NBC, as is the case to this day, carried the Macy's parade. Only two hours back then as opposed to three hours today - I wonder if they cut out the fluff and the awful lip-synched production numbers? Guess not; the broadcast started off with a half-hour, three-ring circus in front of the store. Donald Duck was the new balloon that year, and Bud Palmer and Chris Schenkel, a couple of well-known sportscasters, were the announcers. I find that interesting, considering that traditionally the hosts of the Today show anchored the parade coverage.
CBS's coverage also started at 9 and ran for two hours. Captain Kangaroo was in New York, hosting the overall coverage of three traditional parades: New York, Philadelphia and Detroit. But here's the interesting thing: all three parades were treated as news events, and anchored by newsmen. Douglas Edwards covered New York, Robert Trout and Gene Crane in Philadelphia, and Dallas Townsend and Bob Murphy were in Detroit. These were all well-known newsmen of the time, although you might not remember them today. Again, I wonder if they were forced to read the excruciatingly bad copy that that parade announcers do today? I doubt it.
When I was a kid, I loved watching these parades, particularly CBS - after all, more parades. They were all sponsored by department stores: in addition to Macy's, Gimbel's sponsored the Philadelphia parade, and Hudson's underwrote Detroit. It was good business for the stores, and good publicity. (For many years CBS would also cover the Santa Claus parade in Canada, where Eaton's department store was the sponsor.)
Of course, most of these stores are gone now, as the shopping centers of large cities moved out of downtown and into the suburbs. The parades are still around, with new sponsors (IKEA is the title sponsor in Philly), and the Detroit parade is syndicated nationally, while others are shown locally. CBS and NBC both dedicate their entire parade broadcasts to New York, and we've shifted our attention to Chicago, where WGN provides national coverage of the McDonald's Thanksgiving Day parade, which was moved to Thanksgiving from an early December date a few years ago.
But I digress. There's more to Thanksgiving television than parades, right? There's football! CBS went directly from their parade coverage to the big NFL game of the day, the traditional Turkey Day matchup between Detroit and Green Bay. The 1962 game was one of the most famous games ever played on Thanksgiving; one of the greatest Packer teams ever came into this game undefeated, only to be crushed by the Lions 26-14, with Packers QB Bart Starr sacked a staggering 11 times.
As soon as the Detroit-Green Bay tilt was over, the network switched to Austin, Texas for coverage of the traditional Texas-Texas A&M matchup. These two teams played for many years on Thanksgiving Day, and have sporatically continued the tradition in recent years (including this year) on ESPN. If you were in the mood for a little AFL football, you could catch the New York Titans (now the Jets) playing the Broncos in Denver at 2 pm on ABC.
There was some other holiday fare, however. Pat Boone had a variety special at 4:30 on NBC, with guest stars Patti Page, Elaine Dunn, and Peter, Paul & Mary (!). Also on NBC, at 6:30, was The Bell Telephone Hour Thanksgiving show, starring John Raitt (father of Bonnie), Martha Wright and Mahalia Jackson, and featuring an appearance by poet and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg. Now, for our younger readers those names might not mean much, but trust me - this was some big-name talent appearing on this show.
And that was it for Thanksgiving, 1962.
November 22 is the earliest Thanksgiving can fall in the year. In 1963 Thanksgiving was on November 28, the latest it can fall. It was six days after JFK was assassinated, three days after he was buried, one day after LBJ addressed a joint session of Congress. Parades were still held and people came, although nobody seemed that excited about it. It's for the children, the organizers said, in explanation for why the parades went on. Everyone agreed that the diversion was probably a good thing. The special programming was over; football games were played, entertainment specials were broadcast, life went on.
November 22, 1962. Nobody could possibly have anticipated what things would be like 365 days later. But that was all in the future, and people lived with what they had, which was Thanksgiving Day: parades, food and football.
Come to think of it, that's not a bad thing to have. We don't know what the future holds, which is why we're thankful for what the present gives us.
It's been awhile since we've taken a look back through the pages of TV Guide, and since there's not much else going on right now why don't we open one up and see what's inside?
The latest addition to the Hadley collection is this issue from December 28, 1963, covering New Year's Day, 1964. On the cover you see the 17-year-old Patty Duke, star of The Patty Duke Show, in which she plays twin cousins Patty and Cathy Lane. This show was a modest success, running for three seasons and producing a memorable theme song. The article itself (written by an unbylined author) wasn't particularly flattering, commenting on Duke's lack of personality; one might say, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, that there was no there there. Of course, given what we know about Duke's difficult childhood, it probably shouldn't come as a surprise that she came across as little more than a programmed robot with no independent thoughts of her own.
It's interesting, however, to see the different attitude TV Guide had about it's subjects. Back in the day, TV Guide wasn't merely a shill for the stars' publicity machines; at the same time, the writers often appeared to go out of their way to take shots at those whom they profiled, either outright or through snide insinuation.
Take, for instance, Richard Gehman's piece on Joey Bishop, whose sitcom was entering its third season. Bishop had by that time garnered a reputation as being difficult to work with, a trait which Gehman is eagar to analyze. Speaking of the two major influences on Bishop's career - Frank Sinatra and Jack Paar - Gehman comments, "Some of their arrogance - the necesary cockiness of deep insecurity - has rubbed off on him." I'm sure Bishop appreciated the free psychoanalysis. Again, while Gehman may be making an astute observation on Bishop, with comments such as this peppered throughout the article, it appears as if he takes particular pleasure in doing so.
