THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1965, part 1

Written By:

Alan Boon

Ah, telephemera… those shows whose stay with us was tantalisingly brief, snatched away before their time, and sometimes with good cause. They hit the schedules alongside established shows, hoping for a long run, but it’s not always to be, and for every Street Hawk there’s two Manimals. But here at STARBURST we celebrate their existence and mourn their departure, drilling down into the new season’s entertainment with equal opportunities square eyes… these are The Telephemera Years!

1965-66

Six years into its eventual fourteen-season run, Bonanza was the king of TV in the 1965-66 season with a massive 31.8 rating, four ratings points higher than its nearest rival – Gomer Pyle, USMC – but five points lower than the previous year. It was a downturn that would continue in 1966-67 and, aside from the adventures of the Cartwrights on the Ponderosa ranch, NBC did not enjoy the best of years, their second highest rating show coming in at twelfth, as wacky spy show Get Smart debuted. CBS had much better form across the board, with Gomer Pyle joined in the top ten by The Lucy Show, The Red Skelton Hour, The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, and new arrival Hogan’s Heroes, while ABC looked to Bewitched and new sensation Batman, two high rating genre shows in a fertile period for such fare.

Other notable shows making their debuts in the 1965-66 season included talking pig sitcom Green Acres, eventual soap juggernaut Days of Our Lives, quiz shows Supermarket Sweep and The Newlywed Game, and a clutch of new genre outings as The Wild Wild West, Lost in Space, and I Dream of Jeannie all made their bows. They joined The Addams Family, The Avengers, The Flintstones, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Munsters, My Favorite Martian, and The Man from UNCLE as America embraced the fantastic, but those were all shows that made their mark on the annals of TV history: what about those that didn’t stick around? This is the story of four of 1965’s less successful shows…

Paradise Bay (NBC): The first daytime TV soap opera on US TV was These Are My Children in 1949 and the genre quickly became a fixture of broadcast schedules, just as they had done on radio since before World War Two. Many long-running soaps – including Guiding Light (1952), As the World Turns (1956), General Hospital (1963), and Another World (1964) – made their bows during the formative years of the genre and almost all dealt with familiar situations and subject material, with relationships, family, and medical drama proving as popular with the bored housewife demographic on TV as they are in romance novels.

In September 1965, though, a soap with an unusual premise began airing on NBC, one of the first to air in colour and one centred around Jeff Morgan, the manager of local radio station KVPP (played by former stage actor Keith Andes, who had also starred in police corruption drama This Man Dawson), his wife Mary (Marion Ross, later to star in as Marion Cunningham in Happy Days), and their family. In the first episode, the body of a murdered teenage girl is washed up on the beach and identified as Sally Baxter, daughter of the local beauty shop owner, best friend of Jeff’s daughter Kitty (future voice of Scooby-Doo’s Daphne, Heather North), and steady girlfriend of the best friend of Jeff’s son, Fred. The investigation of Sally’s murder, by local police chief Tom White, and the subsequent trial of a possibly innocent man, were the seam that ran through Paradise Bay.

Other storylines involved Kitty’s yearning to join local rock band The Moonglows, Jeff’s clashes with Walter Montgomery, publisher of the Paradise Bay Journal, and the business rivalry between the rich Spauldings and the upstart Martinez family. Paradise Bay was created by Ted Corday, a producer on Guiding Light and As the World Turns, and he paired the show with another of his new creations, Morning Star, about a fashion designer who gets over the death of fiancé by moving from Connecticut to New York. Writing duties were farmed out to experienced hands John Monks Jr and Jerry D Lewis, but their removal in April 1966 prompted Andes to follow suit when he disliked the storylines their replacements – Manya Starr and Irving Vendig – came up with, with Jeff Morgan written out to follow a baseball team as a road reporter.

