vintageTVPrograms

   By Bruce Shawkey I remember my grandparents watching "The Joe Pyne Show" on late-night TV, when they wanted a break from "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson. I thought it odd that my typically mild-mannered grandparents would want to watch a show filled with anger and confrontation. But there it was. The show is being called the prototype for more modern-day "shock shows" hosted by the likes of Howard Stern, Geraldo Rivera, Morton Downey, Phil Donahue, and others. The episodes I remember typically involved Joe insulting guests where they would walk off the set --- KKK, Nazi, and John Birch guests. One of Joe's catch phrases was "Oh, go gargle with razorblades." The rest of this entry I am paraphrasing from an NPR article on Pyne. One thing absolutely forbidden on the show was to mention Joe's wooden leg, which resulted from an injury during World War II, where he served in the Marines. That injury turned cancerous, which resulted in ...

 By Bruce Shawkey It's been 34 years since Johnny Carson retired from The Tonight Show, so I'm considering this vintage. Here's an article about Johnny from a 1967 issue of TV Guide, just five years after he started hosting in 1962. Johnny Carson stands and fidgets and is unhappy. The photographer stoops from his ladder perch aad cranks rapidly on a reflex camera, crying “Good” and “Very nice,” but he too is unhappy because of the invincible immobility of Carson’s face. The star’s shoulders are angular under a powder-blue turtle-neck jersey and navy-blue blazer; his short black hair is laced with gray, and his eyes are small and alert. Now and again, he tricks himself into a laugh by joking with the bystanders, and the photographer—still cranking and shooting—shouts “Good!” and trips his shutter for the two-hundredth time. The ordeal ends; Carson exits to the street, climbs into his waiting deep-green limousine, and sinks into the cushy grandeur of its black leather seats. ...

    Excellent article on Gleason in the February 6, 1965 issue of TV Guide. Goes way beyond the usual fluff piece on today's celebrities found in People magazine, etc. I would say it's an example of the "new journalism" that emerged in the '60s and '70s. We find a man quite different than the characters he played on TV and the movies, from Ralph Cramden in the Honeymooners to Sheriff Buford T. Justus in the Smoky and the Bandit movies.  Here is the article in its entirety, written by Edith Efron (1922 – April 20, 2001) American journalist and author who wrote frequently for TV Guide. On modern music: "The lives people lead are so limp today that they crave modern music. It seems to give them some stiffness, some rhythm, some beat, some illusion of purpose. But it provides only temporary relief. It goes nowhere. It leaves them with no feeling." On Plato: "Plato was one of the stupidest men in the world. He thought that if a child was strong he sh...

   By Bruce Shawkey Get Smart! (NBC, Saturday nights) set out to be the funniest show on television this year, and if it makes it — which seems likely — much of the credit must go to Don Adams. For those who cry, "Who's Don Adams?," Don Adams replies: "I am probably the most-exposed comedian on TV. I was a regular on The Perry Como Show for a year and a half, a regular guest on the Paar and Sullivan shows and worked a year on The Bill Dana Show. "The result is that everybody knows my routines—they stop me on the street to recite them to me—hut no one knows my name. If they do call me by name, they say, 'Hi there, Glick.' " "Glick" was Don Adams' role as the retarded house detective on the Dana show, and "Glick" in various disguises has been in many an Adams routine—as a baseball umpire, defense attorney and many others.  It's Smart vs. KAOS  In Get Smart! Don Adams plays Maxwell Smart, Secret Agent 86, the terror of an un...

   With makeup Sans makeup BY RICHARD WARREN LEWIS At 5:40 on a Tuesday morning, the jarring ring of an alarm clock sounded in a rented Hollywood hills ranch house. Half-awake, lantern-jawed actor Fred Gwynne quickly silenced the bell so as not to awaken his wife and two children, and methodically began dressing in an old pair of khaki pants, white sweat socks, blue tennis sneakers, V-neck T-shirt and a white cable-knit sweater he had laid out the night before. Then, as he had done three times a week for the past six months, he drove a 1957 sedan he bought for $500 through the early-morning mist to the Universal studios. His hair still unkempt, Gwynne lumbered down a long corridor to room 23. He pulled off his sweater, changed into a barber’s smock and stretched his lanky frame into an adjustable chair, planting his flamingo legs on a counter in front of him. Makeup man Karl Silvera started to apply balloon rubber to his unshaven face, and mortician’s wax to his eyebrows. The ...

 From a 1967 TV Guide THE BUMBELING BARNUM OF SUNDAY NIGHT You have to catch Ed Sullivan off camera to see what's kept him on the air for 19 years BY ROBERT HIGGINS The show bill reads like a psychedelic circus: Mickey Mouse has done his stuff, as well as Helen Hayes, John Gielgud, Charles Laughton and Gertrude Lawrence. Benedictine Sisters have sung. Likewise the Beatles, Joan Sutherland, Ella Fitzgerald and the entire Metropolitan Opera. Chimps chase around on motorcycles while tumblers flip-flop. Bears dance. So do Nureyev and Fonteyn, the Piccoli Puppets and Gene Kelly. Jackie Gleason, Jack Benny, Victor Borge and Bert Lahr have all cracked funnies; so have enough wooden dummies to build a bonfire. It’s The Ed Sullivan Show, of course, and it’s the most successful program in TV history. This Sunday, June 18, it blithely sails into an unprecedented 20th year on CBS. Like it (and, week in and week out, 30 million Americans do) or lump it (and most critics do from time to time), T...

Gilligan's Island was an American sitcom created and produced by Sherwood Schwartz. The show's ensemble cast featured Bob Denver, Alan Hale Jr., Jim Backus, Natalie Schafer, Tina Louise, Russell Johnson, and Dawn Wells. It aired for three seasons on the CBS network from September 26, 1964, to April 17, 1967. The series followed the comic mis-adventures of seven castaways as they struggle to survive on an island where they've been shipwrecked. Most episodes revolve around the dissimilar castaways' conflicts, and/or their unsuccessful attempts to escape their plight. The ship's inept first mate, Gilligan, is typically responsible (or at least blamed) for the failures. Here's a story from the May 8-14 issue of TV Guide First of two parts by RICHARD WARREN LEWIS Two tons of grainy sand lies an inch thick on the concrete-floored soundstage. A lush collection of authentic palm trees, flax, birds of Paradise, carpet grass and cut magnolias shimmers in the artificial mo...