Here's another article on an actress named Katherine Crawford. Only 19, her television career has just started, with appearances on programs such as Kraft Suspense Theatre and Alfred Hitchcock. She's cute enough, and apparently had talent, but her major advantage was that she was the daughter of Roy Huggins, creator of The Fugitive, The Invaders, and other TV hits. In the title of the article (also anonymously authoried), Crawford proclaims, "I'll be acting till I'm 70." As you can see from her IMDB profile, her last credit was in the series Gemini Man in 1976. Well, she made it to 32, anyway. And by the way, I don't mean for that comment to be snarky - she could well have gone on to a life more productive and more fulfilling than most of us. It's just that it never ceases to be fascinating how short the lifespan of "the next big thing" can sometimes be.
There is, for example, a program ABC broadcast on Saturday, December 28 entitled "Hollywood Deb Star Ball 1964," in which we meet "the lovely Deb [for debutante] Stars, slated for future stardom by major Hollywood studios." Well, let's take a look. There's Meredith MacRae, daughter of Gordon and Sheila MacRae, who just happened to be the hosts of the show. She did pretty well for herself. There's the aforementioned Katherine Crawford. There's Susan Seaforth, who as Susan Seaforth Hayes became a huge soap opera star. One of her Days of Our Lives co-stars, Brenda Benet, who was perhaps as well known for being Bill Bixby's ex-wife, was there as well. Linda Evans, star of Dynasty, was one of the Deb Stars, as was Chris Noel, whose remarkable life led her from a modest Hollywood career to her vocation as a radio host and entertainer stationed in Vietnam for the Armed Forces Network, travelling to locations considered too dangerous for Bob Hope and other celebrities. Claudia Martin, Deano's daughter, was one of the ten starlets, and I think it's safe to say that her bloodlines were her biggest claim to Hollywood fame. And then there were Shelly Ames, Anna Capri and Amadee Chabot, who scored minor successes at best. Why do some careers take off while others flounder? Who knows.
Remember Guy Lombardo? He was on hand, as usual, on New Year's Eve, entertaining with his Royal Canadians from Grand Central Station in New York City. Remember when football bowl games were all played in the daytime? Back in 1964 they were, as the Orange (Auburn vs. Nebraska), Sugar (Alabama vs. Mississippi) and Cotton (#1 Texas vs. #2 Navy) were all played at the same time, acting as joint opening acts for the Rose (Illinois vs. Washington), which started at 3:45 Central time and ended the college football season. And what about all those other bowl games that came before New Year's Day? Well, during this week there was only one - the Gator (Air Force vs. North Carolina), on Saturday afternoon. As you can see, service academy football was still big back in the early 60s.
On Sunday, December 29, it's the television premiere on ABC of the documentary "The Making of the President 1960," based on the Pulitzer winner by Theodore White. And speaking of which, it was only a little more than a month since JFK's assassination, and a letter writer notes her appreciation for the television industry's "finest hour" of broadcasting coverage. I would imagine the holiday season might have been a little more somber that year than in years past.
As I have said often, TV Guide is - or was - one of the prime cultural indicators of the past. For the cultural archaeologist, it's like opening a treasure chest. It reminds us not only of days gone by, the things that were, but, as in the case of the Deb Ball, some of the things - or careers - that never were. And it is nice, isn't it, to sometimes be able to look to the future in blissful ignorance of what we know is to come? A pity that we can't be more optimistic like that all the time, but then, times have changed. And not always for the best.
'Tis the season for Christmas television viewing as well as gift-giving ideas. In this piece from 2004, we take a look at something that fits the bill in both areas: the long-forgotten program that was once considered a Christmas treasure, Tennessee Ernie Ford's 1963 The Story of Christmas.
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Now available on DVD is the landmark 1963 special The Story of Christmas, hosted by Tennessee Ernie Ford and featuring music by the Roger Wagner Chorale.
Well, they're all gone now, the Rat Pack. Frank, Deano, Sammy, Peter (we hardly knew ye) and now Joey. And there isn't really anybody to replace them, is there?
Peter Lawford was probably the least well-known of the five, but one could argue that he also had the least visibility within the Pack. Most people, when they think of the Rat Pack, think of the Vegas shows - Dean doing his drunk act, Sammy jumping into Dean's arms when he wasn't tearing up the stage with his singing, dancing and impressions, and Frank being, well, Frank.
With a trio of larger-than-life personalities like that, it was easy for a laid back performer like Joey Bishop to fade into the background. And yet Sinatra knew better. He called Bishop "The Hub of the Big Wheel," and he was right. Joey Bishop was the professional, the sane one in a portrait of joyful insanity, the glue that held the whole thing together. Watch his marvelous comic timing when you get a chance, his deadpan expressions, his easy way with one-liners. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that Joey Bishop was the last of the Rat Pack, the one who outlived them all. As long as Joey was alive, it was somehow possible to believe that the Rat Pack still lived, that we were all young and hip, finger-snapping and swinging our way through life.
There was more to Joey Bishop than the Rat Pack, of course. He was a successful nightclub comedian, a not-so-successful sitcom star, and a longtime talk show host. For a generation, in fact, he was probably best known as Johnny Carson's perennial substitute, pinch-hitting for him over 200 times. And, in fact, from 1967 through 1969 he went head-to-head five nights a week as Carson's competition, hosting his own talkfest on ABC. (Fact number one: Joey's sidekick was the young Regis Philben. Fact number two: the first guest on Joey's show was none other than California Governor Ronald Reagan, who due to a scheduling snafu was 14 minutes late to the live telecast.)