The show continued on without him but the West Side Story-style frisson between Duke Spaulding – freshly acquitted of Sally’s murder – and Rosita Martinez failed to ignite the passions of the viewers, who were beginning to tune in to another of Corday’s creations, Days of Our Lives, which began a run in November 1965 that continues to this day. Paradise Bay was axed in July 1966, falling just short of two-hundred episodes without solving the murder of young Sally Baxter. Andes later voiced the title character in Hanna-Barbera’s Saturday morning cartoon Birdman and the Galaxy Trio but found starring roles hard to come by, despite leading TV’s first murder mystery soap.

Blue Light (ABC): From French-Canadien stock, Robert Goulet grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where his parents worked in the local mill. After the death of his father (who also moonlighted as a singer and professional wrestler) when Goulet was thirteen, the family moved to Alberta, Canada. There, the youngster earned himself a scholarship to The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto to study opera, although Goulet had an eye on television, making the semi-finals of the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s Pick the Stars competition in 1952 and eventually co-hosting Showcase for the channel between 1957 and 1959. Moving south of the border once more, Goulet took up musical theatre and was signed by Columbia Records, releasing his first album in 1962, the first of over sixty in a long career.

A career in Hollywood seemed almost inevitable and Goulet made his film debut in 1962, voicing the lead character in animated musical Gar Purr-ee, while also peppering the TV airwaves with guest appearances on Startime, The Patty Duke Show, The Red Skelton Show, and many other shows. Goulet had set up his own production company – Rogo Productions – with friend Norman Rosemont in 1962, first producing The Broadway of Lerner and Loewe and An Hour with Robert Goulet, but in 1966 they partnered with ABC for a trio of musical productions and a thirty-minute spy drama, Blue Light.

Created by Larry Cohen (would later move into directing with Black Ceasar, Maniac Cop, and more) and Walter Grauman, Blue Light’s premise had the US government place eighteen sleeper agents in Europe in anticipation of a war with Nazi Germany, an operation dubbed Codename: Blue Light. Goulet starred as David March, a journalist who has renounced his American citizenship and come to Germany to support the Nazi cause, writing and presenting Nazi propaganda. In reality, he is the last remaining Blue Light agent and is so deep undercover that – save for a few high-ranking US officials – the entire world believes him to be a traitor, the woman he loved killing herself because of it.

In weekly instalments, March must avoid discovery of his duplicity by the Nazis, evade capture by Allied forces unaware of his double agent status, and do the job he was sent to do and undermine the Nazi war effort, all while liaising with a French underground double agent who pretends to hate him while giving him vital aid! A violent show by the standards of the time, Blue Light earned Goulet critical plaudits for his performance, backed up by some top guest stars, but co-star Christine Carère was less well-reviewed and seen as the show’s weak link. Debuting on Wednesday nights in January 1966 in a spot vacated by Gidget’s move to Thursdays, Blue Light’s ratings did not match its good press and it was cancelled after seventeen episodes, with March still undercover in wartime Europe. The first four episodes of the show were joined together and released theatrically as I Deal in Danger, but Goulet returned to what he did best: singing.

Run For Your Life (NBC): The TV trope of a central character moving from town to town, helping out those he encounters along the way, has been a thing almost as long as TV itself, with the early 1960s bringing one of the most definitive examples of the genre in Route 66. Rarely are such sojourns prompted by as much urgency, however, as that of attorney Paul Bryan in September 1965’s Run For Your Life, whose travels and travails take place against a very final deadline. As played by Ben Gazzara, a member of The Actors Studio who became a star on Broadway before headlining proto-Law and Order show Arrest and Trial in 1963, Bryan is told he has no more than eighteen months to live and decides to fit thirty years of experiences in the time he has left.

Run For Your Life was created by Roy Huggins, a former member of the Communist Party USA who appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 and named other members working in Hollywood. Huggins was a staff writer at Columbia until 1955, when he moved into television with Warner Bros, creating 77 Sunset Strip and Maverick during his spell there. In 1960, he became vice-president in charge of television at 20^th Century Fox where he created The Fugitive and shepherded Bus Stop and The Virginian to air.

