Bring on Steve Allen
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television BRING ON STEVE ALLEN BY MARVIN KITMAN When The Big Show (NBC, Tuesdays, 9 p.m.) had its premiere the night of March 4, it unveiled an enormous stage half a football field long with...
...At the very least, Uncle Freddie should have made Steve Allen the permanent host of The Big Show...
...Clearly the formula was one talent with one unlikely person...
...Now the hosts of talk shows can almost phone in their parts...
...Wait," she said when Gavin McLeod was listing the acts, "I'll get my family...
...That is what I call overproduction...
...The second week was a real letdown...
...The third program spotlighted Dean Martin and Mariette Hartley...
...Only the dancing waters held up...
...What is Marie Osmond's theory...
...Sid's virtual disappearance from TV was a scandal...
...Overexposure of nothing, that's what killed variety...
...The fourth week we were treated to Tony Randall and Tatoo (the little creep from Fantasy Island...
...On the sixth program they resorted to pushing Steve Allen, back for his second shot as host, into the pool...
...Her co-host, Gavin McLeod, didn't help much either...
...You could predict the host pattern from the premiere, where Steve Allen was assisted by Gary Coleman, the strange child from Diff'rent Strokes...
...Remember Sullivan...
...The list of stars he introduced, nurtured and encouraged ranges from Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme to the Smothers Brothers and Lenny Bruce...
...You need an Einstein or a Sir Isaac Newton to figure out the next move and believe me, geniuses like that Nick Vanoff, Perry Lafferty and Freddie Silverman ain't...
...Ninety minutes of Mariette's Polaroid commercials with Jim Garner would have been more entertaining...
...It didn't do much more than give me a headache...
...That second week, as soon as the studio announcer proclaimed, "Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Marie Osmond . . . ." TBS fell into an irreversible decline...
...On his old Tonight Show, 5 per cent was written and 95 per cent ad libbed by him...
...Watch...
...But to have them all simultaneously—that's what they call class in Beverly Hills, where good taste is wearing three very expensive perfumes at the same time...
...Skating, swimming, dancing by people and waters...
...Anything will go...
...Turning over the reins to limited talents like Marie Osmond is an indication of the value network biggies give hosts today...
...What Uncle Freddie also forgot was that Lucille Ball had writers...
...A regular series for Steve Allen would also allow him freedom to exercise one of his most important skills, discovering new talent, something desperately needed on TV today...
...Does their manager pack them up in a large canteen and put them in the trunk of his car...
...In their declining years, the hosts were usually interchangeable, cutesy singers with one or two hit records...
...The Big Show was so big, it seemed that producer Nick Vanoff's widely-touted original concept amounted to unloading all the inventory he had accumulated during his 20 years in the TV variety store business...
...Variety shows died because they were bad, and they were bad because they had become monotonous...
...And his plays on words are the plays of the week on TV...
...How about Sir Laurence Olivier and Boomer as a duo...
...Now you're talking co-hosts...
...A well-constructed 90 minute satire on the Bert Parks-Miss America syndrome, Miss Las Vegas, created and produced by Jeff Harris and Bernie Kukoff, is aired on ABC's late-night schedule...
...Skydiving into the pool...
...At first The Big Show was hailed for reviving the variety format...
...Her first special for NBC, showcasing her new sitcom with Donald O'Connor, revealed the kind of youth movement she can be expected to bring to the network...
...Just one week, it turned out...
...The TV executives killed it with their lack of imagination the size of the redwoods in the Laurel Canyon and Hollywood Hills...
...The Brady family had a swimming pool—into which the kids kept pushing Daddy Brady, making him look a mite silly...
...Well, ex-cuuuse me...
...If The Big Show seemed initially to breathe new life into variety, this was largely due to Steve Allen's presence...
...That is an overused phrase, but in his case it means that his mind works in brave new ways...
...Baloney...
...Allen complained about the lack of intimacy that is so necessary for comedy to Vanoff, who told him, "Don't worry, we'll turn the lights down when you come on...
...The kids on Captain and Tennille, Tony Orlando and Dawn and The Osmonds came and went—it was like watching guppies eat their babes in a fish bowl...
...Just wait until the ratings start to drop...
...True, the Osmonds' old variety show had a skating rink...
...To boot, talentless rage-of-the-mo-ment TV stars were the guests, doing sketches and jokes that were an insult to the intelligence...
...eyes...
...Other variety shows, too, have featured corps of dancers, swimmers, skaters, comedians, even dancing waters...
...I sure hope Uncle Freddie Silverman signed them to a firm 52-week deal, with options...
...Steve Allen is a comic genius...
...The squirt will be playing Hamlet in Uncle Freddie's next live theatre production...
...In addition, there are touches from the original Tonight Show, starring Steve Allen, one of my all-time favorite variety shows...
...They are looked upon as disposable items, like Kleenex...
...What happens when you go from The Big Show on radio, starring Tallulah Bankhead, in 1951 to The Big Show on TV, starring dancing waters, skating swans and Marie Osmond in 1980...
