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;void(0)) . . . TELEVISION see: "ACTORS" see: "MOVIES" see: "RADIO" see: "COMMUNICATION" for other related links see: "ENTERTAINMENT, HOBBIES, & LEISURE ACTIVITIES" for other related links see: "JOURNALISM" for other related links TV a clever contraction derived from the words Terrible Vaudeville. . . we call it a medium because nothing's well done. --Goodman Ace (18991982) American humorist. Letter to Groucho Marx [c. 1953]. Why do they call television a medium? Because it is rarely well done. --Fred Allen [John Florence Sullivan] (18941956) American humorist. Radio is the theater of the mind; television is the theater of the mindless. --Steve Allen (Stephen Valentine Patrick William Allen) (19212000) American musician, comedian, writer, and first host of the Tonight Show. The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction. --Russell Baker (1925 ) American journalist and columnist. Television is the first truly democratic culture the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what the people do want. --Clive Barnes (1927 ) British journalist and critic. _New York Times_ [1969] TV, which compared to music plays a comparatively small role in the formation of young people's character and taste, is a consensus monsterthe Right monitors its content for sex, the Left for violence, and many other interested sects for many other things. But the music has hardly been touched, and what efforts have been made are both ineffectual and misguided about the nature of the problem. The result is nothing less than parents' loss of control over their children's moral education at a time when no one else is seriously concerned with it. --Allan Bloom (19301992) American writer and educator. _The Closing of the American Mind_ [1987] The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience. --Bill Bryson (1951 ) American writer of humorous travel books. Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. --Raymond Chandler (18881959) American writer of detective fiction. Television. . . thrives on unreason, and unreason thrives on television. . . [It] strikes at the emotions rather than the intellect. --Robin Day (19232000) British broadcaster. _Grand Inquisitor_ [1989] We believe that it is reasonable to conclude that a constant diet of violent behavior on television has an adverse effect on human character and attitudes. Violence on television encourages violent forms of behavior, and fosters moral and social values about violence in daily life which are unacceptable in a civilized society...It is a matter of grave concern that at a time when the values and the influence of traditional institutions such as family, church, and school are in question, television is emphasizing violent, antisocial styles of life. --Gloria DeGaetano, "Media Violence: Confronting the Issues and Taking Action" The only people who dispute the connection between smoking and cancer are people in the tobacco industry. And the only people who dispute the TV and violence connection are people in the entertainment industry. --Dr. Leonard Eron, TV researcher at the University of Michigan. Television makes so much [money] at its worst that it can't afford to do its best. --Fred W. Friendly [Ferdinand Friendly Wachenheimer] (19151998) President of CBS News and professor of journalism at Columbia. Editors interview, "The Television Fiasco" _U.S. News & World Report_ [12 June 1967]. Television enables you to be entertained in your home by people you wouldn't have in your home. --Sir David Paradine Frost (1939 ) British television host. Why should people go out and pay to see bad movies when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing? --Samuel Goldwyn [Schmuel Gelbfisz] (18821974) American film producer. In _Observer_ [9 September 1956]. Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it. --Alfred Hitchcock (18991980) British-born film director. No doctor can tell you anything your own bones don't know. And I can let the doctors in on something. I knew I'd really licked it [heroin addiction] one morning when I couldn't stand television anymore. When I was high and wanted to stay that way, I could watch TV by the hour and loved it. --Billie Holliday [Eleanora Fagan] (19151959) American jazz singer. _Lady Sings the Blues_ [1956], "God Bless the Child" O.J.'s [Simpson] trial went from being the most watched legal proceeding in U.S. history to the single event that received more coverage over a longer period of time than anything telecast before it. In its first year as a news story, O.J. attracted more TV coverage than the brutal war in Bosnia, more coverage than the election campaign for president of the United States, more coverage than a terrorist bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that took 168 lives. And O.J. received not just more coverage than any of those individual episodes; O.J. received more coverage than *all of them combined*. --Haynes Johnson (1931 ) American journalist; winner of the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. _The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years_ [2001] p. 148 All television is educational television. The only question