The February 24, 1968 issue of TV Guide offers a profile of Bishop that provides us with a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the talk show. However, it also gives us a portrait that is at odds with the conventional wisdom surrounding Bishop's show. For the conventional wisdom is that Carson was insurmountable, that Bishop's show was merely one in a long line of failed attempts to challeng the King of Late Night (preceded by Crane, soon to be followed by Cavett, Griffin, Thicke, Sajak, Rivers, Hall, et al). Brooks and Marsh, in their indespensible Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, state that "Joey limped along for more than two years, never posting much of a threat" to Carson. According to CNN's obit, "despite an impressive guest list and outrageous stunts, Bishop couldn't dent Carson's ratings." And that, as I said, has become the established school of thought.
Except, according to Richard Warren Lewis' TV Guide story, it wasn't necessarily so. It was true that Bishop premiered on April 17, 1967, and that it wasn't met by a great deal of enthusiasm. (One-third of ABC's affiliates chose not to air the show at its premiere.) The critics of the time pronounced it a "turkey."
But, slowly, it started to turn around. As Lewis notes, "Six months after that shaky start, Bishop was seriously challenging Carson both in the battle for ratings and late-night advertisers' dollars." (Emphasis added.) According to the industry experts, Bishop had found a unique niche, a "totally different audience" that the urbane Carson (who, ironically, was thought to face the same challenge when he replaced Jack Paar, who at the time was seen as far more urbane than Carson). While Carson appealed to the sophisticated viewer, Bishop's audience resided in the outlying areas, the Bible Belt, flyover country.
Big names of the time such as Gregory Peck and Omar Sharif appeared on Bishop's show. Paar himself came out of semiretirement to trade jokes for an hour. When David Janssen, on the night of The Fugitive's final episode, appeared live with Joey, the ratings topped Carson's in New York for the first time. The picture painted by Lewis' article is an optimistic one, of a show on the rise, a show to be taken seriously as a threat to Carson's five-year run of supremacy.
Granted, it must not have lasted. By the end of the next year Bishop was gone, replaced for 1970 by Dick Cavett. I wonder why. Was it only ratings - had Bishop's numbers reached a plateau in 1968, only to fall back? Could it be that ABC, taking a page from CBS's strategy of the late 60s, had decided to cast aside the less demographically appealing (not to mention lucrative) rural and Midwest audiences and challenge Carson's hold on that urbane market? (In fact, ABC was to dump the still-successful but demographically-challenged Lawrence Welk show in 1971.) Did Bishop himself tire of the talk show grind cutting into his successful nightclub bookings? I'm sure the answer lies somewhere within a wealth of printed material that's probably buried on microfilm in some dusty library.
Lewis' story itself is not without its flaws; he makes a point of referring to Bishop's custom of wearing a black tie for every show since a priest had presented it to him on opening night, yet on the cover of the issue, Bishop is pictured behind the host's desk, interviewing a guest, wearing a red tie. So I suspect that, as is so often the case, the truth lies somewhere in between.
One thing is sure, however. Bishop's show was not the unmitigated disaster, the eternally ratings-challenged program that many make it out to be. And so perhaps we should be a bit kinder to the memory of Joey Bishop's talk show, and smile as indeed we do whenever we remember his presence with the Rat Pack, and remember what it feels like to be young again.
UPDATE: My good friend Badda-Blogger has a nice tribute piece to Joey as well - well worth reading, as he usually is.
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While we're at it, we should note that Deborah Kerr also died. She was nominated six times for Best Actress, yet only won an honorary award from the Academy. You probably remember her dancing with Yul Brynner in The King and I, or groping with Burt Lancaster on the beach in From Here to Eternity. As CNN put it, she "played virtually every part imaginable from murderer to princess to a Roman Christian slave to a nun." She was married to the novelist Peter Viertel, author of White Hunter, Black Heart (based on the making of the movie The African Queen; later made into one of Clint Eastwood's best non-Dirty Harry movies).
Deborah Kerr had a great career in some of the biggest movies of the time, and she did it with class.
Through what I can assure you is no fault of my own, I seem to have become a character in a long-running soap opera at the Recovering Dissident Catholic site (with graphic embellishments by Abbey Roads). It’s flattering, to be sure, to be cast as your own character. And far be it from me to discourage comparisons with such sartorial luminaries such as Amos Burke, John Steed, or even What's My Line's John Daly.
But this does bring us around to the golden age of soap opera on television. You don’t see many soaps on TV nowadays, and in fact why would they be needed? Between Opera and Springer and The View and all the rest of the daytime talkers, your dramatic and lascivious needs are pretty well taken care of.
Such was not always the case, however. There was a time, back in the day, when daytime television was ruled by a combination of sudsers and game shows (now also largely forgotten, alas), with a few movies and variety shows thrown in for good measure.
The April 27, 1957 issue of TV Guide (with Groucho Marx on the cover) gives us a fair measure of what the average housewife might be able to choose from. (And housewives were the primary audience back then, in the age of stay-at-home moms, when men dominated the workplace and televisions weren’t yet a staple of college dorms and common areas.)
Soap operas had started back on radio, of course, and many of them made the transition to early television (including a lawyer who was once a character in The Edge of Night – Perry Mason). The Guiding Light was one of them, although originally the show had something of a religious, inspirational subtext – the guiding light, after all, was pretty much what you’d expect.
The soapers were broadcast live, back then, five days a week. They even provided listings in the TV Guide as well, if you can imagine that. Here’s a week’s worth of Guiding Light, for example:
Mon: Bill goes to see Dr. Fletcher. Tues: Dick tries to advise Paul about his attitude toward the patients. Wed: Bill tells Elsie not to let Albert know she is aware of his condition. Thurs: Dick tells Marie he is taking Kathy as a patient. Fri: Robin comes to visit Meta.
