More about Captain Kangaroo,

Bob Keeshan, from the NYT obituary. He started out in show business with the job of seating children in the audience--the Peanut Gallery--for "The Howdy Doody Show." When he did "Captain Kangaroo," he had no studio audience. Asked why, he expressed his concern for the children watching at home:

"The children should never be excluded from what I am doing and should never have the feeling of being part of an audience."

How sensitive that was to the feelings of a child! I remember watching "The Howdy Doody Show" and feeling left out of the Peanut Gallery. Who were those children? How did they get there? Was there something that made some children "Peanuts" that allowed them into the wonderful television world, while I was left stranded on the other side of the screen--screened out? Mr. Rogers followed the same intuition.

Strangely, shows for nonchildren--Oprah, Letterman, MTV's Spring Break--go on the assumption that an audience tends to make the home viewer feel more included. Perhaps that's because nonchildren understand how to get out of the house and into the audience and can therefore project themselves into the audience, which they know is composed of people like them. They have shaken off the feeling that the people on TV are a different breed--they aren't Peanuts, just people like me getting out of the house.

It's funny that back in the 1950s, the kids on TV were Peanuts, while now, we name the people at home after foodstuffs: Couch Potatoes.

Back to Keeshan: He was elevated from audience-seating to a character role on "The Howdy Doody Show," in 1948. He was

"Clarabell, a clown who said nary a word but who jumped around the stage a lot and, to the delight of the members of the Peanut Gallery, frequently sprayed [the show's host Buffalo Bob] Smith in the nose with his seltzer bottle.

Buffalo Bob fired Keeshan/Clarabell because he thought he was trying to form a union! That was in 1950, a couple years before I was in a position to be watching the show, so the Clarabell I remember was Keeshan's replacement. (I remember Clarabell as the best-loved character on the show (along with Flub-a-Dub). I could never understand why Doody got top billing.)

Keeshan got started with "Captain Kangaroo" (which was originally called "Tinker's Workshop"), in 1954. I may very well have watched the first episode and believe I remember the original title.

To play Captain Kangaroo, Mr. Keeshan had to catch the 4:20 a.m. train from Babylon, on Long Island, to be at CBS by 6. He lived in constant fear of oversleeping and employed three alarm clocks plus a phone service. He never missed a broadcast.

In the beginning, he would do "Captain Kangaroo" live twice a day, an 8 a.m. broadcast for the East Coast and then, after a break of less than a minute, a repeat of the whole show for the Midwest.

Ah, the travails of live television! Those guys were heroes!

How much of "The Apprentice" is a set up?

Consider this description of the first three installments, described by the NYT:

In the three episodes of "The Apprentice" that have been broadcast, the women's team has beat out the men's three times. And each time, the women have used their gender and good looks to get ahead. In order to sell lemonade, the women — all attractive and trim, and some scantily clad — rewarded customers with kisses. Their winning advertising campaign pitch for the jet company invoked phallic double entendres about nose cones and fan tails, which the women delivered wearing adorable flight attendant uniforms. In the most recent challenge, the women shamelessly flirted with a gold merchant in order to win a key discount.

I don't think the women are actually actresses, in on a joke, like the housemates on "The Joe Schmo Show," because you can find an old article verifying that Omarosa really did have a job of some kind in the Clinton White House, and because it seems unlikely that they wouldn't clue in the audience that the guys were being scammed, since knowing that would probably be thought to help us enjoy things. But I do suspect that the women, chosen in part for good looks, were encouraged to go all out using sexuality to win every contest, to produce a show where the men would lose again and again, challenging them to break down and begin complaining in amusing and politically incorrect ways.

Speaking of political correctness, what's with the locution "the women have used their gender"? The word "sexuality" is not fit to print?

Ah, friendship!

Dennis Miller is giving Bush a free pass and Al Franken is giving Dennis Miller a free pass. The AP reports:

Dennis Miller has usually been happy to spray his acerbic wit across the political spectrum, but things will be different on his new CNBC talk program. President Bush is in a mock-free zone.

"I like him," Miller explained. "I'm going to give him a pass. I take care of my friends."

.... "People have said to me, 'What happened to Dennis?'" [his former "Saturday Night Live" colleague Al] Franken said.

"Nothing happened to Dennis. He's the same Dennis. He's always had a conservative streak on certain issues. ... It makes what you do different when you say, 'I don't have a dog in this fight,'" Franken said. "It's a big choice to make. I made it. I made the same choice on the opposite side."

