When I got my satellite dish, I got something like a hundred different channels, all of them — that first week — running Hello, Dolly and/or Guide for the Married Man. While I can always find something on I want to watch, I am amazed at how limited the selection is; how so many channels run the same shows. I wish someone would start The Old Sitcom Network and run some old situation comedies that are not I Love Lucy, Andy Griffith, Leave It to Beaver, M*A*S*H, Taxi or The Jeffersons. Where the hell is Sgt. Bilko? Why is no one running He and She? Car 54, Where Are You? Or any of two dozen other great shows we could all mention? For a time, the Game Show Network disappointed me, rerunning The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and a few other awful ones,
ad nauseam.
They still do that but lately, they've made up for it by offering great delights via their Late Night Black-and-White series. Each night between 1 AM and 3 AM — 4 and 6 in the East — they run three episodes of vintage game shows. (Putting them in 40-minute time slots mean that they get run relatively uncut, instead of being trimmed to allow more commercials.) After a brief period wherein they recycled all the episodes they'd run recently in a similar Sunday night slot, they're now running shows that probably haven't been seen anywhere since they originally aired in the fifties and early sixties.
The episodes of Beat the Clock, hosted by Bud Collyer, are as dreadful as I recalled…but the original What's My Line? is enormous fun, especially when it reflects TV history — like guest panelist Johnny Carson being wished well on his new job hosting The Tonight Show, or Julie Andrews popping over from playing in My Fair Lady to be Mystery Guest. My father always hated the show because, to him, it had a palpable air of snobbery and the arrogance of the New York literati. I see very little of that. Mostly, I see people having fun and the occasional wonderful outbreak of utter spontaneity.
Even better are rebroadcasts of old episodes of I've Got A Secret. Garry Moore took game show hosting to a high art form, and it's amazing how witty Bill Cullen and Henry Morgan managed to be. There are moments on all these shows — and especially on a forgotten show that GSN occasionally airs called The Name's The Same — where it's obvious that some briefing of the panelists has obviously occurred. It's not that they were given the right answers but that they were given the wrong questions. That is, the producers obviously told certain panelists to ask certain questions that would get huge laughs…like Arlene Francis, quizzing a man she didn't know sold mattresses, "Could Bennett Cerf and I use your product together?" But both Cullen and Morgan got some amazing quips off, seemingly without benefit of such preparation. There are also installments of I've Got A Secret that show obvious traces of the humor of Allan "Hello, Muddah" Sherman, who was then its producer.
Yeah, they're on late. But that's why God invented TiVo, right?