There you have it. No need to even tune in; you know the whole week right there. (By contrast, yesterday’s listing: Natalia alerts Gus that Harley knows that they slept together.)
As you could tell, doctors (and nurses) were popular subjects for soap operas. Some, like The Doctors and General Hospital, were primarily about them (at least at the start). But almost every serial had a doctor or two somewhere in the mix.
So let’s look back at what you might expect to see that week.
CBS was the king of the soapers back then, with Brighter Day (Rev. Dennis talks to Max and tries to explain Grayling’s resentment), Secret Storm (with an opening theme based on the second movement of Brahms' Concerto in A Minor), The Edge of Night, Search for Tomorrow, The Valiant Lady, Love of Life, The Guiding Light, and As the World Turns (which was, of course, the program interrupted in November 1963 by the news of JFK’s assassination). NBC was in the mix as well with Modern Romances, although they relied more on variety and game shows, and their prime afternoon feature was the hour-long “Matinee Theater,” which sounds as if it belonged more properly in prime time. (Sample program: “The Professionals,” by Stan Cutler. A professional golfer employed by a country club is stunned to learn it will no longer finance his expensive trips to golf tourneys. He has lost too many matches to make it worthwhile.) ABC also gave the nod to movies, with Afternoon Film Festival, and cartoons (Mickey Mouse, Rocky and Bullwinkle, etc). Both NBC and ABC would follow suit eventually, however, introducing such classics as The Doctors, Another World, Dark Shadows (a story in itself), One Life to Live, and a daytime version of Peyton Place.
You might wonder how they were able to squeeze so many soap operas into the daytime schedule, back then. Well, it was because most of them were only 15 minutes long. It was a big deal back in the late 70s and early 80s when some of the most popular serials expanded to an hour, but it was just as big a step in the 60s when many of them went from 15 to 30 minutes. The longer form meant that more than one storyline a day could be explored, and the hectic back-and-forth cutting of the modern soap opera can probably be traced back to that original 15 minute timeframe.
So, as is the case with so much of television nowadays, the daytime lineup has changed greatly over the years. And not for the better, I’d suggest. With 150 channels to choose from, anyone can probably come up with a better lineup than that which was available with only 4 or 5 channels – but that means there’s a lot more dreck out there as well. Which is a shame, because many of the plot-driven soaps of the era, with five shows a week and no reruns, required a fairly high quality of writing and acting. Relatively speaking, of course; I don’t think anyone would ever confuse The Edge of Night with Playhouse 90 (a reference for you old-timers like me out there). But there’s no doubt there was a style in those days which is missing today.
Unless, of course, we can produce more writers like Cathy of Alex. With her, the soap opera might make a comeback after all.
We should have seen it coming.
In the February 17, 1968 issue of TV Guide, buried in the yellow "TV Teletype" section at the back of the magazine, was the following brief notation:
NBC's "Heidi" special, which was filmed in Europe, will be shown in the two-hour form instead of the originally planned 90 minutes.
There were more tantalizing clues - the color photo spread of the Heidi cast shooting in the Swiss Alps in the November 9 issue (ironically, an issue including an article entitled, "Inside Story of a Football Telecast"), although it probably didn't attract much notice at the time. And then in the November 16 issue there's the show itself: Heidi, on Sunday, November 17, 1968 at 6:00 Central on NBC, starring Michael Redgrave, Maximillian Schell and Jean Simmons in "Johanna Spyri's story classic." Almost unnoticed – printed with virtually no fanfare – was the game itself.
3:00 Pro Football. New York Jets vs. Raiders at Oakland. Curt Gowdy and Al DeRogatis report. (Live)
The rest of the Heidi Game, as it came to be known, is history. And so was television sports as we knew it.
The Heidi Game, by itself, didn’t spell the end. Mike Celizic’s wonderful book The Biggest Game of Them All illustrates how the 1966 Notre Dame-Michigan State #1 vs. #2 showdown profoundly changed the way in which television looked at sports. This game, created a demand for media credentials unsurpassed in sports to that time (it took the Super Bowl years before it became as big a media sensation), caused Catholic churches throughout the nation to change confession times so as not to conflict with the game, and became the first sporting event telecast live via satellite in Hawaii.
It may be hard to believe now, but through the 60s and early 70s the televising of college football was a closely regulated business. Teams were limited to the number of appearances they could make on TV each season, and even the biggest games were frequently seen on a regional, rather than national, basis. The Notre Dame-Michigan State game, which was hyped to a level that would be remarkable even today, threatened to change everything.
It was seen as a single-handed threat to small or underperforming college teams. (Why would anyone go to watch such a team when they could stay at home and watch the big boys duke it out?) It created fears that Notre Dame might run off and get their own TV network. (As indeed they did, although it took almost 30 years for it to happen.) By bowing to the demands of the viewing audience and showing the top teams week after week (regardless of how many times they appeared), major schools were certain to gain a recruiting advantage in what was rapidly becoming a national, rather than regional, playing field.
In the end, the two teams settled nothing, playing to a 10-10 tie. But as far as television was concerned, the game had taken it to the brink. It would take perhaps one more event to push it over the edge.
Enter Heidi.