is what it is teaching? --Nicholas Johnson (1934 ) FCC chairman and professor at University of Iowa. It is not that what is purveyed to [children] is always directly hurtful, intentionally or otherwise. Some of it even tries to be helpful. The evil lies rather in the forfeiture of what the child might otherwise be doing if he or she were not watching television. --George Frost Kennan (19042005) Ambassador to the USSR in 1952, and to Yugoslavia from 1961 to 1963 and chief architect of the U.S. Cold War policy of containment and deterrence against communism. _Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy_ Ch. 8 [1993] Pay no attention to what Burke's Peerage says about Princess Diana's lineage. Any woman who goes on television and discusses her affairs, betrayals, suicide attempts, and vomiting habits, and then says 'I'm a very strong person,' is an American. --Florence King (b. 1936) American journalist, essayist, and novelist. "The Misanthrope's Corner" [c. 1995] Television won't matter in your lifetime or mine. --Rex Lambert, editor of the Radio Times [1936] Isn't it odd that networks accept billions of dollars from advertisers to *teach* people to use products and then proclaim that children aren't *learning* about violence from their steady diet of it on television! --Toni Liebman, "A Call To Action" NYSAEYC Reporter [Fall 1993] For all its flexibility, television is more a mirror of taste than a shaper of it. --Russell Lynes (19101991) American art critic. _The Phenomenon of Change_ [1984] I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go into the library and read a good book. --Groucho Marx (18951977) American film comedian. _King Leer_ [1947] - The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. --H. (Herbert) Marshall McLuhan (19111980) Canadian professor and author. _The Gutenberg Galaxy_ [1962] Television is teaching all the time. It does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning. --H. (Herbert) Marshall McLuhan (19111980) Canadian professor and author. Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America not the battlefields of Vietnam. --H. (Herbert) Marshall McLuhan (19111980) Canadian professor and author. In the "Montreal Gazette" [16 May 1975]. - When television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air [. . . ] and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland. --Newton Norman Minow (1926 ) Chairman of the FCC (Federal Communications Commission). Speech [9 May 1961]. If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable. --Edward R. Murrow [Egbert Roscoe Murrow] (19081965) American broadcaster and journalist. Television is to news as bumperstickers are to philosophy. --Richard Nixon (19131994) American Republican statesman, President [19691974]. What worries me about television is that it takes our minds off our minds. --Robert Orben (1927 ) American magician and comedy writer. Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life. --Camille Paglia (1947 ) American writer and social critic. In "Harper's Magazine" [March 1991]. Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable. --Shimon Peres (1923 ) Israeli statesman. At a Davos meeting, in "Financial Times" [31 January 1995]. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. --Neil Postman (19312003) American educator. _Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business_ [1985], pt. II. ch. 6 - "It's a powerful medium," he opines. as Dr. Crane might, . . . A few years ago he traveled to deepest Africa, where Mr. Grammer reports, two men, in Masai get-ups, did a double take looking at him. "Ah Frasier!" one of them explained. May 13 [2004] will see the end of the 11-year run of "Frasier," one that brought the show more Emmys 31 than any other comedy in TV history. --Dorothy Rabinowitz, in the WSJ [22 April 2004], speaking to Kelsey Grammer about his character Frasier Crane. - In the mid-1940s, Moss Hart was president of the New York Dramatists Guild. One afternoon he called together the guild's foremost members to discuss demands and standards for writers in the new medium of TV. Many viewed the meeting as a joke. One veteran Broadway playwright described what he had seen already on TV as "amateurs playing at home movies." Hart insisted the members address the problem at hand. "The time will come when stations will be telecasting twelve, perhaps fourteen hours a day," he told them. A colleague interrupted, "I won't write for television, and I don't know anyone else who will." Hart pushed on. "The day is coming when a two-hour play will be seen once by millions of people. The network will be looking for writers to supply them with thirty-six full plays--or seventy-two hour long plays--each week." The silence was deafening. Finally, the oldest writer in the guild slowly raised his hand. "Where was it ever decreed that man had to have so much entertainment?" --Michael Ritchie, _Please Stand By: A prehistory of television_ [1994] - It is clear to me that the causal relationship between televised violence and antisocial behavior is sufficient to warrant appropriate and immediate remedial action. There comes a time when the data are sufficient to justify action. That time has