THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1972, 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!

1972-73

The 1972 season would turn out to be a disastrous one for ABC, with no shows in the top twelve, which was evenly shared between CBS and NBC. Marcus Welby, MD – which had been the number three show of the 1971-72 season – was their highest placing show, with their next best effort coming in at number seventeen. ABC did have two promising new shows making their bow in Kung Fu and The Streets of San Francisco, but it would be another few years before the Alphabet Network could hold its own in the race for ratings. The sitcom still ruled the roost, with All in the Family, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show all doing good business for CBS, alongside new arrivals Maude and Bridget Loves Bernie (which would end up having just a single season despite good ratings due to threat from the Jewish Defense League over its inter-faith couple).

For NBC, Sanford and Son was a strong number two to Archie Bunker in the ratings, while The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie – a “wheel” show with four rotating features – gave audiences another taste of Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan & Wife, alongside less popular newcomer Hec Ramsey. Other new arrivals included The Bob Newhart Show, M*A*S*H, and The Waltons, with Bonanza, Mission: Impossible, The Mod Squad, and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In all entering their final seasons. Those were all shows that people remember, though: what about those that didn’t make such an impact? This is the story of five of the 1972-73 season’s misses…

The NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie: Banacek (NBC): The NBC Mystery Movie launched in September 1971 as a “wheel” show with three rotating features. Two of them had been launched previously, with Peter Falk appearing as Columbo in two pilot movies shown in February 1968 and March 1971, and McCloud launching with a pilot and a six-part series in 1970, but the third spoke – McMillan and Wife – was all new. The show was a success, with over thirty million viewers and was moved to Sunday nights, where it added a couple of million more on a more competitive night. The move left a gap in the Wednesday night schedule, though, and what better to fill it with than more of the same? Thus, the renamed NBC Sunday Mystery Movie was joined by The NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie from September 13^th 1972 and an all-new wheel show needed all new features.

Initially, the show launched with just two: Banacek and Madigan. Banacek had debuted in a pilot show as a TV movie in March 1972 and starred George Peppard as Thomas Banacek, a Polish American private detective which a knack for solving seemingly impossible thefts for an insurance company. Peppard hot shot to fame as Paul Varjak opposite Audrey Hpeburn’s Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1961, dubbed the next big thing and subsequently appearing in How the West Was Won, The Carpetbaggers, The Blue Max and other smash hits. A five-picture deal signed with Universal in 1967 was less fruitful and by 1970 he was beginning to become frustrated with the lack of goods scripts he was offered. Turning to television instead, he agreed to star in Banacek but first had to undergo a trial for rape, a charge he was acquitted of in February 1972.

Banacek was created by Anthony Wilson, who wrote for shows including Combat, The Fugitive, and Land of the Giants, before co-creating Cade’s County, a Western/crime drama starring Glenn Ford that ran for one season on CBS in 1971. Banacek gave Peppard the chance to play the hero after a decade of steely-eyed villains, quipping with his driver/assistant Drury (Ralph Manza) and always with an apposite Polish proverb at the ready. Other regular cast members included insurance company boss Cavanagh (played by George Murdock), bookseller and regular source of information Felix Mulholland (Murray Matheson), and Christine Belford as Carlie Kirkland, Banacek’s sometime rival and love interest.

One of Wilson’s main influences in creating Banacek was The Thomas Crown Affair, a 1968 Steve McQueen flick that saw Faye Dunaway play a game of cat and mouse with Steve McQueen’s titular thief after being hired by the insurance company of the bank he robbed. Like the film, Banacek was set in Boston (although location filming took place in Los Angeles) and exterior shots of Banacek’s house used the Second Harrison Gray Otis House in the city, also used for Thomas Crown’s house in the movie, when the budget did stretch to some Boston location filming.

