Who Do You Trust
TV history books will tell you that Edgar Bergen (and wooden friends) hosted a prime-time game show called Do You Trust Your Wife? from 1956 to 1957. They will further tell you that when it shifted to daytime on July 14, 1958, its name was changed to the ungrammatical Who Do You Trust (should have been Whom and had a question mark) and that Bergen was replaced by Johnny Carson. The above tickets tell a different story. Here we see Johnny hosting the daytime version in January of ’58 and it’s still called Do You Trust Your Wife? Perhaps the name change is what occurred on the July date. On the September 22, 1958 ticket above, the name of the show is in a typeface other than the one normally used then on ABC tickets. That would suggest someone had made a quick fix on the printing plates to change the name of the program.
Writing the name of Carson’s game show without a question mark was symbolic of the program, which was a quiz show that never got around to asking many questions. Like Bergen’s version and Groucho’s You Bet Your Life, the quiz format was just an excuse for the host to banter with contestants and, in Johnny’s case, to engage in demonstrations. A belly dancer would come on to play the game and before they got to that, she’d give Johnny a lesson in her craft. It all honed and demonstrated Carson’s fine skills for making an interview interesting and participating in stunts — two of the three essential skills (the other being the monologue) that he’d display on The Tonight Show.
Occasionally, the game show got randy. Tuesday through Friday, Johnny would do the show live. On Fridays, he’d also tape a show that could air on Mondays so he and the crew could have a three-day weekend. After doing the live Friday show and before taping Monday’s, he and announcer Ed McMahon would repair to a nearby tavern for dinner and drinks, often resulting in an alcohol-enhanced taping that would be looser and dirtier than the norm and, of course, funnier. It all earned Johnny The Tonight Show, though not without a wait. When he was signed to replace Jack Paar on the late-night show, he still had six months on his Who Do You Trust contract, and that show’s producer, Don Fedderson, saw no reason to let him out early. The Tonight Show endured six months of guest hosts while Johnny hosted his afternoon program under duress, cracking jokes about ABC holding him prisoner. In actuality, it was not ABC but Fedderson, who knew that his show would not long survive the loss of Johnny…and it didn’t. Carson was finally replaced by comedian Woody Woodbury, ratings on Who Do You Trust plunged, and that was the end of that.
Danny Kaye Show, The
Danny Kaye was one of those entertainers who was almost universally loved by audiences when he was performing, and despised by those around him when he wasn’t. His 1963-1967 variety show was pretty wonderful, as I recall — kind of a mid-point between the Sid Caesar and Carol Burnett shows. Half his writing staff had worked for Sid. Most of the others would work for Carol, as would co-star Harvey Korman. Burnett, whose show went on just as Kaye’s was going off, would even tape in the same studio. Of interest on the above ticket is the rubber-stamped proclamation, “Special — No Seats Reserved.” You see that on a lot of tickets and it’s sometimes pretty meaningless. They stamp “special” on your free tickets and you think you’re somehow privileged and will get V.I.P. treatment if you use them. What you don’t know of course is that everyone else also has a “special” ticket. It can also be a way of composing the audience with preferred types. For example, they want to limit the number of senior citizens in the house so they pass out the “special” tickets via means that they know are likely to reach a younger crowd and make a point of seating them first and in the front.
Red Skelton Show, The
Tickets to TV tapings are free, of course. But they could have made a fortune charging to see Red Skelton rehearse; that is, if they raised the minimum age to 21. As I explained in this article, Mr. Skelton’s dress rehearsals consisted of ignoring that week’s scripts and telling dirty jokes to the crew and a contingent of CBS secretaries and employees who filled the audience. And here are the key questions: If you were the maker of Pet Evaporated Milk, would you really want to publicize that you also made Johnson’s Wax? Just how do you benefit from connecting those two products in the minds of the American public? And what the heck ever happened to Brian Donlevy?
There’s some odd terminology on two of the above tickets. Skelton, when he did his show at CBS, would do a “preview” performance on Monday night for a live audience — not to be confused with his ribald dress rehearsals, for which there were no tickets. Then the script would be revised and rehearsed for a Tuesday evening taping. But in most cases, a ticket that says “a special preview” is a ticket to watch a tape or film of a show that was shot without a live audience. Some shows have done that — shot without the public present, then brought an audience in, shown them the program and recorded their laughter and applause to dub into the show. That doesn’t seem to have been the case with the second and third tickets above, especially the one that says “preview performance.” Both were probably tickets to watch Red Skelton and his guests do the entire show live…but they don’t look it.
Real People
Real People, which some might call the first prime-time TV “reality show,” debuted on April 18, 1979. So I’m not sure why a ticket for a taping more than nine months later is composed as if attendees had never heard of it. Nevertheless, this is one of the few TV tickets I’ve ever seen that felt it had to explain a little about the show and even make a joke, warning people not to show up “with somebody you should’nt [sic] be seen with.” For those who don’t remember, the idea of Real People was that the show’s correspondents would just spotlight and salute interesting folks around the country. Produced by George “Laugh-In” Schlatter, the series was enormously popular for most of its five years and briefly made stars out of some of those it covered, and spawned a short-lived spin-off, Schlatter’s Speak Up, America. Also, one of the hosts, John Barbour, was inspired to go out and sell something called That @&$# Quiz Show.
P.D.Q.
