The radiant past returns, for an hour every night

The Yuletide season weighs heavily upon us all — if depression didn’t exist, the holidays could singlehandedly create it. One cable network, however — which I had condemned last year for dropping their library of wonderfully entertaining b&w shows into oblivion — has decided to give nostalgia buffs a little present for Xmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/whatever you choose to celebrate.

As of this past Monday, GSN has decided to throw those who’d like some representation of vintage TV a bone by restoring the channel’s “b&w hour” from 3 to 4:00 a.m. (midnight–1:00 a.m. West Coast). They’ve started out with the most entertaining (and awesomely guest-filled) shows, What’s My Line and I’ve Got a Secret. The former was the most silly-yet-sophisticated game show ever, and the latter was the most wittily pointless — the game never mattered, and if we thought it did, the gold-standard curmudgeon, radio humorist Henry Morgan, reminded us that it didn’t.

IGAS has been resumed in 1960, when its longstanding panel (Cullen, Myerson, Morgan, Palmer) was firmly in place. WML has been joined in the mid-’50s, when the sour-faced comedy god Fred Allen was on the panel (“new” sensation Jayne Mansfield was the Mystery Guest last eve, if that makes it easier to situate the period).

I still like to promote the notion that if the folks running TCM would like to bless us with a classic TV channel, there’d be brilliant b&w comedy, drama, and genre weirdness being seen again for the first time in decades, making the cable "choice" truly that — a choice. No more having to surf past mounds of awful sports programming, rancid, recent-vintage TV movies, and mind-destroying “reality TV.”

UPDATE: The eagle-eyed souls on the GSN message boards have noted that this is indeed a two-week “Xmas present” from the folks who run the network and want to push their most recent anodyne crap product and acquired garbage (every known iteration of Family Feud! The 2000-era game shows that no one wants to rewatch! The Newlywed Game retread with Carnie Wilson!). Enjoy while you can — classic, classy TV is about to be buried again….

Ladies upload movies too! Latest YouTube discoveries

I think I’ve referred in the past to most of the YouTube posters who’ve uploaded entire movies as “he” because I tend to identify that level of obsessive fan behavior as male (you ladies tend to have more sensible proclivities). Well, two of the posters who’ve put up entire flicks on their accounts are indeed female, and so this week, in my ongoing survey of what’s what on that crazy, insane, bottomless source of entertainment, I salute them. (And yes, I know, the Internet being the intangible concept it is, the people claiming to be men could women, and vice versa.)

The first poster is someone known as The Thin Woman. This poster, like so many folks on YT, pays homage to her fave performers by making little music-vids of their best moments, as with this valentine to the great Myrna Loy:



She generally uses danceable trax as a background music, and in some cases the lyric/title adds another layer to the imagery, as here Garbage’s “Androgyny” is used to salute Garbo:



Her most interesting is a montage of actresses who were rumored to be lesbians scored, natch, to Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl”:



The Thin Woman’s complete uploads include these movies: The Blue Angel, The Bachelor and The Bobbysoxer, All About Eve, Suddenly Last Summer, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Garbo’s first talkie, Anna Christie:



The other female poster must be named Sara, because her nick is SaraismyName. Sara is a young woman in Sweden who also likes old movies and Golden Age actresses. Her rarest upload is a full 1972 TV interview with Ingrid Bergman (without subs), which can be found here.