Madigan, meanwhile, was a pipe-smoking veteran New York policeman, whose crime-solving remit often involves trips to Europe in pursuit of clues and criminals. Richard Widmark had first played Dan Madigan in a 1968 theatrical feature of the same name, directed by Don Siegel (who would go on to make Dirty Harry), and signed on for his first regular TV role having been nominated for an Emmy for his performance in a TV movie – Vanished! – a year earlier. No mention was made of the character having died at the end of the movie.

After eight weeks, the pair were joined by Cool Million, another private detective show, this time created by Larry Cohen. Jefferson Kayes, the protagonist of Cool Million, was also a private detective, but that’s where the similarities with Banacek ended. Jefferson Kayes – played by James Farentino in his first title role – was an ex-CIA man who offered his services to anyone who could afford his $1 million fee, which gave the show its name. With receptionist Elena (Adele Mara) the only other regularly recurring character, Cool Million relied on guest stars such as Barbara Bouchet, Wilfrid Hyde-White, and Ray Milland, and producer Roy Huggins also leaned heavily on talented directors he’d worked with on shows such as Alias Smith and Jones, The Bold Ones, and The Outsider to bring a stylish edge to matters.

Going up against the ABC Wednesday Movie of the Week, The NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie was less effective than its predecessor. Cool Million bowed out at Christmas after just five cases for Jefferson Kayes, with Madigan going just one further, even if he did get to visit Lisbon, London, and Naples during his short tenure as a globehopper. Banacek was the most popular of the three, its eight episodes rating above its companion shows, and that saw it given a second chance when The NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie returned in September 1973, this time accompanied by two new features in the shape of Faraday & Company and Tenafly. Ratings were still nowhere near what NBC would have liked, and even a switch to Tuesday nights – with a subsequent name change to The NBC Tuesday Mystery Movie – in January 1974 didn’t help things. By the end, Banacek was just one of two features, alongside The Snoop Sisters which had arrived in late December 1973, with the other two having been jettisoned when the showcase switched days.

Taken in isolation, Banacek received good reviews and the ratings for its episode were considerably higher than any of the others in the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie slot. As such, NBC greenlit the show for a third season, although the midweek wheel show was axed and it’s probable that Banacek would have been added to the successful Sunday trio, which would be expanded to four features in September 1974. However, before production could begin, Peppard walked away to prevent his ex-wife Elizabeth Ashley receiving more of his earnings during their divorce settlement and took a year off acting before returning in Doctor’s Hospital n September 1975.

Love Thy Neighbour (ABC): Vince Powell and Harry Driver got their start writing material for comedian Harry Worth in 1960. Worth’s BBC show – Here’s Harry – ran for five years and during that time the pair also wrote for ITV soap Coronation Street and its sitcom spin-off Pardon the Expression, which starred Arthur Lowe. It was at ITV that they entered a purple patch, creating George and the Dragon for Sid James and Peggy Mount, mismatched rag-trade comedy Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width, and the long-running Nearest and Dearest and Bless This House, a résumé to match that of Clement and La Frenais, Galton and Simpson, or Croft and Perry.

In April 1972, a new Powell and Driver show debuted on ITV based around a white, working-class couple in the London suburbs faced with the then very modern dilemma of black people moving in next door. Love Thy Neighbour starred Jack Smethurst and Rudolph Walker as the warring husbands, while wives Kate Williams and Nina Baden-Semper get on well. Almost immediately, the show attracted criticism for its clumsy handling of the race divide, although the insults and ignorant statements uttered by Smethurst’s Eddie were often met with derision from his wife or shown to be completely overblown.

Despite the controversy, Love Thy Neighbour was hugely successful and ran for eight seasons (and a big screen movie adventure), followed three years after it ended by a spin-off, also called Love Thy Neighbour, which saw Eddie relocate to Australia. Surprisingly, the racism was toned down for its down under translation, something that was also done for an earlier attempt to take the show international. Debuting in June 1973 as Summer replacement for The Odd Couple, Love Thy Neighbor was ABC’s latest attempt to translate a successful British show for American audiences in search of an All in the Family-sized hit. Thicker Than Water – an adaptation of Powell and Driver’s Nearest and Dearest with Julie Harris and Richard Long in the Hylda Baker and Jimmy Jewel roles – had premiered on ABC two days, the network having tried out A Touch of Grace (For the Love of Ada) in January.