P.D.Q. was a fringe-time afternoon game show on NBC. “Fringe-time” means it was scheduled late in the afternoon and not every network affiliate carried it, so in some cities it was syndicated to non-NBC stations. The premise was that you had two teams, and at times they’d be one celebrity and one civilian. One member of each team would go into a little booth while the other member would race against the clock, running back and forth to put letters up on a board that would spell out a word or phrase. The person in the booth would have to guess the word or phrase based on seeing some but not all of the letters, and the team which “got it” in the fewest number of seconds would get the points. It was kind of like someone said, “How can we rip off Password but make it more physical?” Presiding over the game when it aired from 1965 to 1969 was Dennis James, the Iron Horse of TV game show hosting. Not long after it went off, Lin Bolen took command of NBC’s daytime game show lineup and, legend has it, she decided she didn’t want any of her programs hosted by “old men like Dennis James,” the theory being that housewives wanted someone hunkier to look at during the day. When the decision was made in 1973 to revive P.D.Q., it was retitled Baffle and Dick Enberg came in to host.
On the above ticket, one can see many indicators that P.D.Q. had trouble filling its studio audience: The long lead time between when they wanted you there and when they did the show, the door prizes, the low minimum age, etc. An awful lot of people who went to see them tape P.D.Q. probably arrived at NBC that day hoping to see something else.
Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, The
These tickets aren’t from my collection but I actually went to see them tape The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour around this time. My first memory is of an excruciatingly long wait to get in. Well past the hour given for Seating Time, we were still standing outside, and in the hot sun and in an area without anywhere to sit. (CBS soon rearranged their audience areas so this is no longer true.) A lot of folks gave up waiting and left and we were about to when we were suddenly admitted…whereupon we got to wait a very long time inside Studio 33, a legendary place in television history, but still not a place you’d want to sit and wait for too long.
Finally, the producer welcomed us, and Sonny Bono and his then-wife came out and did the opening spot of the show, including a song. Then they taped the closing spot and exited to great applause that could continue under the credits. During all of this, the producer, Sonny and Cher kept talking about the great guest stars they had this week, and we kinda assumed we’d be seeing some of them. As it turned out, all the comedy sketches had already been taped without an audience. (They’d be sweetened with canned laughter, but of course the home viewers would see us, the live audience, at the beginning and end of the show, and would probably assume we’d been there throughout and that that was us howling with glee.) The producer explained that the sketches had to be taped without an audience “for technical reasons,” but I later worked with that producer and found that he just preferred to do it that way.
The only other thing we got to see was a musical number by that evening’s musical guests, The Grass Roots. The song was “Sooner or Later,” and one of the reasons I can recall that title is because they sang it — actually, lip-synched to what I think was their record — about eight times so that the cameras could get it from a wide array of angles. At least, I think it was eight. We left about the time it started to seem like eight. On the way out, we ran into a young lady — a devout Sonny/Cher fan we’d been chatting with in line. The lady was almost in tears. She’d brought something she hoped to get Cher to sign, and had left the taping after the fifth take of “Sooner or Later” to get outside the Artists’ Entrance in the hope of an encounter. A guard there told her that Cher and Sonny had both left twenty minutes earlier. In other words, we’d stayed at the taping of The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour longer than either Sonny or Cher.
Telly – Who Loves Ya, Baby?
This isn’t a very good scan but then, it wasn’t a very good show. In the midst of his success as Kojak, Telly Savalas somehow decided he wanted to be Frank Sinatra. One year, he got the producers of the Academy Awards to let him sing one of the nominated songs, which he attempted to do while smoking a cigarette, a la Sinatra. Unfortunately, he also decided to pre-record his vocal and hadn’t quite mastered the knack of taking a puff between lines of the song and getting his mouth clear to lip-sync the next line. For weeks after, Johnny Carson did jokes about Telly not being able to smoke and lip-sync at the same time. Since Savalas was a CBS star, they had to let him do his own variety special, which went much the same way. Note the line which says, “Audience will be seen on camera. Please dress accordingly.” What that usually means is that the pages get instructed to seat the best-dressed folks up front, or in the section on which the cameras will be trained…and everyone from about the third row back will be dressed like they’re shopping at Target.
Amateurs Guide To Love, The
The Amateurs Guide To Love was a messy attempt to cross-pollinate a game show with a Candid Camera type show, also folding in elements of a “let’s discuss romance” daytime program. The format changed a bit during its run but basically, a celebrity panel was shown pre-taped clips where people on the street had been caught in hidden camera stunts that were supposed to point up the way men and women acted, individually and collectively. The tape was stopped before the payoff and the panel would predict how the folks would react, with prizes going to the subjects if the panelists didn’t guess the outcome. Or something like that. I never quite understood the show; not when it was a prime-time CBS special hosted by McHale Navy‘s Joe Flynn…not when it became a daytime CBS show hosted by Gene Rayburn. The special aired in August of ’71 and the series started in March of ’72, so I’m guessing the top ticket was from a test show done at a time when the network was still deciding whether or not to pick up the daytime version. The words “special preview” are one tip-off, as is the absence of the CBS eye. They usually leave it off tickets to shows that tape at CBS facilities but air in other venues. I’m presuming they also leave it off shows that may not wind up on CBS. (A version of this show also aired briefly on the USA Network, but that was years later.)