...That is class...
...All at once...
...TV viewers did their best to appreciate John Davidson, Mac Davis, David Cassidy...
...How long, though, could NBC sustain The Big Show...
...It is no accident that his first official act after being signed on for second and third appearances as TBS host was to book Sid Caesar...
...This was the girl whose variety show on ABC had already helped kill variety...
...He is one of those rare combinations—a writer, poet, composer, musician, and wit, as well as a gentleman and a nice person...
...Since his original mind is always generating fresh material, he could have solved many of NBC's problems...
...No sooner did hot starlets like Suzanne Somers, Cheryl Ladd, and Mackenzie Phillips appear in their own shlock series than they were forced to act and sound like major performers on a variety show...
...Bring on Steve Allen...
...It has been dead for years and somehow we the TV audience have been blamed for killing it...
...And they got Rula Lenska to do it...
...Whenever Steve Allen presides over TBS (and don't miss his return on May 20), echoes of the old Steve Allen Show reverberate (basically, Vanoffs recipe is one half Steve Allen Show and one half Hollywood Palace...
...He should have been asked to head up NBC's new comedy works department, but Uncle Freddie hired that golden oldy, Lucille Ball...
...3) illusions by Copperfield...
...There is a 40-year-old vaudevillian fighting to get out of that 12-year-old body...
...Allen's timing, poise and absolute mastery of things—even when falling into a pool—knock me out...
...The best place to catch Allen's act as the host-with-the-most is on ABC's Annual Unofficial Miss Las Vegas Showgirl Beauty Queen Pageant, which he has emceed over the past five years...
...He was a hell of a sailor on The Love Boat and a great rewrite man in the newsroom of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but he's not exactly the new Ed Sullivan...
...It's impossible to make a mockery out of Terre Haute, of course, because it does that so well itself...
...Allen is a professional with an enormous background in variety...
...4) and Marie Osmond...
...Hail, Caesar...
...At last Caesar has found a new Coca in Allen...
...Allen has never needed any...
...had its premiere the night of March 4, it unveiled an enormous stage half a football field long with an enormous orchestra pit and an enormous orchestra...
...The two of them were brilliant on the April 22 show...
...I myself would spin my head around, as if following a record, to increase my perception of their talents...
...The search for younger jerks whom TV viewers could relate to gave us Jeff Altman...
...Garry Moore...
...There are even rumors of a Sid Caesar-Steve Allen Show next season...
...Silverman probably feared young people would not relate to him...
...the names were changed, but everything else stayed the same...
...for a while afterward, he was the rapist-of-the-week...
...at least they all had theories of entertainment...
...His act, apart from his Qiana shirt open to the navel, consisted of the following elements: 1) a trained dog...
...Before long they'll probably add a few sharks, or maybe teams from the William Morris and Sue Menges agencies playing water polo...
...In this department, too, things were better at the outset...
...Little Donny sliding around in his tux looked like a penguin with a nice smile...
...Steve Martin was very amusing on the premiere, I thought, with his little film of returning to Terre Haute to apologize for making a mockery of it in his act...
...Knivel...
...In the old days when variety was alive and well on TV, hosts were crucial...
...Among the stellar attractions of the second week was Joe Namath, a sign that the guest stars also were going to be a problem...
...With fireworks...
...At one point Copperfield threw a sheet over Marie and made her disappear, a trick nobody else has been able to do on TV lately...
...In fact, it was on the Tonight Show with Allen that Bruce did some of his best work...
...The result was an overwhelming technical achievement for the little screen, much like capturing the Red Chinese Army Chorus singing a rendition of the old folk ballad, "Tea for Two Thousand...
...None at all...
...Allen the impresario won't go for Silverman's kind of performer, though, like Gary Coleman...
...TV fed on its young...
...It's the TV equivalent of the Olympic biathalon...
...2) a song by Barry ("The Nose") Man-ilow...
...They knew what the public wanted...
...Well, Donald was the youngest guy Lucy knew...
...Another Big Show guest the second week was illusionist David Copper-field...
...And next to an enormous skating rink there was an enormous pool with enormous bathing beauties with enormous . . . where are my notes here...
...Actually, you can't tell from these Big Show appearances how fine an entertainer "I, Stevius," (as he called himself in a spoof on the last PBS begathon) really is...
...The enormous this and that listed earlier create the perfect setting for a comedian to lay an enormous egg...
...But by the second time out you could see they were hard put to use the facilities in new and different ways: They stocked the pool with trained swans and Mel Tillis, a guest who usually sings, joked about fishing for the mermaids (Tillis has a speech handicap that only surfaces when he has to talk on variety shows...
...Maybe that's why Robert Reed turned to a life of crime in made-for-TV movies...
...Then perhaps Evil Knivel riding his motorcycle over the pool, accompanied by Mrs...
...Incidentally, did you ever wonder where they go after the show...
Vol. 63 • May 1980 • No. 9