Adapted by veteran TV writer Arthur Julian, Love Thy Neighbor saw redneck Charlie Wilson (Ron Masak) and his lovely wife Peggy (Joyce Bulifant) meet new neighbors Ferguson and Jackie, played by Harrison Page and Janet MacLachlan. Hilarity ensues because Ferugson and Jackie are black and Charlie is bigoted. Ferguson is also quick to blame race for his misfortunes and – gasp – is also a Republican. After six episodes, Thicker Than Water was cancelled and Love Thy Neighbor was moved to Wednesdays, lasting for another six episodes before the 1973-74 season started in earnest. With ratings low even for a Summer replacement, it did not return for another outing, but that didn’t stop ABC trying again a few years later with On the Rocks (Porridge) and The Rear Guard (Dad’s Army) before finally hitting big with Three’s Company, an adaptation of Man About the House in 1977.

Ghost Story (NBC): If William Castle had his way, he would be forever remembered as the director of Rosemary’s Baby, one of the greatest psychological horror movies of all time. In 1967, before it was even published, he’d obtained the rights to Ira Levin’s novel – which went on to be the highest selling horror novel of the 1960s, with over four million copies sold – and secured a deal with Paramount Pictures. However, the studio insisted that he only produce, hiring noted sex criminal Roman Polanski in his place, and although the movie made Castle rich, he would forever be remembered as the king of the gimmick.

Ah, yes, those gimmicks! Working as an independent filmmaker, Castle produced some of the most sensational thrills to ever hit American theatres. Accompanied by such gimmicks as Emergovision, Perceptovision, and Illusion-O, Castle sold the likes of The House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler, and 13 Ghosts to an America yearning for more than their traditional movie fix. All good things come to an end, though, and by the 1970s the gimmicks were played out. After 1968’s Project X and the Rosemary’s baby disappointment, Castle directed just one more movie, 1974’s Shanks, also writing and producing Bug for Jeannot Szwarc. He died in 1977 having suffered a heart attack but is remembered by directors John Waters and Robert Zemeckis (who has remade two of Castle’s films and calls him his favourite director), as well as being immortalised on the screen in 1993’s Matinee, where John Goodman’s character was based on him.

At first glance, Castle’s work in television was minimal. He directed several shows between 1956 and 1958, also working as a producer on The Adventures of McGraw and Men of Annapolis, but soon returned to his first love, the cinema. Apart from, that is, 1972’s Ghost Story…

Hearing that NBC were looking for an anthology series along the lines of The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, the latter of which was pulling in good numbers in the youth demographic, Castle pitched them a show. Dealing exclusively in the supernatural, each episode of Ghost Story would be hosted by British actor Sebastian Cabot (Giles French in Family Affair) as Winston Essex, the owner of the haunted Mansfield House hotel. Essex would introduce the evening’s story and return for a closing monologue, imparting some wisdom or warning based on what we’d just seen, all filmed at the supposedly haunted Hotel del Coronado near San Diego, California.

A pilot – “The New House,” starring David Birney and Barbara Parkins as a couple who buy a house built on the site where an innocent woman was hanged, only for the woman’s spirit to gradually possess their baby – aired on March 17^th 1972 and did well enough that NBC greenlit a series to debut as part of their Fall 1972 line-up. Castle was given an executive producer credit, with day-to-day control in the hands of Joel Rogosin, a veteran of such shows as Surfside 6, The Virginian and Longstreet. Rogosin assembled a team of writers that included Hammer regular Jimmy Sangster, Psycho’s Robert Bloch, I Am Legend‘s Richard Matheson (who penned the pilot and provided the story for another episode), and the Star Trek team of Harlan Ellison and DC Fontana. Directors including Richard Donner, Leo Penn, and Paul Stanley, TV veterans all but bringing a very cinematic feel to the show.