She also does montages of her faves, set to current music. This is a compilation of moments featuring the ever-awesome Carole Lombard set to a song by “ladies man” Chris Brown (he treats ’em so nice):



Sara’s complete uploads include Madame Curie, The Letter, That Forsyte Woman, Blossoms in the Dust, The Old Maid, Charade, The Miniver Story, The Golden Arrow, and The Great Lie. Here’s my fave of the bunch, the perfect screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby:



Sara is also a fan of classic TV game shows from the U.S. I’m not sure where or when she saw ‘em, but people know my opinion of GSN here in the States since they dropped all their b&w programming. In any case, Sara has posted some montage videos of the ladies of What’s My Line?. I didn’t realize there was anyone under 30 years of age who even knew who these women were, so I was surprised to see that she had posted this episode of a 1950s show hosted by Arlene. And was very amazed to see this collection of “Lady Arlene” moments (I do miss John Charles Daly!) set to the Beatles:



And this further Arlene/Beatles clip:



This one was the biggest eye-opener, a montage of Dorothy Kilgallen moments, set to Blondie’s “One Way or Another”:



Give both posters a whiskey, with ginger ale on the side, and don't be stingy, baby. (Understand who will.)

Class leaves the airwaves: GSN drops b&w programs

I often lament on the program how it is IMPOSSIBLE to find black and white television and movies anywhere on cable these days, aside from the very visible and extremely welcome Turner Classic Movies. True, there is the one trio of vintage shows that is always allowed to remain on in reruns, even as George Lopez, that godawful Tim Allen show, and other substandard Eighties/Nineties/2000s sitcoms fill the schedules of the “classic TV” networks. The three that are allowed to stay on? (Yes, I think of it that way) I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and The Twilight Zone. Aside from those three, the one shining example of a tie with Television Past was the Game Show Network’s “Black and White All Night” block of programs. It began as two hours when the network signed on, then was reduced to one a few years ago and, as of tonight, is off the air.

Game Show Network is, of course, a pretty poor excuse for a channel: their originals are threadbare and mundane, and their recent reruns (the ones they’re staking the bank on) are as stale as yesterday’s news (yeah sure, Slumdog was based on the Millionaire concept — but has that gotten anyone at all to endure those rancid reruns of the Regis Philbin shows? If there’s anything certain about a craze, it’s that it ages very, very quicky and quite badly). The nightly airing on GSN of What’s My Line from the show’s very beginning in 1950 until its signoff on a sad night in 1967, has been the one way in which the banner of 1950s TV has been held aloft on cable, albeit in a very tiny little late-night niche. Nostalgia is very much out of fashion, but it was nice that one network had chosen to stick with real classic TV, and to acknowledge that, yes, there WAS indeed television before The Brady Bunch, Three’s Company, and the absolutely execrable sitcoms that make up the Nick/TV Land rerun schedule (those two channels have had about as much connection to classic television in the last decade as American Movie Classics has had to respect for classic moviemaking).

And so the opportunity to regularly follow a classic program like What’s My Line? is now snatched away, in the manner that all other good Fifties and Sixites (and now Seventies) shows have been eradicated from cable. Cable and satellite TV are touted to offer limitless possibilities: if you like sports, Christian broadcasting, mediocre TV series, insipid TV movies, and painfully bad multiplex flicks, you’ve got a helluva selection. If you like foreign movies, tough luck (Sundance Channel and a handful of movies each month on TCM should do ya); if you like vintage television, really good shows from the past, forget it and just try to find them on DVD (boxed or bootlegged), or visit the Paley Centers in NYC and LA, the only place where this programming will ultimately be available.

For those that weren’t watching it, the joy of catching WML on GSN was the immediate connection to a lost world — one where urbane and really intelligent people played a silly parlor game, but with such sincerity you couldn’t help but be charmed. The cycle begins with an early, early 1950 kinescope of the first show — with a poet who was later blacklisted on the panel, Phil Rizzuto as the “mystery guest,” and the stalwart Arlene Francis wearing so much makeup for the cameras she looks like a Kuklapolitan player. (I hope that made three fans of Fifties TV smile.)