come. --Dr. Jessie Steinfeld (1927 ) Former U.S. Surgeon General [19691973]. If a man is pictured chopping off a woman's breast, it only gets a R rating, but if, God forbid, a man is pictured kissing a woman's breast, it gets an X rating. Why is violence more acceptable than tenderness? --Sally Struthers (1948 ) American actress best known for her role in "All in the Family" [TV show]. In those early days in television the sponsor could even impose its brand on the title of the network newscast: "The Camel News Caravan." Indeed, at the end of the broadcast the screen was filled with a close-up shot of a burning cigarette in an ashtray, its smoke curling up languidly as an announcer intoned that the program had been "produced for Camel cigarettes by NBC News." For those concerned with sponsor interference in the news content of the program, let us note that there were only three prohibitions: no live camel could be shown (real camels were dirty, the sponsor thought), no "no smoking" sign could appear on screen; and no cigars were permitted. When the producer of the "Camel News Caravan" pointed out in the early 1950s that such restrictions made it difficult to cover news of Winston Churchill as prime minister of Great Britain, Camel granted special dispensation for the Churchill cigar. --Garrick Utley (b. 1939) American TV journalist. _You Should Have Been Here Yesterday_, ch. 1 [2000] I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts. --Orson Welles (19151985) American motion-picture actor, director, producer, and writer. Television is an instrument which can paralyze this country. --William Westmoreland (19142005) (Retired U.S. Army General, quoted in _Time_ [5 April 1982].) It used to be that we in films were the lowest form of art. Now we have something to look down on. --Billy Wilder (19062002) Austrian-born American film director and screenwriter. In A. Madsen _Billy Wilder_ [1968]. Television contracts the imagination and radio expands it. --Terry Wogan (b. 1938) Irish radio and television broadcaster. In "Observer" (London) [December 1984]. Chewing gum for the eyes. --attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) American architect. We watched with envy on television as American solders gave out Marlboro cigarettes to Iraqi prisoners of war. Many of us have to work an entire shift underground to afford one packet of Marlboros. I want to surrender to the Americans. --Sergei Yevshin, a coal miner on strike in the Ukraine. Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night. --Darryl F. Zanuck (19021979) American producer, writer, actor and director who headed 20th Century Fox. [In 1946.] - I am gross and perverted I'm obsessed 'n deranged I have existed for years But very little had changed I am the tool of the Government And industry too For I am destined to rule And regulate you I may be vile and pernicious But you can't look away I make you think I'm delicious With the stuff that I say I am the best you can get Have you guessed me yet? I am the slime oozin' out From your TV set You will obey me while I lead you And eat the garbage that I feed you Until the day that we don't need you Don't got for help...no one will heed you Your mind is totally controlled It has been stuffed into my mold And you will do as you are told Until the rights to you are sold That's right, folks.. Don't touch that dial Well, I am the slime from your video Oozin' along on your livin'room floor I am the slime from your video Can't stop the slime, people, lookit me go --Frank Zappa (19401993) American rock musician and songwriter. _I Am the Slime_ - MARGE: Homer, sitting that close to the TV can't be good for you. HOMER: Talklng while the TV's on can't be good for you. --Julie Thacker, dialogue "Last Tap Dance in Springfield," _The Simpsons_ Fox TV [2000] For God's sake go down to reception and get rid of a lunatic who's down there. He says he's got a machine for seeing by wireless! Watch him he may have a razor on him. --The editor of the Daily Express, dealing with John Logie Baird, inventor of a prototype television apparatus; [1925]. The answer to life's problems is not at the bottom of a bottle, they're on TV. --Homer J. Simpson But if I pay attention to you, I have to stop watching T.V. You can see the bind I'm in. --Homer J. Simpson Cable. It's more wonderful than I dared hope. --Homer J. Simpson It's just hard not to listen to TV: it's spent so much more time raising us than you have. --Bart Simpson Magazines and newspapers nowadays are filled with articles saying that television has at last come to America. But has it? Today, in millions of homes, the radio is turned on all day long while the housewife goes about her daily tasks. But television requires that the spectator sit still and look; he can't combine it with other occupations. If you are a workingman, tired after a hard day, would you rather lie down and listen to a radio program of your favorite music or sit up straight and watch a television performance of a few vaudeville acts? --"Ike and Mike on the Air" [17 May 1939] Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again. --TV listing for "The Wizard of Oz" in a Marin, CA