The uproar over the game was immense, not only in the immediate aftermath but in the days to follow. It was a featured story on NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley report. It made the front page of the New York Times. For the American Football League, still fighting for respectability and acceptance, it was a public relations bonanza – seldom before had the league gotten the kind of attention it now basked in. (And things would get even better less than two months later, with Joe Namath leading the aforementioned Jets to their shocking Super Bowl victory over the Colts.)
The message to TV from the public came through loud and clear – don’t mess with our sports.
The results were mixed. TV did indeed learn the power and popularity (not to mention profitability) of sports, with the result that they started messing with it more than ever – games starting at the break of dawn or the middle of the night, summer sports in the winter and winter sports in the summer, endless commercial breaks, stadiums constructed around TV sightlines – even leagues created in partnership with networks (the XFL) or partially owned by networks (Arena Football). Entire networks were devoted entirely to the telecasting of sporting events. Leagues started their own television networks. It wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to suggest that sports became, to a great extent, a wholly owned subsidiary of Corporate America (see Rollerball for further details).
Oh, there was never a repeat of the Heidi Game – at least not exactly. For while an NFL game would never again be cut off before its completion (unless your home team was playing in the second half of a doubleheader, but that’s another story), other sports aren't necessarily as fortunate, as the NHL found out last Saturday afternoon. The NHL learned this lesson the hard way, when the fifth game of the Ottawa-Buffalo series was unceremoniously dumped by NBC (yes, the same network of Heidi) to make way for the Preakness pre-race show. The game was headed for overtime, you see, and as any fan of the NHL can tell you, a playoff overtime game can last five minutes or five hours. For those die-hard fans who wanted to see just how this game wound up, they had to hightail it over to Versus, the NHL’s cable home. If they had access to Versus, that is. Moral of the story: money talks. The NFL has it. The NHL doesn’t. (The NHL hasn't been the only victim of this kind of programming, as this Wikipedia entry shows.)
Now, it may be a stretch to accuse one little girl of causing all this, but then again it might not be such a stretch after all. What is safe to say is that the Heidi Game changed the way television perceived sports, and in some fundamental way sports has never been the same.
And nobody could possibly have guessed it at the time, reading the pages of TV Guide.
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On that topic, a big shout-out to Billy Ingram at TVParty for his kind link to our site and his nice words about us. Keep up the great work, Billy, and we look forward to staying in touch!
Yes, it's time once again for everyone's favorite feature, The Cultural Archaeologist. Let's get started.
A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned the passing of the entertainment and game show icon Kitty Carlisle. Well, in the November 29, 1975 edition of TV Guide there's an article about Kitty written by Peter Funt, son of the legendary TV host Allen Funt. (If you're old enough to remember Candid Camera, you'll know who we mean.) "The only way to see Kitty Carlisle in the same dress twice," the article proclaims, "is to watch reruns of 'To Tell the Truth.' " Funt's story is a charming portrait of an entertainer who takes her job seriously, as well as her responsibility to her fans, and radiates class all the way. "She is one actress who still refuses to appear in public without beautiful clothes, ornate jewelry and a carefully styled coiffure." Particularly humorous is her description of her "pit crew," the wardrobe people responsible for helping her change in the ten minutes between shows (the five-a-week show was taped in a single afternoon). "Every once in a while, I feel like I'm a car in the pits at Indianapolis. Somebody changes the oil, kicks the tires - you know, pats the hair and shoves me back out on the stage."
In the same issue we read about the latest presentation of Hallmark Hall of Fame, an adaptation of Maxwell Anderson's play Valley Forge, starring Richard Basehart as George Washington, leading his troops through the incredibly harsh winter of 1777, trying to hold his struggling new country together. Now, this is in the days before Hall of Fame became a lacrymose, diabetes-inducing disease-of-the-week picture, oozing sentimentality for it's Oprahfied audience. Back then, the Hallmark Hall of Fame was synonymous with quality. Remember their motto - "When you care enough to send the very best"? Can't say the same nowadays, either in their cards or their TV programs.
At 10:30 p.m. Central time on Saturday, November 29, NBC pre-empts Saturday Night Live for a basketball game - but not just any game. It's one of the biggest regular-season college basketball games in many years, defending national champion UCLA playing undefeated, top-ranked Indiana at St. Louis (supposedly a neutral site, but in reality swarming with Hoosier fans cheering their team on). Note the starting time - way out of prime time. Television hadn't quite figured out prime time sports yet, and although everyone realized how big this game was, they still thought it might be a drag on ratings, which is why they stuck it on in such a strange time spot. (The game was telecast live, which means tip-off was at 10:30 local time in St. Louis.) I have extremely bitter personal memories of this game; not because of the result - I was an Indiana fan, and they crushed UCLA 84-64 - but because the local NBC affiliate where I lived didn't show the game. They had a movie on instead, Bridge on the River Kwai, but this had nothing to do with substituting a quality movie for televised sports. It had everything to do with a parochial attitude toward their programming, and a desire to retain as much advertising revenue as possible. When we moved out of that area in 1978, they still had yet to show an episode of Saturday Night Live, never showed the second half of Sunday NFL doubleheaders, and preempted NBC programming with pernicious distain. The FCC should have yanked their license. They're owned by a larger media conglomerate now, and while I would probably regret the loss of local programming, I can't say it'd be a big loss.
Of course this issue marked the start of the Christmas programming season (as it was still called back then), so both Rudolph and Bing Crosby (with special guest Fred Astaire) make appearances, along with a host of lesser Christmas cartoons. Ah, with Thanksgiving just concluded, you could just feel the holiday spirit in the air.