Personally, I adore Miller. He says things like this:

"If two gay guys want to get married, I couldn't care less," he said. "It's their business. If some foreigner wants to blow their wedding up, I want my government to eliminate him."

The United States right now is simultaneously the world's most loved, hated, feared and admired nation, he said.

"In short," he said, "we're Frank Sinatra."

Plus, according to the AP, the show will have a monkey:

You read that right. Miller wanted a simian presence, believing a monkey occasionally scampering across the studio floor will keep both guests and viewers on their toes, he said.

Hey, it worked for The Today Show.

So how was Dennis Miller in his first effort?

The "monkey," actually a chimpanzee, really was meant as a tribute to J. Fred Muggs, of the original Today Show (as discussed below). The creature seemed depressed (or drugged), and didn't hop away or jump back up on cue with the speed that must have been intended. This is no cute baby chimp, but a relatively full-sized one (to my eye, at least). I'm not sure what that added, other than dead weight, but Miller led off with a few jabs at animal rights types who might object, out of concern for the chimp--which he referred to as "the simian," in a typical effort to help us expand our vocabulary.

Some of these efforts are off the mark. For example, it's not right to say "We're not going to waste time pretending to adhere to the McGuffin of 'fair and balanced.'" A McGuffin is not a slogan or a canard, but a meaningless plot device, like the uranium in "Notorious." Is he just trying to impress people who don't get the references? But even they can pause the Tivo and Google.

His intro didn't make the idea for the show very clear--other than the "one unalterable rule: no Ed Asner." He said he was going to change from his usual "milieu" and "evolve" (a possible reference to the chimp). He claimed to be liberal, but changed since 9/11. He did that gay wedding/terrorist joke quoted below. Expressing disdain for the overprotection of the rights of the accused, he said "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown." I don't know how in control of that reference he was, but as I remember "Chinatown," that line means the law has no application here. So did he mean, after 9/11, the government can fight terrorism any way it wants? I doubt it, because he went on to talk about the need for "pragmatism," which can be a vision of the rule of law.

After the intro, he brought on his pal Arnold Schwarzenegger, who proceeded to talk policy, blabbing about Proposition 57 and 58, which Miller had to prod him to explain. Did you know that people need to work together to solve problems? At least Miller made fun of himself afterwards for being so bad.

Some "Weekend Update" type clutter in the middle, then out come David Horowitz, Naomi Wolf, and David Frum. Okay...

After the break, there's Dennis hiding behind an O'Reilly Factor mug. He says, "All Right! First show! Broke some adhesions. Gotta figure out a way to break into people. Don't wanna be rude."

Unfortunately, the show seemed to justify the O'Reilly approach of cutting in all the time. I hope he figures out a solution. He obviously knows he's got a problem.

Jack Paar's death

Jack Paar has died. Look for obituaries attempting to explain that shrouded-in-the-mists-of-time W.C. incident:

A man of boundless curiosity and interests, he was charming, gracious and famously sentimental: He could shed tears, as he put it, just from "taking the Coca-Cola bottles back to the A&P."

He could also be volatile, pettish and confounding. And never so much as in February 1960, when, making headlines, he emotionally told his thunderstruck audience that he was leaving his show. It was the night after a skittish NBC executive had judged obscene, and edited out, a story by Paar where the initials "W.C." were mistaken for "wayside chapel" instead of "water closet."

A month later, the network managed to lure Paar back. Returning on the night of March 7, he was greeted with generous applause as he stepped before the cameras. Then he began his monologue on a typically cheeky note: "As I was saying, before I was interrupted ... "

The late-night shows of that era are outside of my memory range. Johnny Carson succeeded Jack Paar on The Tonight Show in 1962, and I can clearly remember Carson's earlier daytime quiz show, "Who Do You Trust?" I even remember discussions of the grammar of that show title. I wish I had seen the Jack Paar Tonight Shows. How about a DVD?

"I'm against psychiatry -- for me, anyway," he told viewers. "I haven't got any troubles I can't tell standing up."

I vaguely remember adults being very interested in the subject of psychiatry in those days. Didn't Jack Paar fit into that theme for a lot of people? Or am I only remembering the mysterious sophistication that adults seemed to have to me when I was a child?