Ghost Story premiered at 9pm on September 15^th 1972, part of a new look Friday night line-up led off by uber-popular UK transfer Sanford and Son, and also including fellow new arrivals The Little People and Banyon. Ahead of its debut, a tie-in record album featuring a children’s ghost story and branded with the Ghost Story logo was released on Peter Pan Records. The opening few episodes featured stories that involved prophetic television sets, the ghost of a sea captain, a possessed vacation home, and an evil doppelgänger, and they struck a consistent tone, intended to scare and chill where Night Gallery could be whimsical at times. Cabot aside, the anthology format afforded plenty of guest stars, with Birney and Parkins joined by Karen Black, Angie Dickinson, Doug McClure, Jason Robards, Gena Rowlands, Stella Stevens, Rip Torn, and a young Jodie Foster as the series wound through its first thirteen episodes.

Ratings, though, were less than NBC had hoped for, especially as The CBS Friday Night Movies and Room 222 on ABC – which also aired at 9pm – were beating it week after week. With a break coming up for Christmas, the show was renamed and retooled, with Cabot given the elbow as Circle of Fear would have no opening and closing monologues. Other than that, it was business as usual, with stories by Ellison, Fontana, and Sangster (as well as Bill S Ballinger, The Sixth Sense co-creator Anthony Lawrence, and Tales of Tomorrow’s Mann Rubin) putting the likes of John Astin, Susan Dey, Patty Duke, Leif Garrett, Janet Leigh, Martin Sheen, and David Soul in peril. Supernatural shenanigans included curses, potions, witches, and a door to a mysterious forest, as well as a heap more hauntings, but the changes did little to improve Circle of Fear’s ratings, which remained beneath the threshold for renewal, albeit at the higher end.

After a combined twenty episodes, the show was put on hiatus while a decision was made over its future, returning a month later to air the final two episodes once it had been decided to let it go quietly into the night. Ironically, it would be joined by Night Gallery, which had been retooled for its third season in September 1972 and subsequently lost a third of its ratings. As time has worn on, both shows have picked up new fans, especially after Sony made the complete run of Ghost Story and Circle of Fear available as a manufacture on demand DVD in 2012. William Castle’s legacy remains his gimmick-filled schlock horrors of the 1950s and 1960s, but there’s also significant affection for the anthology show that he sparked into life.

Anna and the King (CBS): Based on Margaret Landon’s 1944 novel Anna and the King of Siam, The King and I premiered on Broadway in March 1951 and ran for three years, the fourth longest-running Broadway musical of all time. With songs from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein (who already had Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific under their belts), the musical made a star of Yul Brynner, although he was only the pair’s second choice behind Rex Harrison, who had played the King in an earlier, non-musical adaptation of Landon’s novel. Hammerstein also wrote the “book,” as a musical’s script is known, adapting Landon’s story of a governess who falls in love with the King of Siam (now known as Thailand), although their positions mean their love can never manifest.

The Broadway show led to a 1956 film, again with Brynner in the starring role but with Deborah Kerr ins place of Gertrude Lawrence. The movie, replete with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s songs, was the fifth highest grossing film of 1956 and earned Brynner an Academy Award for Best Actor, one of five in total. Brynner was propelled to movie stardom, but for every hit – The Ten Commandments, The Brother Karamazov, The Magnificent Seven – there was a miss, with The Journey, The Sound and the Fury, and Taras Bulba all losing money. By the 1970s, he was reduced to making Spaghetti Westerns and supporting Kirk Douglas in The Light at the Edge of the World, but his most famous role was about to return.