As the cycle moved on, I was mesmerized not only by the amazing A-list caliber of the mystery guests, but also the amazing intelligence of the panel (sure, sure, there is still Jeopardy on TV for armchair eggheads, but WML showed that yesterday’s celebs were a damned savvy bunch compared to today’s reality show camera-hogs). Also a gift to behold: the fourth chair, from which they pushed out a guy named Hal Block (comedy writer) for a young “humorist” new to NYC, Funhouse deity Steve Allen (who coined the oddball query "Is it bigger than a breadbox?" on the program). After Steve hit it big with The Tonight Show in 1953, radio legend (and TV failure) Fred Allen took over the seat. When he died, the array of AMAZING men that sat in that chair was a laundry list dear to my heart: in addition to the many Random House authors Bennett Cerf called upon when someone couldn’t show up, there were class-acts like David Niven and James Mason, raconteurs like Peter Ustinov and Victor Borge, sui generis comic gods like Groucho and Ernie Kovacs, and young comics like Mort Sahl, Dick Cavett, Peter Cook, and Woody Allen (who spoofed the show brilliantly as "What's My Perversion?" in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex...) — so yes, you had a seat in which three generations of fucking genius comics with the name Allen (natal or chosen) sat: Fred, Steve, and Woody.

A number of newspaper articles were written about the fact that GSN was still running this “relic” of TV past on a nightly basis. In fact, I have the feeling the reason it stayed on for so long — I had the unmistakable impression it was too good to last — was because some writers from The New York Times and elsewhere were addicted to it, and wrote generous pieces that kept the public aware of its existence. On the GSN.com message board, posters indicate that the network’s licensing deal with Goodson-Todman had expired, but I could find no official acknowledgement of that. That would seem to not be the case because, as I write this, a color 1960s rerun of Password is airing in what used to be the second b&w show’s timeslot — yes, that b&w show, To Tell the Truth, was a creaky rerun, but the other G-Ts, most especially I’ve Got a Secret when they were at their best, were like spun gold to nostalgia buffs. Password was a G-T production, as was Match Game, which is an “acceptable” piece of Seventies nostalgia (for the moment).


The loss of What’s My Line? specifically, and the “black and white hour” on GSN more generally, is extremely sad for those of us who feel that, out of a cable dial containing a thousand choices, it would be only fitting to devote one network to real classic TV. Couldn't one channel contain the programming created in the thirty-five-year span before the truly awful sitcoms of the mid-Eighties took hold?

Farewell, Arlene, Bennett, Dorothy, urbane fourth panelist, and John Charles Daly — you remain class acts, although you are now truly reduced to museum pieces.

And for the clips...
As you might have guessed, the hardcore nostalgia-buff audience has posted some beautiful clips from the show on YouTube, about 700 thus far. Among them are a breadbox maker coming on (to see if Steve is savvy), the appearance of the other Goodson-Todman hosts (including Gene Rayburn, from the then-fledgling Match Game), and some nice double entendres from the show.

One of the rarer early mystery guests, the only one I know of who used a translator on the show, Anna Magnani:


The immortal Dali:


Ernie Kovacs on the panel, talkin’ some Hungarian to Zsa Zsa:


The one, the only, Groucho as the MG. He did it more than once, but this is one of the best:


Sammy, rockin’ that eyepatch:


Jerry Lewis, on the panel, bein’ rude to a large lady:


Since this is the Fifties, there must be Liz Taylor:


Nichols and May:


The inimitable Peter Ustinov:


A comic god who’s still with us, Jonathan Winters:


Brian Epstein gets figured out pretty quickly:


The cast of Broadway’s Luv: Alan Arkin, Eli Wallach, and Anne Jackson:


And one of the great latter-day guests, Judy Garland, who seems like she’s a little hyper (she’s readying herself for the role in Valley of the Dolls):


And the single best find on YouTube, some wonderful gent’s posting of a 1975 ABC special on which John Charles Patrick Croghan Daly, Arlene Francis, and Mark Goodson present their favorite clips. The show starts off with three killers: Groucho, Fred Allen, and Woody, and then moves onward to other great things. The fourth part starts out with a clip we never saw on GSN: the Martin and Lewis appearance (my assumption as to why that kine was listed as "missing" by the GSN folks: Jer purchased it from G-T or Viacom?).