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.)