Bill Idelson and Harvey Miller had produced Love, American Style for ABC, having crossed paths while scripting The Andy Griffiths Show spin-off Gomer Pyle, USMC. Working on that unconventional comedy anthology sowed a seed of an idea for a TV version of the famous old musical, but this time they were going to make Anna someone the audience could identify with, an all-American girl, although the setting remained the Siam of 1862. Curiously, then, Idelson and Miller cast Samantha Eggar – a British actress who received an Oscar nomination for her breakout role in The Collector before starring opposite Harrison in Dr Doolittle – in the role, her accent explained away by coming from Boston. Opposite her, as the King, was Brynner, clearly enjoying himself in a low-pressure environment (as he had in outrageous cop flick Fuzz earlier that year, and uncredited in drag in Peter Sellers’s The Magic Christian).

There was just one problem: the show did not have access to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s original score, songs such as Shall We Dance? And Getting to Know You, and the audience’s familiarity with the source material – or at least the 1956 film version of it – left little room for innovation, although Landon felt it moved sufficiently away from her original story to launch a lawsuit for copyright infringement. Viewers stayed away – the show was CBS’s lowest rating of any they aired that season – and the axe fell after just thirteen episodes, ironically freeing up Brynner to make Westworld, one of his career-defining roles.

Search (NBC): Airing on February 21^st 1972 as part of NBC Monday Night at the Movies, Probe starred The Legend of Wyatt Earp‘s Hugh O’Brian as Hugh Lockwood, a private eye working for the high-tech World Securities Corp organisation. Designated Probe One, Lockwood was outfitted with cybernetic implants which allowed the team at Probe Control to monitor and supply him with information he might need to complete his mission. At the behest of VCR Cameron, Probe’s director of operations (played by Burgess Meredith), Lockwood is sent on a mission to find a cache of gems looted by Hermann Goering during World War II, accompanied by gemstone expert Harold Streeter (an underused John Gielgud).

With a cast that also included Alfred Ryder, Lila Skalia, and Elke Sommer, Probe was enough of a success that NBC ordered a series, retaining Lockwood, Meredith, and Playboy model Angel Tompkins from the pilot. They were forced into a change of title to Search because Probe was already being used for a show on PBS hosted by Albert Burke, but Lockwood’s designation as Probe One remained. Creator Leslie Stevens began his career writing for anthology shows in the mid-1950s, contributing to the likes of Kraft Television Theatre and Playhouse 90 before creating two shows for ABC – Stoney Burke in 1962 and The Outer Limits (originally titled Please Stand By) in 1963. Although he was uncredited at the time, The Outer Limits earned the writer enough influence to direct his first feature, 1966’s Incubus, which starred William Shatner and was filmed entirely in Esperanto, an artificial language created in 1887 by LL Zamenhof.

Search was given the anchor slot on NBC’s Wednesday night drama line-up that also included Adam-12 and The NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie. The series brought additions to the cast, including Tom Hallick as Meredith’s number two, The Virginian‘s Doug McClure as “back-up” Probe CR Grover and Tony Franciosa (who’d worked with Stevens on the first season of The Name of the Game) as Nick Bianco, head of Probe Control’s Omega Division, which dealt with organised crime. Each episode would feature one of the three on assignment, cases including the mysterious disappearance of an official from the State Department, a coup with an organised crime family (and the death of the Probe originally assigned to the case), and a scientist from the Eastern Bloc who wants to defect.

Beginning on September 13^th 1972, the twenty-two-episode series saw plenty of guest stars appear, including Bill Bixby, Sebastian Cabot, Rhonda Flemming, and Stephanie Powers, and there was an early turn for Cheryl Ladd – credited as Chery Stoppelmoor (and you can see why she changed that) as Probe technician Amy Love in three episodes. The final episode – a CR Grover adventure – aired on April 11^th 1973 but the ratings just weren’t strong enough to warrant renewal. Stevens, though, continued to work in television, allegedly writing the original script for Battlestar Galactica and coining the term “bottle episode.” He would also contribute to the reboot of The Outer Limits in 1996.

Next time on The Telephemera Years: More of 1972’s less successful affairs, including MEN!

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

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

The Telephemera Years: 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)