newspaper. - Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube! This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation; this tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers; this tube is the most awesome g*ddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people. When the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome propaganda force in the world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network. TV is not the truth. TV is a g*ddamned amusement park. It's a circus, a carnival, a traveling troup of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. Since television programs were the first Earthly broadcasts to travel through space outside our solar system, they may be an extraterrestrial civilization's first glimpse of Earthlings. For instance, the first television message strong enough to reach into space was Adolf Hitler's opening speech at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.] "Those goddamn programs are our ambassadors into space . . . the Emissary from Earth." She paused to savor the phrase. "With an ambassador, you're supposed to put your best foot forward, and we've been sending mainly crap to space for forty years. I'd like to see the network executives come to grips with this one. And that madman Hitler, that's the first news they have about Earth. What are they going to think of us?" --President Lasker, a character in {Carl Sagan (1934-1996) American astronomer and author} _Contact_ [1985] Part I, "The Message", Ch. 6, "Palimpsest" - - So if you want the truth, go to God, go to your guru. Go to yourselves. Because it's the only place you're ever going to find any truth. You'll never hear it from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell . . . We deal in illusions, man. None of it is real. --Paddy Chayefsky (19231981) American playwright and screenwriter. (Spoken by Peter Finch in the 1976 movie _Network_.) You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here, you're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal! You do! Why, whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion! --ibid. -  ;void(0)) TELEVISION ADS . . see: "ADVERTISING" see: "SLOGANS" see: "CAPITALISM" for other related links Dennis James: "Ah, a box of matches and a pack of Old Gold cigarettes. That's all you need, my friend, and you're enjoying the smoothest, mildest, tastiest cigarette ever created. A treat instead of a treatment. That's Old Gold cigarettes. Made by tobacco men, not medicine men. To give you the cigarette that treats you better in every way, because in every way, it's a better cigarette. Good, huh? Yes, for a treat instead of a treatment, get a pack--or get a carton--of Old Gold cigarettes." _The Best Classic Commercials from the 50's and 60's_ [1993] In those early days in television the sponsor could even impose its brand on the title of the network newscast: "The Camel News Caravan." Indeed, at the end of the broadcast the screen was filled with a close-up shot of a burning cigarette in an ashtray, its smoke curling up languidly as an announcer intoned that the program had been "produced for Camel cigarettes by NBC News." For those concerned with sponsor interference in the news content of the program, let us note that there were only three prohibitions: no live camel could be shown (real camels were dirty, the sponsor thought), no "no smoking" sign could appear on screen; and no cigars were permitted. When the producer of the "Camel News Caravan" pointed out in the early 1950s that such restrictions made it difficult to cover news of Winston Churchill as prime minister of Great Britain, Camel granted special dispensation for the Churchill cigar. --Garrick Utley (b. 1939) American TV journalist. _You Should Have Been Here Yesterday_, ch. 1 [2000] - Plop, plop, fizz, fizz. Oh what a relief it is. --Alka-Seltzer I can't believe I ate the whole thing. --Alka-Seltzer Mama Mia, that's a spicy meatball! --Alka-Seltzer Brylcreem A little dab'll do ya. --Brylcreem hair lotion I'd walk a mile for a Camel. --Camel cigarettes That's what Campbell's soup is--Mmmm Mmmm Good! --Campbell's Soup (singing) "Chock full o' Nuts is the Heavenly coffee ...better coffee a millionaire's money can't buy!" See the USA in your Chevrolet! --General Motors Corp. (Commercial sung by Dinah Shore.) When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen. --E.F. Hutton brokerage It keeps going, and going, and going ... --Energizer batteries When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight. --Federal Express delivery service Chorus: "Nestle's is the very best..." ventriloquist dummy: ..."Cha-w-k-let" I wish I were an Oscar Mayer weiner That is what I'd truely like to be, eee, eee: For if I were an Oscar Mayer weiner, Everyone would be in love with me. I wish I were an Oscar Mayer weiner That is what I do not want to be, eee, eee: For if I were an Oscar meyer Weiner, There would soon be nothing left of me. [singing] "You'll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent" We'd rather fight than switch! --Tareyton cigarettes It takes a licking and keeps on ticking. --Timex watches . . see: "CARTOON CHARACTERS" see "ENTERTAINMENT, HOBBIES, & LEISURE ACTIVITIES" for other related links - Lassie looked