It stayed on my mind, and fostered a affinity for a good amnesia story, and the “clueless protagonist caught up in a thriller” genre. I filled that void with movies like North By Northwest.
This was the summer of '67, so it was decades until I found out it really was a show (though a short summer replacement; they never showed the whole series). Wow, I did the math and it took fifty years for anyone to post the intro online, and release it on DVD (a year and a half ago). Man, I wish I could show it to those sixth grade haters who would get me to sing “Coronet Bluuuuue…”
But, and here’s the kicker… they wouldn’t care, or even remember. I’m all alone with the show that only I know or care about.
I could go on with a few books and an unsung musician, but I’ll let someone else have a turn first…
There was Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers in London, a summer replacement show for The Dean Martin Show in 1970, which had Marty Feldman and Charles Nelson Reilly in comedy sketches. The Golddiggers were the comedy and dance troupe that filled in between sketches in the regular seasons of The Dean Martin Show and were part of the summer replacement shows. In 1970 the producers decided to shoot the summer replacement show in London.
The show had comedy sketches like nothing I had ever seen. Remember, Monty Python’s Flying Circus hadn’t reached the U.S. yet. There was one sketch with Feldman and Reilly that was an adaptation for two people of the sketch “The Four Yorkshiremen” from At Last the 1948 Show, for instance.
Yes, Dean Martin wasn’t in it. That was the point of a summer replacement show (something that doesn’t exist anymore). The host was allowed to take a vacation. The host controlled the time period on TV though.
I don’t have any memory of the Golddiggers anymore, so I can’t tell you what they were like.
Charles Nelson Reilly was a friend of the Rat Pack (look it up if you don’t know it), so he became part of the show. Marty Feldman wasn’t known in the U.S. yet, but he was known in the U.K. Someone decided to hire him for the show to have someone local to London. Yes, the two of them were a surprising pair.
When I was young, in the mid '70s, and forced to go to bed too early in the evening, it also meant that I woke up very early in the morning – so early that none of the local TV stations were on the air yet (most of them didn’t start broadcasting until 7am).
One morning, when I was 11 or so, I woke up, went to the family room, and turned on the TV. It was still a bit before 7, but one of the stations would often turn on their transmitter before 7, and play music, while broadcasting a test pattern, until programming started. (Yes, I really was that bored. ) That morning, they were playing some upbeat, acoustic guitar music. I really liked it, but I’d never heard anything in that style before; I remember them playing several songs (clearly in the same style) before the top of the hour.
Of course, there was nothing on screen to indicate the names of the songs, or the artist. The closest I’ve ever since heard to that song is Steve Howe’s acoustic guitar solo, “Clap,” which appears on The Yes Album (though that specific song probably wasn’t what I heard on the TV that day).
They were a company of young, nubile discotheque girls* who did dance numbers in between comedy sketches and songs and occasionally participated in them. I seem to recall them dancing in a Hollywood Squares-type set in the shows opening and station breaks, dressed in gold-sequined miniskirts and white go-go boots. The one number I remember them doing was “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme That Thing.” (I can still remember the show’s theme music, which had no lyrics other than “Lalalalada-da!”)
Does anybody remember a short-lived series called The Good Life** around 1975? Larry Hagman and Donna Mills ditch the middle-America rat race and go to work for millionaire David Wayne as his personal servants, thereby allowing them to live like the rich. All three would go on to greater success in Dallas.
*Not to be confused with “disco girls.”
**Not to be confused with the British series of the similar name, known in the US as Good Neighbors.
I also remember Guestward Ho! It was on ABC as I recall. Chief Hawkeye was hilarious. Drove a Cadillac and dressed in full “Indian” gear. You’d never see a character like that nowadays. Also in the cast was Flip Mark who was quite a busy child/young adult actor for about a decade. One of those “whatever happened to” people.
I’ve often wondered what happens to the films of TV shows that lasted only a season or two…or less. Do they exist in some dark warehouse somewhere, or were they taken out and dumped into the ocean. (Don’t laugh. NBC did that with tons of their old shows, just to free up warehouse space in New Jersey.)
The Spirit of 76. It was a half-hour show for kids about the American Revolution for a couple of years 1975-77 or so. It was shown around noon-one on Saturdays. The host was dressed as an American colonist, played the guitar, and told stories about the Boston Tea Party, Molly Pitcher, etc. I’ve Googled it and checked on YouTube and nothing is what I remember. I thought it was on CBS, but it may have been a local show.
