So it's TV "Sweeps" month again. You know, this is where they trot out all of their best stuff and "special episodes." Well, I'm sorry but I can no longer keep up with 489.6 channels and, for all intents and purposes, no more TV GUIDE. Thus, I had to hear about such once in a lifetime TV moments as Lindsay Lohan attempting to channel Stevie Nicks on the American Music Awards second hand. Damn! I missed that! Awww, MAAAN!
It was different back in the day (as the young folk say). This book, from 1956, was designed with the sole purpose of keeping people from watching television...by reading the scripts of the same shows right in their own living room! Amazing! And what choices! There's our boy, Jack, from yesterday's post. I tell you youngsters, he was the Jim Beliushi of his day! Perry Como smiles at the top( I saw him put on a most energetic show with Bob Hope in Cincinnati in the mid seventies!) and Martha Raye looks like an overly made up zombie beneath him. What's that all about?? Finally, Garry Moore and Milton (Mister Television...already past his prime)Berle are at the bottom. My real question is,
what did William Bendix do to get his name truncated to just "WM." Adding the additional letters would clearly have made the name no longer than "Ozzie and Harriet" so I just don't get it.Each entry features a brief history of the selected show followed by a fairly good biographical piece on its star by Irving Settel. Settel would go on to write, in 1967, A PICTORIAL HISTORY OF RADIO, one of the first books on that medium written after the last real network dramas aired and it was quickly being remembered as the Golden Age of radio.
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