brilliant, in part because the farm family she lived with was made up of idiots. Remember? One of them was always getting pinned under the tractor, and Lassie was always rushing back to the farmhouse to alert the other ones. She'd whimper and tug at their sleeves, and they'd always waste precious minutes saying things: "Do you think something's wrong? Do you think she wants us to follow her? What is it, girl?", etc., as if this had never happened before, instead of every week. What with all the time these people spent pinned under the tractor, I don't see how they managed to grow any crops whatsoever. They probably got by on federal crop supports, which Lassie filed the applications for. --Dave Barry (1947 ) American humorist. - Smile! You're on Candid Camera! --Television catchphrase "Candid Camera" - This is the nineteen -- what, eighties? --dialogue _Cheers_ TV show, "Coach" {Nicholas Colasanto 1924-1985} - If you're looking to save the whales, call Oprah Winfrey. If you're sleeping with a whale, call us. --Richard Dominick, Executive producer for the Jerry Springer Show [October 2000] - De plane! De plane! --Tattoo [Herve Villachez] (Said during the opening sequence of Fantasy Island) - Agent99: Oh, Max, how terrible. Max: He deserved it, 99. He was a Kaos killer. Agent 99: Sometimes I wonder if we're any better, Max. Max: What are you talking about, 99? We have to shoot and kill and destroy. We represent everything that's wholesome and good in the world. --Dialogue, "Get Smart" [1965-1970 television show] [Catchphrase of Maxwell Smart (Don Adams):] Would you believe . . . --"Get Smart" [American TV show 19651970] - Around Dodge City and in the territory out west there's just one way to handle the killers and the spoilers and that's with the U.S. Marshall and the smell of Gunsmoke. A transcribed story of the violence that moved west with young America and the story of a man who moved with it. "I'm that man, Matt Dillon United States Marshall, the first man they look for and the last they want to meet. It's a chancy job but it makes a man watchful and a little lonely." - [Catchphrase of Steve McGarrett (Jack Lord):] Book 'em, Danno! --"Hawaii Five-O" [American TV show 19681980] - How sweet it is! --Catchphrase, "The Jackie Gleason Show" [TV show 19521970] - Profane language was being used once every six minutes on network TV shows, every two minutes on premium cable shows, and every three minutes in major motion pictures, according to a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs released in March 2000. The study examined 284 TV series episodes, 50 TV movies, and 189 MTV music videos that aired during the 1998-99 season, as well as the 50 top-grossing feature films released during 1998. Researchers identified 4,249 scenes with profane or crude language, including 966 scenes with "hard-core" profanity, such as the "f-word" and the "s-word," as the study delicately put it. --Haynes Johnson (1931 ) American journalist; winner of the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. _The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years_ [2001] p. 207 Gee, Ward, you were kind of rough on the Beaver last night. --dialogue, Leave it to Beaver [June Cleaver speaking] - Good morning, Mr. Phelps. Your mission should you decide to accept it, is to [mission described]. As always, should you or any member of your IM force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. Good luck, Jim. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. --"Mission Impossible" [American TV show 19661973] - Peg: I'm going to bed. Chester: It's only 7:30--you sleepy already? Peg: No, I'm bored. I'm utterly bored. I'm bored sick! (leaves room) Chester: (to Junior) I can't figure her out. She's got a house to clean, meals to cook, you two kids to look after, dishes to wash, laundry, floors to scrub and she's bored! What more does she want? --Dialogue between Peg, Chester and Junior Riley (Marjorie Reynolds, William Bendix and Wesley Morgan) in the "Riley Steps Out" episode of the "Life of Riley" television series, circa 1953. - [Hawkeye speaking:] I will not carry a gun.... I'll carry your books, I'll carry a torch, I'll carry a tune, I'll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I'll even hari-kari if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun! --_M*A*S*H_ [U.S. TV show] "Officer of the Day" - From an early episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Lou Grant is interviewing Mary for a job. Lou Grant: What religion are you? Mary: [stuttering slightly] I- I'm sorry, Mr. Grant, you can't ask me that question. Lou Grant: No? Mary: No. You're not allowed to ask an applicant their religion. Lou Grant: All right. [Pause] Why aren't you married? Mary: Presbyterian. - - Gene Rayburn (19171999) American actor and game-show host . . . But game shows became his turf, and his "Match Game" tenure survived one hilarious blooper. Interviewing a contestant and meaning to compliment her dimples, he looked at her face and said, "you have the most beautiful nipples I have ever seen." --David Tanny "Gene Rayburn Obituary: A Favorite Passes On" [1999] - - From the May 1949 issue of _Time_ (magazine): As the clock nears 8 along