TELEVISION
Tertian, Philip
CAVEAT CAVETT TELEVISION When and how television became a 'cool' medium I am not prepared to say; nor, for that matter, whether it is cool or not. But the fact remains that it is believed to...
...Johnny Carson is still in place, but he remains, in Oscar Levant's phrase, amiable about his mediocrity...
...I can only report that he is the same as before, only more so...
...He remains the 'cool' interviewer, the living lesson of programming shrewdness K pretty, sloganeering, detached, acquainted with everyone, Now, there is no audience...
...Now, after a suitable interregnum, Cavett is back...
...On one memorable occasion Richard Nixon performed an original composition for piano...
...His guests were drawn from several worlds, none in particular profusion: a tap-dancer might complement a journalist, or a poet play off a politician...
...In the same way, when Milton Berle revived his show in 1966 it was a failure...
...he was unable to sustain a thought...
...I must confess that it lost its charm for me when it moved away froni New York, and I seldom see it anymore.' When I do, though, it seems tired, flaccid, punch-drunk...
...Cavett brought on two Hollywood juvenile delinquents—Jane and Peter Fonda —who proceeded to bait Ramsey on the irrelevance and asininity of Christianity, and even to smirk at his courtesy title of address, 'His Grace.' Ramsey was shocked, but polite...
...PHILIP TERZIAN...
...Paul Ehrlich, etc...
...For example, it has been remarked that...
...It is interesting that the few failures were different from the others in one important respect: they made the viewer feel uncomfortable, and in fact strove to make him feel uncomfortable, sometimes even unclean for having watched them...
...If you wish to know about this actress's breathing exercises, how much sleep that actor puts in before a performance, how this actress met that actress, or how much that actor wishes to play King Lear, then Cavett is the show for you...
...How long can it go on...
...Better a shameless plug or a shopworn routine, it seems to me, than this sort of charade...
...This may explain in part why the talk show has more often than not been successful on the air—where else but on television could a circle of people conversing in various degrees of banality be regarded as entertainment...
...Occasionally an intellectualoid is thrown in as an awkward sop to high-mindedness, but they are from Central Casting as well, usually masters of the obvious aphorism, or bearers of frightening statistics: Margaret Mead, Ashley Montagu, Dr...
...I always preferred Carson because he strove to be funny and nothing more...
...The Tonight Show" is still huffing and puffing along through the generations of Steve Allen, Jerry Lester, Jack Paar and Johnny Carson...
...When he was in late-night competition with Johnny Carson in the late 1960s and early '70s the audiences seemed to divide along cultural/ ideological lines...
...In the mid-1960s there was a vogue for 'controversial' shows, generally featuring a master of ceremonies who managed somehow to remain more offensive than his guests...
...perhaps it's because of his well-advertised diploma from Yale...
...The only other master of ceremonies who approaches Paar is Dick Cavett, and he misses the mark by some distance...
...His guest was the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr...
...David Susskind's "Open End" initiated a different kind of format —a group of worthies with some common denominator discussing one topic—which has been easiest for local stations to imitate...
...he played to the audience in the worst possible way: he would set up his guests and bully them to shrieks of derisive laughter...
...His guests, so far as I can tell, are all fugitives from show business...
...Cavett strove to be funny, and was pretentious as well...
...But the fact remains that it is believed to be a cool medium, and whether true or not, that notion informs programming, and the conventional wisdom about programming...
...Hitler would never have gotten anywhere if he had had to appear on television: his violent ranting and raving would have been frightening on the tube (apart from what he had to say), driving viewers away, and leaving the field open, presumably, for a relaxed, soft-spoken demagogue...
...It is "The Tonight Show" without music...
...Apparently forever, and the examples of an alternative fall further into the recesses of memory...
...The Mailer-Vidal bout of some years ago is best remembered...
...The premise is television's only innovation, dating from its earliest days, and has become an institution...
...in short, a television style...
...Is that Shecky Greene just in from Las Vegas, or John Davidson...
...He interrupted...
...In the presence of someone both amusing and thoughtful—Peter Ustinov comes to mind—he was at a loss...
...The set was plain, the studio audience small, and Paar permitted his guests to talk: he was interested in drawing them out, he allowed them to be funny or he allowed them to be portentous...
...Cavett has acquired, over the years, a reputation as the thinking man's interviewer, a judgment mysterious to me...
...the familiar format has remained durable...
...Jack Paar had a Friday night, one-hour program (1962-65) which, to1 my mind, struck the right balance...
...But that brings about the eternal complaint about television programming—the shows are adequate, but they could be so much better...
...To the public's credit, they didn't last long, and...
...It was an extraordinary display...
...Viewers had grown accustomed to a more understated style of humor (if that is the word for it), less frantic and theatrical, unlike vaudeville and the movies...
...The Tonight Show" is a case in point...
...I recall a more odious occasion...
...I recall a few names—Les Crane, Joe Pyne, Alan Burke— and their stock in trade was abusing a pitiful parade of zealots, malcontents and fugitives from the asylum...
...Ramsey, a benign, avuncular man* a pioneer in ecumenism with a history of progressive views...
...The guests, of course, remain the same, appearing, or so it would seem, in some sort of rotation in the course of a year...
Vol. 105 • January 1978 • No. 2