There are other things of note in this issue - some quite interesting bits on the media by Pat Buchanan (who, amazingly enough, has a column in TV Guide at this point) and Edwin Newman. Since this has been a pretty lighthearted piece, I think we'll reserve those thoughts for their own space, and we'll come back to it later this week.
And, by the way, the cover story of this issue features Tony Curtis, star of a new TV series. Does anyone out there still recall that series, McCoy?
We're back from our brief Christmas break, and just in time to give you the wrap-up of Christmas week programming for 1964 as seen in the pages of TV Guide. I've really enjoyed doing this summary; in going through these old publications you dutifully note what you read, but sharing them with others somehow brings them more alive for yourself.
Friday, December 25, 1964 started with Kukla, Fran and Ollie celebrating Christmas for the entire two hours of the Today show. Captain Kangaroo read "Christmas Is a Time of Giving." The morning rerun of the Andy Griffith show was Christmas-oriented, as was those on The Real McCoys and Father Knows Best. At 10:30 Channel 11 ran The Joyful Hour, with Pat O'Brien and his family introducing a dramatization of the Nativity. (This show can still be seen at Christmastime on EWTN, by the way.)
At 11:30 a.m., NBC presented a live church service from the National Cathedrial in Washington, D.C. This program of lessons and carols was a tradition on NBC for many years, before going into syndication. I wonder if it's still on TV anywhere today? Opposite this were Ernie Ford's Christmas show on his daily half-hour program on ABC, and a film feature on "Christmas Around the World" on Channel 11.
Daytime interview programs are nothing new - the actress Lois Leppart had one on ABC in the mid-60s, and on this day she told the Christmas story. Even the program that followed it, Day in Court, concluded it's week-long story "hours before Christmas." At 2:00 p.m. ABC showed the North-South Shrine college football all-star game from Miami, a game that isn't played anymore but back then was a staple of Christmas day. The Bachelor Father rerun opposite it on Channel 11 was (you guessed it) holiday-themed.
At 3:30 Channel 4 presented a half hour of Christmas music by the Gustavus Adolphus College Choir, and they followed up at 4:00 with the kids show Axel and His Dog presented its annual Christmas show. And at 4:30 they finished the block with the Blackpool Tower Circus from England.
There wasn't much on in the evening, and what there was was mostly on the educational channel, 2 (what a difference from now!) - at 8:30 p.m. Channel 2 had Christmas in Tyrol, a repeat of a Christmas concert from the previous year, hosted by Fr. Richard Schuler, now our pastor emeritus at St. Agnes. Channel 5 had their annual telecast of a Christmas skating show from the Minneapolis Ice Center. At 9:00 Channel 2 was back with holiday music from the University of Minnesota Men's Glee Club, at 10 they presented a medieval play on the journeys of the shepards and the Wise Men, and at 10:30 they showed a repeat of Monday's music show with the St. Olaf choir. Finally, at 10:30 Channel 4 had a movie called The Old Testament, and I'm not sure whether this qualifies as Christmas programming or not!
And so Christmas week came to an end. What kind of conclusions can we draw about what they saw on TV back in 1964?
Yes, times have changed, haven't they? This was fun for us - hope you enjoyed this trip back into the past as well!
Christmas Eve was a day of great excitement in our household - or rather, I should call it "the day before Christmas." Being a great stickler for detail, as most children are, I insisted that "Christmas Eve" didn't start until that night. That was when the family came over for dinner, when we had our tree, when I would watch some of the church services on TV. That was Christmas Eve, and until then it was merely the day before Christmas.
I was reminded of that last night as we were watching The Bishop's Wife with Cary Grant, Loretta Young and David Niven (and not that awful remake The Preacher's Wife, which misses the boat entirely). In it, the daughter mentions that "Christmas Eve will be here soon." And indeed it will, but for the next few hours it's still the day before Christmas.
The Bishop's Wife wasn't on TV on Thursday, December 24, 1964, but there were plenty of other Christmas programs to watch, according to TV Guide. (See our previous posts on Christmas week programming for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday). During the first hour of NBC's Today show, Hugh Downs reports on how GIs in Europe will be spending Christmas. On Captain Kangaroo, the Captain reads "The Night Before Christmas," as illustrated by Grandma Moses. A rerun of Father Knows Best on ABC at 11 am shows that Robert Young has concerns that the family has made Christmas too commercial and plans an old-fashioned Yule. (Once again showing that there's nothing new under the sun.)
At 12:20 Channel 5's Dialing for Dollars presented another local singing group, The Crosier choristers, with several Christmas songs. Channel 11's "Matinee Movie" at 1pm is Alice in Wonderland (the non-animated version), presented for all the children who've been out of school the entire week. At 4:00, Channel 4's Around the Town has the Lutheran Brotherhood choir singing "holiday" music. Seeing as how Lutheran Brotherhood was a fraternal insurance organization for Lutherans, I'm betting at least some of those songs were religious ones..
At 6:00 Channel 2 continued their Christmas music programs with a half hour from the Holy Childhood Boys Choir, and here I'll interject a personal note. Holy Childhood, which is where we'll be attending Midnight Mass tonight, has always had a reputation for an outstanding music program (one of their first music directors was the famed liturgical composer Richard Proulx). In the pre-Vatican II days their music was supplied exclusively by a choir of men and boys; after Vatican II, girls from the K-8 school and women were added. To this day the music program in the school remains one of the best around, and it's a parish that takes religious and liturgical music very seriously. (We'll report on the Midnight Mass early next week.)
