The Decline and Fall of Sunday
FENTRESS, CALVIN
ON TELEVISION By Calvin Fentress The Decline and Fall of Sunday "IN THE FIRST PLACE, I don't own a television set, and in the second place, I only watch it on Sunday afternoons.' Years and...
...Is there anything to beat solvency...
...After airing pro football for three hours and forty minutes, including pre-game introductions of the players and postgame locker room interviews, the network joined Mister Ed, and followed it up with the Ted Mack Amateur Hour (a half-hour program), which featured the tap dancing Koverman Brothers (clickity clack clack CLACK), who are strikingly similar to-if not the same -Koverman Brothers who were tap dancing on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour in the evenings 10 years ago, and who will be tap dancing there 10 years hence (click clack clack...
...These are tried and true principles...
...Literally: By two o'clock, a pro football game was well under way on one network and a pro basketball game was beginning on another...
...It was a high spot in an otherwise lackluster performance...
...It was one of those magic moments in the theatre, and more than one viewer left his seat mumbling the haunting refrain...
...The disintegration of Sunday afternoon was an insidious business-a rerun here, a new time slot there...
...He has the equipment to go all the way: He was handsome, glib, unctuous, composed, evasive and inordinately cheerful...
...Sunday afternoon was to television what Classic Comics were to the world of Jughead and Captain Marvel...
...Summing up the strike that Sunday afternoon, Eric Sevareid wondered whether the late Mike Quill was playing a practical joke, trying to end crime in the subways, or asking for 200 days off for his members in order that they might have more time to attend concerts, study Egyptian tapestry and follow other pursuits typical of the Great Society...
...The remainder of the two-hour Sunday was taken up by reviews of local news, which in New York meant the transit strike...
...Nixon, on the other hand, appeared on stage to deliver his current monologue (ingeniously ignoring the questions asked), to avoid antagonizing anyone, and to get his name on the front page of the Monday Times...
...Nor did his debut disappoint...
...Although the company has undergone numerous changes in recent seasons, the repertoire remains much the same...
...On the contrary, one sees in him a magnificent Lear, raging against a storm of deficit spending, certain madness only a billion dollars away...
...Goldman has long been the most sensible discussion leader on television...
...Promptly at 2 p.m., the Theatre of Inquisition, along with the Goldmans and Sevareids, left the air...
...At the very peak of his powers, Dirksen ended his performance with this variation on the well-loved Eisenhower Soliloquy: "Is there anything to beat peace...
...If Adlai Stevenson was the John Gielgud of the Theatre of Inquisition, then surely Everett Dirksen is its Bert Lahr...
...We are left with a token Sunday, possibly assembled on the theory that preverts and associate professors do not require lunch, and are therefore free to partake of these public affairs leftovers...
...As students of the Theatre of Inquisition will recall, Lawrence E. Spivac and Richard M. Nixon established the method for these things, and it is a tribute to their mastery of the art that both continue to perform regularly, neither having ever been surpassed in the role he originated...
...At one point, Marks blithely observed that the USIA dispensed truth rather than propaganda...
...We may be a nation of spectators, but no one can accuse us of spectating half-way By four o'clock, the football game was still going strong, but on NBC Jimmy Mack had given way to the World's Spearfish Championship in Tahiti and the World's Drag Racing Championship in Tulsa, ABC, meanwhile, left basketball to present a rerun of a Laramie show, followed in turn by a 1941 movie starring Gene Tierney...
...Asked by Spivac if he could "still be described as a Goldwater conservative," Reagan delivered one of the classic lines of the Theatre of Inquisition with a sparkle that gave it new life: "I have never believed in labels," he said...
...It was widely conceded that all preverts, associate professors, and readers of magazines like The New Leader, climbed out of their holes on Sundays to huddle in front of flickering images of Leonard Bernstein, John Crosby and Lawrence Spivac, while the rest of the populace rested up for Ed Sullivan...
...He said that three times...
...Spivac, of course, billed himself as the antagonist in the drama...
...On the afternoon under examination here, a new actor was seen in the lead role, one Leonard H. Marks, director of the USIA...
...Indeed, young Reagan is the most promising new talent these eyes have seen since the early days of Stuart Symington...