Did the TV station also have a sister radio station? Up until the early 80s, this was common in most media markets until the FCC began discouraging the practice. If that was the case, the TV station might’ve been audio simulcasting the radio station to test equipment and fill time until regular programming began.
No, they didn’t. FWIW, the station was WLUK in Green Bay, which, at that time, was the ABC affiliate there. My suspicion had been that it was just a matter of the morning engineer entertaining himself by playing music he liked.
I can think of many. A favorite was Wish You Were Here. It was about a stockbroker who is fired from his job and takes a camcorder (cutting edge technology in 1990) and travels to Europe. Each week, he sends back a videotape of his adventures and we see not only what happened to him, but also the reaction of the person receiving the tape. The storytelling structure was very clever, as his story dovetailed into the story of the viewer.
Most memorable episode was when he visited his grandfather’s home village, only to see the family name vilified as Nazi corroborators.
I’ll also mention Once a Hero, a hilarious satire of the Superhero genre which was cancelled after three episodes.
Saturday morning cartoon called Tomfoolery, broadcast for one season only in 1970, when I was nine years old. It was a Rankin-Bass production, animated in England, and based on the poetry of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. With silly jokes inserted in the interims. Continuing characters included the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo (on whom the early pumpkins blow).
Mainlining Carroll and Lear (it got me to the library, where I buried myself in the Alice books and The Hunting of the Snark and the complete Lear limericks) probably transformed me from a normal Middle American Hero who would have ended up as a hedge fund manager or investment banker into the boinkers lunatic weirdo I am today.
Even more than all the marihuana cigarettes and LSD sugar cubes I took a few years later.
Exactly one episode of Tomfoolery is available on YouTube. Not a very good one. The one that abides as a standard in my mind featured “The White Knight’s Song” from Through the Looking Glass.
One of the first books I ever read as a little kid, and certainly the moodiest. Most of the illustrations were a grey ink wash, with a dirty orange wash for accents. Which gave it a drab, end-of-October feel, which was exactly what late fall was like for a kid growing up in Milwaukee. And perfect for a story about ghosts at Halloween. Especially ghosts who lived, like I did, in a soulless suburb…
On the corner of Willow Wand Lane and Moonbeam Road stood a deserted ranch house.
It had been the model house at Doomsday Park.
And so many people had come to look at it that by now the poor house was quite shabby.
The ranch houses next door and down the street were copies of this house…
But no one at all wanted to live in the model house — no one but a family of ghosts.
It was a gateway book to the spooky side of Bradbury, Saki, King and Lovecraft.
To this day, when the leaves have fallen and dusk comes too early, I smile into the chilly drizzle and say *“Feels like Marshmallow Ghost time…” *
So, I’ll go with Rock Follies (1976), which is a wonderful British series that aired on PBS one year, then absolutely seemed to disappear (at least in the US). (It’s also the reason I didn’t get the joke when people started complaining “Who’s Rula Lenska?” when she appeared in a commercial as herself. I knew who she was!)
You’re not the only one who remembers “Tomfoolery” because I used to watch the show when NBC aired it at 7 a.m. which was the Saturday-morning equivalent of the Friday Night Death-Slot. It was an ambitious attempt at trying to do something different in children’s programming but, in retrospect, the network probably overestimated the number of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and Ogden Nash fans in the 5 to 9 age group.
I lived in the UK from 1976 to 1977, and I remember Rock Follies. At one time, I had both LPs from the series. (I think they’re still in storage.)
A year or so later, there was an American series called (I think) Sugar Time with Barbi Benton (of ***Playboy ***“fame”) and two other girls whose names I don’t recall. I never watched it, but I got the distinct impression it was a ripoff of Rock Follies.
I recall a bit I loved on Roadrunner cartoons. What I remember watching on TV was when the Coyote would fall off a cliff he would shrink to a dot, a donut cloud of dust would appear, and a half second later you’d hear the sound of him hitting the desert floor. But in the DVDs I got in the last 10 years, the sound comes with the donut.
) That morning, they were playing some upbeat, acoustic guitar music. I really liked it, but I’d never heard anything in that style before; I remember them playing several songs (clearly in the same style) before the top of the hour.