Remembering Early Television One thing which annoys me to no end is when a TV show I’m interested in gets dropped on a cliffhanger. I just read where Project Blue Book is not going to be renewed. I was under the impression this show was popular but I guess I was wrong. This happened so many times it almost makes you want to not get interested in any new shows. Over the years there have been many good shows on television. Being old, my memory goes back quite a few years. When their only a few channels. The channels we could get were 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13. If my memory serves me correctly they were WCBS, WNBC, WABD which was the Dumont network, WABC, WOR, WPIX and WNET. I am talking about the late 1940s and early 1950s. One of the early shows which almost everybody watched, was the Milton Berle show. The show was an early comedy and was on from 1948 to 1956. Uncle Milte, I’m not sure if that is the correct spelling, but he was very popular. We probably had nine out of ten television sets tuned to him when he was on and we watched him at my godfather’s house on his large 8 inch or so screen. Folding chairs used to be lined up in front of the set and the entire family would go there since that was the only place where there was a television. I remember my godfather would walk into a room and if somebody was looking at his television, he might switch the channel to something else. This used to drive people crazy and his wife gave him the nickname of switch. Sometimes things happened on television which were unscripted because the shows where live. People might fall over things, and might get a rip in their clothing or some other unplanned event might happen, and sometimes it was funny. We’ve lost most of this today since all of our shows a prerecorded except perhaps for the news. The 1949 to 1950 TV schedule was monumental. It was the first season in which all four of the big networks offered some prime time programming all seven nights of the week. When nothing was on you would get a test pattern on your TV. One of the television shows from that era which was famous was The Lone Ranger. It aired from 1949 to 1957. It was about a Texas Ranger who survived a massacre of rangers and went out to stop all lawbreakers. He had a sidekick named Tonto, his faithful Indian companion. He wore mask and shot silver bullets. This is one of the few old shows that was ever released on DVD. Clayton Moore played The Lone Ranger on the show and became very popular, but was dumped from the role in future Lone Ranger adventures in the movies. Many people were upset over this and he was hit with a stop and deceased order which prevented him from wearing his mask in public so he wore sunglasses. Not every show was live however and one of the first to be produced on film was a show called The Life of Riley. It was very popular and a comic book was produced about it. It started out as a radio program. It starred William Bendix as Chester A. Riley and ran for thirty minutes. One extremely popular show was the Ed Sullivan show. Almost everybody watched it and there were many notable firsts on it. It was a variety show and the acts were announced by Ed Sullivan a news man. The funny part of this was he seemed to be the wrong person for the job and yet he became extremely popular. This is the show that introduced the Beatles to America. He had many big acts on every week and they spanned every type of entertainment. Elvis Presley appeared on the show with all his gyration, but he had previously appeared on the Milton Berle show, so this was not the first time he was on television. One of my favorite acts was a ventriloquist named Señor Wences. Wences had originally been a Spanish bullfighter. He developed a dummy whose head was really his hand and his act was hysterical. He also had a talking head in a box. Almost everybody in the country had to know who he was as he made frequent appearances on the Ed Sullivan show. As the show continued, it gathered more great acts such as the Dave Clark five, The Supremes, the Animals, Credence Clearwater Revival, The Beach Boys and many other musical acts, besides circus performers famous actors and actresses, comedians even ballet dancers. There was no end to the talent that appeared on the show. Originally the name of the show was The Toast of the Town. The show lasted from 1948 to 1971. Another very popular show that most people looked at was called Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. It ran from 1948 to 1958 on television and was sponsored by Lipton tea. Arthur Godfrey was on two shows at once, he was on this one and also on a show called Arthur Godfrey and His Friends. The show would send out talent scouts and bring back the acts they found to perform. It was also a radio show and it continue to 1956. As time marched on people’s taste about television shows changed and Westerns kept getting more popular reducing the size of Godfrey’s audience until the show went off the air. As hard as it is to believe, Meet The Press started in 1947. One has to wonder how after all these years the show is still popular, but there you go, it has lasted seventy-three years and looks like it could reach 100 years. Lately it has been taking a lot of criticism. A comedian named Groucho Marx was very popular at the time and had made movies with a group called the Marx Brothers. Some were full-length and some were shorts and all were comedies. The act was composed of the three eldest Marx brothers, Chico, Harpo and Groucho. They disbanded in 1950 and Groucho went out on his own and had a successful career. He became the star of the show named You Bet Your Life in 1947 and the show went on until 1961. In the late forties everybody was fascinated by television. It seemed an impossible invention and we couldn’t get enough of it. The fact it was only in black and white and usually on a small screen didn’t deter anyone’s interest in it at all. For those of us that remember those days, it seems they were even more amazing than the technology we are experiencing today. Maybe because that was one of the first great technological breakthroughs.
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