Prime time is a mixed bag, as the networks are assuming that many families are getting together, and probably not watching much TV. The Flintstones (ABC, 6:30) has a Christmas episode (never could figure that out, how cavemen living BC would celebrate Christmas. Who knew?). At 7:30 Channel 2 has more Christmas music, "Carols from Around the world" by the College of St. Theresa, and they continue at 8:00 with A Child's Christmas in Utah and at 8:30 with a concert by the Monk's Choir of St. John's University. Dr. Kildare's Christmas show (7:30, NBC) deals with a alcoholic brought into the ER on Christmas Eve. George, the nominal patriarch of the house governed by Shirley Booth's maid Hazel (8:30, NBC), takes a page from Robert Young's playbook, deciding that Christmas is too commercial. At 9:00 on CBS, the legal drama The Defenders doesn't have a Christmas show per se, but during the run of this very ernest show, they always presented a comedy at Christmas, and this is no exception. (On the same page is an ad stating that "The Publisher And Staff Of TV GUIDE Magazine Extend Best Wishers To You And Your Family For A Happy Holiday Season.")
At 10:30 CBS presents The Sounds of Christmas, hosted by Baroness Maria Von Trapp (that's right, the Von Trapp from The Sound of Music) coming from the Von Trapp family lodge in stowe, Vermont (and presented by the National Council of Catholic Men). A musical Christmas Card is NBC's show, featuring Sammy Davis Jr. and the Norman Luboff Choir.
At 11:00 (midnight on the East Coast) the church services start. On CBS it's a Protestant service (all the religious affiliations of these church services are carefully noted) from St. Luke's Lutheran Church in New York. What's really interesting about TV Guide listings at this point in history is that they can carry so much detail, because compared to our time there is so little programming on. For this service all the music to be performed is listed - "The Shepherd's Carol," "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silent," "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," and "What You Gonna Call Yo' Pretty Little Baby?" The pastor of the service is Albert L. Neibacher.
Prior to its annual coverage of the Papal Mass at the Vatican, NBC had traditionally covered the Midnight mass at St. Patrick's in New York. This year the Pontifical Solemn High Mass is celebrated by Bishop John Maguire, with a taped message from Cardinal Spellman. I find the listing for this Mass particularly interesting, and quite sad in a way, for in the description is one of those wonderful and terrible lines which carries so much history, and which - unknown at the time - portents much heartbreak, misery and turmoil:
"The new liturgy will be used, with some of the Mass sung in English, some in Latin."
It's not the Novus Ordo - yet - but it's the Tridentine in the vernacular, and things will never be the same again.
At midnight ABC presents taped coverage of the Solemn Pontifical Mass at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, celebrated by Bishop Sheen with music by the Marist College Choir. The independent Channel 11 has Amos 'n' Andy, with Andy taking his goddaughter Christmas shopping. And Channel 4 brings this wonderful day to an end with the Mora High School Choir singing traditional Christmas songs and carols (and I'll bet those carols are gone from their playlist now), and at 12:30 a.m. a repeat of the Great Lakes Choir's concert from Sunday.
And so the stations sign off for the night (except for Channel 5, whose late movie The House of the Seven Gables will run until 2:30 a.m.). People will be returning from midnight church services, driving through the darkened streets, walking on snow-covered sidewalks. Children will sleep restlessly, wondering if that squeaking floorboard means Santa's downstairs. All is calm, all is bright.
It's Wednesday, December 23, 1964 in the pages of TV Guide, as we continue our review of Christmas-week programming from 31 years ago. On Captain Kangaroo (8:00 a.m., CBS) the Captain and Mr. Green Jeans demonstrated how to make Christmas cards, and Mr. Moose presented a bit on "The Most Beautiful Tree of All." Channel 4's "Around the Town" was back that afternoon with the Columbia Heights High School choir, which was apparently quite popular on TV that year.
Prime time featured some specials, but belonged mostly to holiday-themed epidodes of regular series. At 6:30 the educational station, Channel 2, prsented a half hour of music by the Madrigal Singers of the College of St. Catherine and the College of St. Thomas. CBS had a Christmas concert from England by the well-known singer Jo Stafford, along with The Westminster Abbey Choir, the George Mitchell Singers, The Corona Stage School Children's Chorus, and the Lionel Blair Dancers. ABC featured the Ozzie and Harriet Christmas episode (first telecast in 1956) in which "Ozzie's plans for a quiet, relaxed Christmas go awry."
At 7:30, Channel 2 continues their Christmas music with a concert by the College of St. Benedict choir. ABC's rock-and-roll show Shindig didn't have a Christmas show per se, but the Beach Boys were singing "Little St. Nick," and Adam Faith did "Santa's Back in Town." At 8:00 The Dick Van Dyke Show presented the Christmas edition of the "Alan Brady Show," the program for which Rob, Sally and Buddy wrote. And at 9:00 the regular edition of Danny Kaye's program included a "Christmas Fantasy" by Danny and dancer Gwen Verdon.
It's all building up to a climax - Christmas Eve is coming soon, and with it more special programs.
Continuing our look back at 1964 Christmas week programming as seen in the pages of TV Guide, we're up to Tuesday, December 22.
One of the things you don't see too often any more is the local variety show (and when you do see it, it often takes the guise of a news program). Here in the Twin Cities, we had a program called "Dialing for Dollars" that combined elements of the game show with local news and entertainment. On Tuesday's edition, shown at 12:20 p.m., the Columbia Heights senior High School Choir sang Christmas music. Channel 4 had its own local show, "Around the Town," airing at 4:00 p.m. and featuring the choir from Investors Diversified. (Remember when companies used to have their own employee choirs? It still happens, I guess, although not as often as it used to.)