Sharing TV

I'm itching to watch "American Idol" and the first episode of the new season of "The Osbournes," but the TV with the TiVo (and with a sightline from the computer) is currently being shared with a family member who is interested in the coverage of the New Hampshire primary. I'm interested in the primary, but don't really need to witness nonstop journalistic yammering all evening. Breaking news! Kerry is the predicted winner! Okay, he was 35 points behind in December. That is really something. Boy, can they crank out analysis of how the heck that happened.

"The economy was a big issue"... blah blah blah.

"Single digit loss" = new momentum for the Dean campaign. Let's watch his concession speech and talk about all the dimensions of its difference from his notorious Iowa concession.

Edwards: "What I wanted to do is come from the mid- to upper-single digits into the teens."

Now Carville is going with the theory that it's all about 5: if Kerry wins by more than five, he's in a good position; if he wins by less than five, that will demand some explaining.

The show is all about characterizing the numbers, because that is all the material we have, a handful of percentages. And they must talk, talk, talk about them.

Hmmm.... 101 votes for Al Sharpton....

Jack Paar again

Did you know that Jack Paar came up with the idea of the sofa and desk furniture arrangement for a TV talk show? Here are a few more things about Jack, who seems to have had a talk show that was much more about great talk than today’s talk shows, from the NYT obituary:

• [U]nknowns who [got] national exposure on his show[:] ... Bill Cosby, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Carol Burnett, Woody Allen, the Smothers Brothers and Godfrey Cambridge.

• "Everyone thinks Ed Sullivan discovered the Beatles," [Paar] once complained. "That's not true. I had them on before he did. I did it because I thought they were funny, not because I liked the music. I'm a Muzak kind of guy — my home's like living in an elevator."

• There always seemed to be a neurotic edge to Mr. Paar and his pals. [NYT critic John J.] O'Connor once said people watched to see if anyone would have a nervous breakdown on camera. Mr. Downs once explained affectionately, "Jack's not mentally ill; he's a carrier of mental illness." [Regular guest Oscar] Levant, asked what he did for exercise, mumbled, "I stumble and then I fall into a coma."

• "I hate my emotion," Mr. Paar said of all his tearful controversies. "Knock it off, I tell myself, but I just can't help it."

He had a catchphrase, “I kid you not.” I can remember my parents saying that and understanding that it was amusing in a way I couldn’t understand because I was too young to stay up and watch late night TV.

I see Prof. Yin is blogging last night's "The Apprentice."

Ah, big surprise, the women win again by what the New York Times once referred to as "using their gender." My conspiracy theory is still in play.

I have this episode TiVo'd, and I can't be positive I won't give in and finish watching it, but I can tell you exactly where I hit the pause button, and where, if I know what's good for me, I will leave it.

It was right when Trump dangled the big prize for winning the new challenge in front of the contestant/sycophants: a visit to "the best golf course in New York State"--Trump National Golf Club. Is this show not the most revolting, grandiose infomercial ever?

What's that movie?

I idly turned on the television in my bedroom as I was getting ready for work this morning. It was some black and white melodrama with a woman screaming about how she didn't want her baby, she was only 26, she still had her figure, and she wanted to have fun. Told she needed to get a job, she was all: "I don't want no dirty job."

I loved the dialogue.

Then, we see the little girl, trying to show her mother her report card, calling out for friends who never arrive, going up the stairs to her shabby apartment. I found this fascinating for some reason and decided it must be a great film to get my attention over what should be just a cliché: a lonely little girl. But I loved this low-dialogue exposition of loneliness. The girl leaves the door open, gets a lone glass from a high shelf, pours a glass of milk. A kitty cat wanders in, the girl gets a bowl from another shelf, pours some milk for the cat, watches the cat, pets the cat. I'm telling you: fascinating!

Next, she's older. Who's that actress playing her now? She's going on about how the boys only want to go out with her because of what she lets them do with her. At regular intervals she says things like "I'm going to Hollywood!"

Who is that actress?

I go downstairs and turn on the TV that displays the show titles and see the movie is "The Goddess," and the actress is Kim Stanley. I'd order the DVD right now if it were on DVD, but it's only on VHS. I scroll through the listings on the channel -- it's Turner Classic Movies -- to see if they're going to repeat it. There is an unbelievably high-quality set of movies being shown there in the next few days, but I'm not seeing a repeat of "The Goddess."

Have any of you seen that movie? Talk about it!

So let's see what's going on with TCM. Oh, it's the "31 Days of Oscar" schedule, and today they're in Best Screenplay. Who wrote the screenplay for "The Goddess"? Paddy Chayefsky!

Very good.