You won't bother to watch the entirety of this here but I can't resist. I have the opportunity to embed any whole episode of The Prisoner, the historic 1967 TV series by Patrick McGoohan. I picked the first but you can view any one of them over on this page of the AMC Website. I gather they've been placed online as a teaser for a forthcoming DVD release of well-restored prints.

There are also little "Prisoner-in-a-Minute" videos there that chop each installment down to a fast summary. Some of you may find them no less coherent than watching the entire hour.

I was not as big a fan of this show as some of my friends when it first aired. It would have required too much effort to be as big a fan of this show as some of my friends when it first aired. You'd have had to talk about it every waking moment and find double, triple and quadruple meanings in every line of dialogue and every prop or piece of scenery. What I guess intrigued me the most was that every time a new episode aired, I'd hear the discussion and analysis all over the schoolyard. No two people agreed. No two people seemed to be remotely on the same page as to what had happened, let alone what any of it meant.

And of course, everyone was blood certain that they and only they understood the show. I used to occasionally wade into these conversations, not because I had any better grasp but because it was fun to lob in a grenade or two. I'd stroll up to the mob and having no idea what I was talking about — but unlike the rest of them, knowing that — I'd ask, "And did everyone notice the scene that represented the Cuban Missile Crisis? And the sign in the background of the last shot that said, 'Number Six is Number Nine?'" This was back before we had VCRs, so no one could race home and replay the show and freeze-frame it to see that I'd made that up. It made the discussions somehow livelier.

The only other thing I can think of to mention about the show is to tell the following story. One evening about 1973, I was on a date with a young lady whose all-time favorite TV show was The Prisoner. I learned this when we were walking in Westwood and she suddenly noticed someone about thirty yards down the sidewalk and shrieked. "Omigod," she gasped, pronouncing it that way (as one word). "There's the star of my favorite TV show." I couldn't see who she'd spotted but I ran after her as she sprinted up to the gentleman. Before I could stop her, she accosted him and blurted out, "Mr. McGoohan, I have to tell you that I think The Prisoner was the greatest TV show ever made and I think you are a genius."

The man thanked her, very so politely, but said, "I'm sure Patrick McGoohan will be pleased to hear that but my name is Patrick Macnee and I was on a TV show called The Avengers." Then he looked at me and said with a smile, "Don't worry…this happens all the time." Here's the other Patrick in her favorite show…

Debuting this week on most PBS channels — on Wednesday night in L.A. — which is described as "…a six-hour comedy epic showcasing the most hilarious men, women, and moments in American entertainment and why they made us laugh." It also says on the series website that it's "…hosted by America's favorite funnyman, Billy Crystal." I like Billy Crystal…but America's favorite funnyman? I don't think so. I don't even think Billy Crystal or his agent think so.

One thing that often bothers me about this kind of show is the lack of historical perspective and that today's top comedy stars are on the same plateau as Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, etc. They may be comparable in their respective categories but your basic old time comedy legend had a little different job description, a different set of challenges and, most significantly, produced work that has stood the test of time. The work of the current guys hasn't been subjected to that test yet and I have the feeling some of them aren't going to pass.

Still, I'll be watching. Here's a little reminder…

As a follow-up to yesterday's Video Link: On October 23, 1984, Paul McCartney appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson again…and this time, Johnny Carson was actually there. Paul was out promoting his then-recent film, Give My Regards to Broad Street.

One of the first things you'll see Carson ask him is about a little mystery. The night the Beatles made their first, historic appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Ed thanked a number of folks for making it possible, including Johnny Carson. Johnny never knew what that was all about and you'll see him ask Paul, who doesn't have a clue. I believe a prevailing theory among Beatles historians is that Mr. Sullivan was confused, as he tended to be; that he'd meant to thank Jack Paar and had mixed up the names of the previous host of The Tonight Show and the new one.

As for why Ed would have wanted to thank Jack Paar: Here's an excerpt from this article in which Mr. Paar talked about his days on television…

Mr. Paar reminded the audience that, legend to the contrary, it was he, not Ed Sullivan, who first showed the Beatles in action to an American television audience. In January 1964, five weeks before Mr. Sullivan introduced the Beatles live, viewers of the Jack Paar Show saw a film of the Beatles sending a teen-age English audience into shrieking, delirious orbit just by shaking their hair and chorusing "Yeah, yeah, yeah."

The segment was shown in full again last Thursday. "In my seven years on NBC, I never, ever had a rock 'n' roll act," Mr. Paar commented. "I was interested in the Beatles as a psychological and sociological phenomenon." He added that his was the only television show to which no one under 21 was admitted because "kids tend to take over the audience."

I offer that as a point of information not only as to why Ed might have thanked Paar, but also as to why Jack Paar didn't remain on TV after the mid-sixties. Around the same time he did that interview, I saw him give a little lecture and he was very charming and very witty but he also seemed shocked and angry that anything had changed in the world or show business since 1961.

So here's John and Paul. The audio isn't very good on this but you should be able to make everything out. If you don't want to sit through the whole thing, you still might be interested in the last few minutes when, after teasing the audience, Mr. McCartney finally takes up the guitar and sings a little. The video is in three parts and in the unlikely event that I've configured things properly, they should play one after the other in the browser below. Thanks again to Shelly Goldstein…

Talk about rare Tonight Show clips. Shelly Goldstein sent me this link to maybe the rarest one of all.

On May 14, 1968, Paul McCartney and John Lennon held a press conference in New York to announce the formation of their new company, Apple. Later that same day, they then did two TV interviews — one on a local educational program and the other on The Tonight Show. As (bad) luck would have it, it was on a night that Johnny Carson was off and his program was being hosted by Joe Garagiola. Mr. Garagiola was a good sportscaster and a fine game show personality but he proved that night to be woefully deficient in the art of interviewing Beatles. Among other problems, he seemed to think they were still the four mop-tops who'd made such a hit on The Ed Sullivan Show and was unaware they'd evolved and gone on to other, less flighty things.

Prior to their appearance, John and Paul did a brief pre-interview with Jim McCawley, who was then a Talent Coordinator for The Tonight Show. That interview, McCawley always told people, went quite well. In fact, it went too well. At the close of it, he was stunned when John and Paul said to him, "We want you to interview us on the show." McCawley had to convince them that this was not possible; that the Tonight Show didn't bring on staff members to displace the host, even a guest host.

On the air with the guest host, John and Paul both seemed a little high and their dislike for Garagiola became increasingly obvious. Another guest, Tallulah Bankhead, threw in a few questions and she wasn't much help. Here's a transcript of the entire conversation. During the commercial breaks, Garagiola was counselled to pay a little more attention to McCawley's notes from the pre-interview but he kept departing from them and it all made for an evening of great discomfort.

Most of tapes of The Tonight Show from that era were lost and the first ones to go were those with guest hosts. (The episodes with Johnny were kept around for a few years for possible rerunning before erasure.) As a result, there is no decent video of the Lennon-McCartney appearance. However, one ardent Beatles fan pointed a silent 8mm movie camera at the screen and got a Zapruder-like record of a few minutes of the event. Another recorded the audio on a reel-to-reel tape recorder…and the two sources have been married together to create the fuzzy, hard-to-see image that is linked below. It's less than two hundred seconds long and it's bad video but it's all we've got.

Tomorrow, I'll bring you a later appearance that Paul (alone) made on The Tonight Show, thankfully with Mr. Carson. In the meantime, here's John, Paul and Joe…