A pilot for the show – “Rapture at Two-Forty” – appeared in season two of NBC’s drama anthology series Kraft Suspense Theatre, during which we see Bryan’s doctor give the attorney the unfortunate news that he is suffering from chronic myelogenous leukaemia, a disease chosen so as to be fatal but not particularly life-limiting, at least in its early terminal stages. In the subsequent series, this conversation is only heard in voiceover recap, but it sparks Bryan to travel to the French Riviera where he falls in love and partakes in risky pastimes. The pilot proved popular enough that Gazzara was contracted for a full series, with the frivolity of the pilot given over to peril-filled drama, encountering a deposed dictator at ski resort, becoming embroiled in a Cold War spy ring, and being arrested in a small town in just the first few episodes.

Run For Your Life was a hit with viewers and despite Paul Bryan’s sands of time constantly running out, it was renewed for a second season in September 1966, with a handy amnesia episode allowing viewers to catch up on his previous exploits as he regains his memories. The episodic nature of the show allowed for plenty of guest stars to appear, with the likes of Bobby Darin, Tippi Hedren, Howard Keel, Peter Lawford, Jack Palance, Gena Rowlands, Telly Savalas, and others all encountering Bryan along his journey, and a third season – which began in September 1967 – took the total number of episodes to eighty-six. In March 1968, six months past the doctor’s deadline, Run For Your Life finished its run but there was no tragic final scene, Bryan’s death presumably occurring off-screen.

The Baron (ABC): The Incorporated Television Company – much better known by its initialism, ITC – was formed in 1954 by talent agency boss Lew Grade, who formed a consortium to bid for one of the franchises available as part of the launch of the ITV network in the UK. Although ITC’s bid was rejected on the grounds of a conflict of interest due to Grade’s agent duties, ITC were allowed to join with one of the successful bidders – the Associated Broadcasting Development Company – to form Associated Television, or ATV, serving the Midland region (and London at the weekends). ITC’s bread and butter, though, was in programme production, with Grade’s favoured variety show format bringing Sunday Night at the London Palladium to air, and their flair for the dramatic proving particularly popular with transatlantic audiences.

Partnering with American producer Hannah Weinstein, the first ITC show to hit in both the UK and US was The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1956, and over the next decade ITC (and ATV Weekend) shows such as The Avengers, Danger Man and The Saint proved so popular with American audiences that ABC managing director Howard Thomas quipped that ITC was making shows for “Birmingham, Alabama, rather than Birmingham, England.” Later ITC hits would include The Prisoner, Department S, and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), all featuring British leads (as did their earlier hits), something that would seem counterintuitive for shows produced with an American market in mind. Despite their popularity, ITC’s US partner network, ABC, encouraged the company to produce a show with an American lead, and the result was The Baron.

Based on a series of novels by John Creasey (written under the pseudonym Anthony Morton), The Baron starred Texan actor Steve Forrest, who relocated his family to London to take the role. Filmed at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, the show shared production (and a guest cast) with many of the other ITC shows of the time, although the locations in the show – given that the titular Baron, an undercover secret agent posing as antiques dealer John Mannering, travelled widely – were often exotic. Alongside Forrest in the main cast were Colin Gordon as agency head John Templeton-Green and Paul Ferris as his assistant, Marlowe, but due to pressure from ABC, the character of Marlowe was phased out in favour of Cordelia Winfield, a character from the first three episodes played by Sue Lloyd (best known for her later role as Barbara Hunter in Crossroads).

Across the series’ thirty episodes, The Baron thwarted kidnappers, aided freedom fighters, uncovers a germ warfare plot, settles the score between a former prisoner of war and the Japanese commander who was in charge of the camp he was interred in, and engaged in dozens of other escapades, all broadcast first on ABC, which began airing the show in January 1966, nine months before the UK. Indeed, by the time it went out on the ITV network, the show had been cancelled by its American broadcaster, ratings not matching the high excitement of the stories.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: More of 1965’s blink and you’ll miss ‘ems, including wacky ships, troublesome teens, and female cops!

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: pre-1965 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1966 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1967 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1968 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1969 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1970 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1971 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1973 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1974 (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

The Telephemera Years: 1975 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)