the Eastern Seaboard on Tuesday night, a strange new phenomenon takes place in U.S. urban life. Business falls off in many a nightclub, theater-ticket sales are light, neighborhood movie audiences thin, Some late-hour shopkeepers post signs and close up for the night. . . . On big-city bar rails along the coast and in the Midwest, there is hardly room for another foot. --Referring to the Texaco Star Theater TV show. - - Just the facts, ma'am. --Jack Webb (19201982) American actor. Tagline from the TV show _Dragnet_. This is the city--Los Angeles, California. I work here. I'm a cop. --Sgt. Joe Friday (Jack Webb) (In "The Big Little Jesus" episode of the Dragnet television series, December 24, 1953, produced by Michael Meshekoff, directed by Jack Webb.) - A few intros from the old 50's and 60's Twilight Zone episodes narrated by Rod Serling . . . You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension--a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone. There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone. You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead - your next stop, the Twilight Zone. - The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. --Television catchphrase "Wide World of Sports" [American TV show 19611998] ^ Reality Shows Today Evolved From Contest Of Competing Misery By Cynthia Crossen _The Wall Street Journal_ February 4, 2008 Television critics were outraged by the exploitation of human misery; one called the show "a horrible example of what hits the antennas when the breadwinners are away." But audiences -- 10 million a day, five afternoons a week -- loved it, and so did advertisers. "Queen for a Day," broadcast first on the radio in 1947 and then televised until 1964, was one of the first shows to prove what now is obvious: Other people's troubles make great television. The four (later five) contestants for queen were chosen from a studio audience of about 800, many of whom had lined up for two hours outside the Moulin Rouge nightclub in Hollywood, where the show was taped. Everyone was given a "wish card" to fill out, and these were initially culled to 21. After quick interviews with Jack Bailey, the show's emcee, and Ray Morgan, the producer, the finalists were chosen. In the early years of the show, the women's wishes were often whimsical or flippant; there was a spirit of fun to them. They wanted to meet Errol Flynn, direct traffic on 42nd Street in New York, sleep on the top of the Empire State Building or ride a camel down Fifth Avenue. One woman asked for, and won, a date with a different military officer every hour of the following day (and eventually married one of them). But gradually, hard-luck stories began winning out over the light-hearted. Contestants started wishing for things like dentures, hearing aids and prosthetic limbs, special bikes for their terminally ill children, or a car so they could visit their disabled husband in the veterans' hospital. Instead of a professional panel, the queen was chosen by an "applause meter" of audience response, so the trick was to tug as many heartstrings as possible without breaking down and blubbering, which Mr. Bailey strongly discouraged. The show became a competition of who had it worst. A woman who wanted a special bed for her brother, who had been shot five times in the back, beat out a woman whose 5-year-old son had a brain tumor and wanted educational toys and a collie for him. One woman wanted a vacation because her two disabled children had died, then her father and mother died, and a month later her husband. And she didn't even win. She was defeated by a woman who wanted a wheelchair for her son, who had cerebral palsy. In 1953, Maxine Thompson asked only for 10 pairs of denim trousers for her 10 sons, who ranged in age from 15 months to 15 years. In addition to the pants, she won a three-week trip to Europe, where she was scheduled to attend coronation festivities for Queen Elizabeth. A wire-service critic, William Ewald, called the show an "essay in flummery and flapdoodle" and complained about the woman who said her crippled husband was unemployed, her baby's lungs had been scarred by pneumonia, "and, rather anticlimactically I thought, she added that she and her husband both had astigmatism." There were only a few rules about who could or couldn't be a contestant for queen. "No blind people and no crutches," Mr. Bailey said in a newspaper interview. "If you allow them on, you might just as well throw out the other contestants. They would always win. So in fairness, we don't pick them." [...] ^ TRIVIA: Three series in TV history have bowed out at the top: "Andy Griffith," "I Love Lucy," and "Seinfeld." end page | TABLOIDS - TALENT | TALK - TAYLOR (ELIZABETH) | TAXATION | TEACHERS / TEACHING | TEAMWORK - TELEVANGELISTS | TELEVISION - TELEVISION SHOWS | TEMPER - THANKSGIVING | TERRORISM | THATCHER - THINKING | THOUGHT POLICE - THRIFT | TIME | TIME TRAVEL - TODAY | TOLERANCE - TOYS | TRADITION - TRANSIENCE | TRAVEL | TREACHERY - TRIVIA | TROUBLE - TRUST | TRUTH | TRYING - TYRANNY | | R | S | T | U - END | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The Reviews | |
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