...The best preserved of the Sunday relics is the tri-network Theatre of Inquisition, consisting of Meet the Press (NBC), Face the Nation (CBS), and Issues and Answers (ABC...
...And on ABC, a man named Walt Bellamy was missing a free-throw at the Civic Center court in a nameless city...
...Not that Dirksen isn't up to Shakespeare...
...Dirksen: Now just a momentI didn't say anything about "total victory...
...The walkout elevated Mayor Lindsay to instant stardom on the small screen, and should he ever achieve higher office, he will owe no small debt to the TWU for his major showbiz break...
...The strike may have been a civic disaster, but it was a boon for New York television...
...Unlike the Spivacs and the Susskinds, he rarely attempts to confound his guests, but instead tries to elicit information, points of view, and exchanges of ideas...
...Sunday afternoon, as we once knew it, was over...
...Marks was playing opposite Chalmers Roberts of the Washington Post, who managed to unsettle the new leading man with such queries as, "Just how candid is the USIA being in reporting events in the Dominican Republic...
...On CBS, it was half-time in Miami, and the Apache Belles ("the dancin' darlin's of the Dallas Cowboys") of the Tyler, Texas, Junior High School were strutting their stuff on the 50 yard-line of the Orange Bowl...
...Jammed into those fleeting moments is Open Mind (NBC), moderated by Eric Goldman...
...All three now fall within the two-hour span mentioned above...
...The final act (Issues and Answers) starred that beloved character actor, Everett McKinley Dirksen...
...Chock full of candor, protested Marks...
...Reagan (with feeling): "I don't know how anyone can say how he would have voted on a bill unless he was part of the discussion...
...Never one to be upstaged, Spivac pressed on...
...it was his function, quite literally, to antagonize, to ask would-be Presidents when they stopped beating their wives, and to get Meet the Press reviewed on the front page of the Monday New York Times...
...They are simply magnificent...
...The first act of the matinee, as it is now performed, features Face the Nation...
...From then on, it was anybody's ballgame...
...Where, he asked, did Reagan stand on civil rights legislation...
...It gave the self-proclaimed intellectual an excuse to buy a television set ("there's Sunday afternoon...
...Act II (Meet the Press) brought another newcomer to these boards, although it should be noted that Ronald Reagan was preceded by his reputation as an "actor's actor" in Nixon's California School...
...Question: Does this mean you have joined the ranks of those Republicans who call for total war...
...The world press is overwhelmingly grateful for the peace offensive...
...A few shadowy remnants of that once proud era are all that survive, The networks have compressed the old Sunday into the minutes from noon to 2 p.m...
...Having watched television from noon to 6 p.m...
...one recent Sunday, I can categorically report that, somewhere along the line, the system broke down...
...Although the Theatre of Inquisition is the meat of the twohour Sunday afternoon, there are other traces of the more leisurely past...
...Well, what can you say," said the announcer...
...The extent of this sportsman's paradise was vividly illustrated by a check of each of the three great networks at 3:30 p.m...
...Throughout, it was a triumphant performance: No information of substance was disclosed, no stand was taken, no ethnic group was offended...
...And who but Dirksen could refer with such melodious disdain to "Brother DeGaulle...
...On NBC, a young man named Jimmy Mack had just done (or not done) something on lane 21 to the "2, 4, 5, 3 pin cluster" in the Rheingold Bowling Championships...
...It was a good system all the way around...
...Is there anything to beat frugality...
...ON TELEVISION By Calvin Fentress The Decline and Fall of Sunday "IN THE FIRST PLACE, I don't own a television set, and in the second place, I only watch it on Sunday afternoons.' Years and years ago, when there were wolves in Wales and God was alive, this was the rallying cry of the television snob...
...We have come to expect the jitters from an actor appearing in his first major role, but Marks rather overdid it...
...Especially disconcerting was a tendency to repeat his lines...
...it gave the networks something with which to rebut "wasteland" critics ("there's Sunday afternoon...
...But it was CBS, more than any other network, that typified the present condition of Sunday afternoon on television...
...And he does so with such good grace and good questions that he often succeeds...
...Is there any other performer who could bring off an exchange such as this one: Dirksen: I believe in what MacArthur said: "There is no substitute for victory...
...and it gave everyone else a chance to get some fresh air ("there's Sunday afternoon...
Vol. 49 • February 1966 • No. 4
