In 1973, ABC tried something which probably sounded good in the meetings but didn't work as well as they'd hoped. In their 11:30 PM weeknight slot, they had The Dick Cavett Show, which was critically acclaimed and attracting enough viewers to show a modest profit. But alas, it wasn't beating Johnny Carson in the ratings and there were reportedly execs then at the network who felt such a feat was, no matter what anyone said, possible. They pared Cavett back to one week per month and declared that henceforth, whatever appeared in that time slot was part of something called ABC's Wide World of Entertainment.
In other words, rotating shows. I suppose that worked somewhere at some point on one of the three networks we had then but no example springs to mind. Usually, if people like a show enough to watch it, they want to watch it every day or every week. As I understand it, ABC tried this particular experiment figuring that at least one of three things would happen…
- One of the shows they slotted into their "wheel" would attract enough of a following to make it a regular, Johnny-beating series five (or so) nights per week.
- One or more of the new shows would click is such a way that it could go from being a late night tryout to being a regular prime-time hit. Or…
- The entire ABC's Wide World of Entertainment would score higher ratings than Carson…or at least higher than Cavett.
And of course, none of these three things happened. It certainly didn't happen with Jack Paar Tonite. One out of every four weeks, you got a talk show bringing the former host of The Tonight Show back to television after being away for many years. It was just a sad, little-watched show, in large part because Paar hadn't updated his act and, frankly, wasn't that interesting in 1973. I wrote about this show in this blog post and linked you to a video of its first episode. If you want, you can watch it and decide for yourself why Mr. Paar was soon scurrying back into retirement.
The other two weeks, they featured a wide array of specials, some of them one-shots while others recurred now and again. There were — among many other efforts — rock music specials under the name In Concert, a spooky anthology series from Great Britain called Thriller, Playboy specials, a news magazine hosted by Geraldo Rivera called Good Night, America, and a funny news program called Comedy News. It is a slightly-fuzzy episode of Comedy News that we have for you today.
I remember watching and liking Comedy News but feeling that it was often one of those good half-hour shows stretched to a longer length. This particular installment features Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory, Bob & Ray, Peter Schickele, Spencer Quinn (I don't know who that is), Joan Rivers, Fannie Flagg, Anthony Holland, Marian Mercer and your anchormen, Andrew Duncan and Kenneth Mars. I remember other episodes including Stan Freberg (a major reason I watched), Robert Klein, Richard Pryor, Richard Dawson and many others.
Here's this one and thanks to "John G" for alerting me that it was online. The video starts with a few seconds of the end of the local (Los Angeles) 11 PM Eyewitness News, which is kind of what Comedy News was parodying. Inattentive viewers might not have realized that the allegedly real news show had ended and the spoof had begun…