Here's a strange bit of TV history. Jack Paar, as we all know, hosted the show called Tonight on NBC for a few years before it became The Tonight Show and Johnny Carson took up what for a long time seemed like permanent residency. Among the many competing talk shows that came and went opposite Mr. Carson was Dick Cavett's.
Unlike all the others that "went," Cavett made a good showing against Johnny. He was on for almost exactly five years and when he went off, it was one of those "golden goose" things that happens in television. He was finishing a respectable, profitable second and someone at ABC got horny to knock off Carson and be Numero Uno…and what they replaced Cavett with did much worse. It was several years before that time slot was at all profitable again. They'd have been better off leaving Cavett right where he was.
They replaced him in stages. He went from weekly to every fourth week, displaced by ABC's Wide World of Entertainment, a rotating mess that some referred to as ABC's Wide World of Indecision. One out of four weeks, you got a week of Cavett. Two out of four weeks, you got a jumbled array of specials and pilots and special pilots and news magazines and they ran a couple of Monty Python specials made up of excerpts that were assembled so ineptly that the Pythons sued and won.
And then one week out of four, you got Jack Paar Tonite. Jack Paar came out of retirement to do what he'd once done on TV…and to show why he wasn't doing it any longer. As I wrote here in 2004 when Mr. Paar passed…
The new show didn't work, in part because it was the old show: Paar remained more or less stuck in 1959, trotting out his old regulars (those who'd survived) and telling stories about having Adlai Stevenson on his old show. In later years when he surfaced for the occasional interview, he still hadn't advanced much. He criticized "current talk shows" for eschewing witty guests for dizzy starlets…an odd criticism from one who gave so much air time to a woman named Dody Goodman whose mouth never once connected with her medulla oblongata. He also devoted a lot of TV hours to chatting with Genevieve (a French starlet who didn't speak English well), Reiko (a Japanese lady who didn't speak English well) and the Gabor sisters. I suspect that, like a lot of old TV shows, the Paar Tonight Show is legendary in part because the shows aren't available to be seen and fairly evaluated.
When he was doing Tonight, Paar's rerun episodes were titled The Best of Paar. The new show was like The Worst of Paar, even though they weren't reruns and even thought they sometimes felt like they were.
Well, guess what I found for you today, kids! It's an imperfect-but-watchable video of the first episode of Jack Paar Tonite as it ran on January 8, 1973. You will probably feel sorry for its host because the taping was beset with tech problems. Paar made his entrance to a thunderous ovation from the live audience and was halfway through a strong monologue when the director (Hal Gurnee, who later worked for David Letterman) had to stop him and say they had to start taping again from the beginning.
You don't see that part because it was not recorded. You see the Second Take as Paar and the audience attempt to recreate what happened moments before…and there are other technical glitches in the program. That would throw anyone off their game.
The announcer is Peggy Cass. The first guest was Goldie Hawn, who one suspects was booked because they thought she'd be a total airhead and Paar could treat her as he used to treat Dody Goodman. Mostly, Paar — who in retirement was constantly criticizing TV for being "smutty" — wanted to talk about how flat-chested she is.
Jonathan Winters followed and instead of being funny, they talked about how funny he was on the old show. Then the last guest was Dave Powers, who worked for John F. Kennedy. Paar was congenitally unable to go an hour without talking about his close relationships with John F. Kennedy and/or "Brother Bobby" and/or Richard M. Nixon.
Jack Paar Tonite lasted a year of appearing every fourth week. I watched it from time to time and don't recall it getting much better than this…