Channel 4 also had local programming at 7:00 that evening, preempting the Joey Bishop Show. "The Sounds of Christmas" presented the Senior Choir, Holiday Singers, and children from Mt. Olivet Lutheran Church in Minneapolis (a very big church; for Christmas Eve they have eight services, every hour on the hour). A nice program of Christmas music, including "White Christmas," "Jingle Bells," "Winter Wonderland," and (lest we forget it's a church choir) "O Holy Night," and "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." The pastor of the church, Dr. Reuben K. Youngdahl, read the Christmas story from the Bible. This in particular seems to be the kind of program that it's very hard to imagine appearing on television nowadays.
At 7:30 CBS presented Red Skelton's annual Christmas show, with special guest Greer Garson. An elementary school choir from Los Angeles gave their version of "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," and I ask myself how many public schools would even have a sacred song like that in their repritorie? The sitcom Petticoat Junction was on at 8:00, with the townfolk doing their traditional Christmas caroling.
At 9:00 NBC presented one of their prestige music shows, The Bell Telephone Hour. Host of this live program was Maureen O'Hara, who read the story of the Nativity (which back then was acknowledged as an integral part of Christmas), the Columbus Boychoir, and singers Howard Keel, Phyllis Curtin and Martha Wright, along with the Bell Telephone Orchestra. The Bell Telephone Hour was a prime example of a program that used to be common on TV but as completely disappeared from the airwaves - a show that combined classical music (one of their most famous broadcasts was a 1960 production of the operetta The Mikado featuring Groucho Marx) with popular entertainment. As one critic said of The Mikado, "It is indicative of how far we've come [or fallen] that such a program would be considered high-brow entertainment were it presented today."
And if you couldn't get enough of the luminious Maureen O'Hara (and, let's face it, who could?), she was back at 10:00 on Channel 11 in Miracle on 34th Street with John Payne, Edmund Gwenn (in his Oscar-winning role) and the very young Natalie Wood. This original version remains one of my favorite movies of all time. It's a heartwarming holiday story that's also a sly satire on commercialism, Freudian psychiatry, Dr. Spock-type child rearing and other modern fads; and any attempt to understand or remake this picture as a simple Christmas fable without considering these elements (as well as the sharp, crackerjack writing) loses much in the translation. Watch this movie, and see if it doesn't make you want to go out and shop at Macy's (which only goes to show how far that store has fallen).
It's getting closer to Christmas, but there's still much to see and hear. Stay tuned for tomorrow.
This week we've been doing a retrospective of Christmas-week TV programming as described in the December 19-25, 1964 issue of TV Guide. Each day we're looking back at what was on TV that same day in 1964.
We're up to Monday, December 21, and the focus will be on prime-time shows (although on the game show You Don't Say, all the contensants for the week are children). First up is the 6:00 presentation of the famed St. Olaf College Choir on the educational station, Channel 2. The choir sings a half-hour of motets from the 16th and 17th centuries, and selections from Bach.
NBC dominated the Christmas prime-time schedule that day. At 6:30, NBC showed an encore presentation of the Tennessee Ernie Ford special The Story of Christmas. It was last year that I first heard of this program (from the Christmas 1963 issue of TV Guide), and I was stunned to find out that the show, which was highly honored at the time, was actually available on DVD. As befits one of Ernie Ford's shows, there was a high religious content to the program - "What Child Is This?", "Gesu Bambino," "Virgin Slumber Song" and "Joy to the World," along with a stunning animated depiction of the Nativity. Critics of the time predicted it would become a perennial classic; I'm not sure why it didn't.
Following The Story of Christmas, NBC presented a Project 20 documentary, "The Coming of Christ." Narriated by Alexander Scourby (who, if you've never heard him speak, had a wonderfully sonorous voice), the program used masperpieces of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance to illustrate the Old and New Testament stories relating the birth of the Christ.
It wouldn't be Christmas without Andy Williams, and at 8:00 NBC wrapped up their block with Andy's Christmas show. Family was always a big part of Andy's show, and this was no exception - the Williams brothers (Andy, Don, Dick and Bob) along with sister Jane teamed up for seasonal standards like "White Christmas," "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," and "Jingle Bells." The Osmond Brothers chimed in with "Silver Bells," among others. From the description in TV Guide, the show doesn't appear to have the religious dimension of the Ernie Ford program, but you could always depend on Andy Williams to do Christmas up right.
Over at ABC, 8:30 brought Bing Crosby's Christmas show. But if you were expecting one of Bing's family gatherings (for which he became famous), you'd be mistaken - this was a time when Bing had his own sitcom, The Bing Crosby Show, in which he portrayed retired entertainer Bing Collins (clever, huh?). Therefore, this episode presents Bing with his TV family - Beverly Garland as his wife, along with kids, neighbors and co-workers. They all get together and do a Christmas show. The series only lasted one season, but this episode marked Bing's one and only Christmas show for 1964.
Finally, CBS got in the act in an unusual way - a documentary at 9:00 entitled "Chrismas in Appalachia," in which Charles Kuralt focused on the bleak holiday for residents of poverty-stricken southern Appalachia.
And so Monday, December 21 wrapped up. I might have expected some local stations to be running Christmas-themed movies in the late-night spot. (Holiday Inn or Going My Way, for example.) However, interestingly enough, Channel 9 does offer the original King Kong at 10:30, with Fay Wray (Naomi Watts, anyone?), Robert Armstrong and Bruce Cabot. I wonder if thirty years from now they'll be showing this year's version on December 21's late show?
