Radio: The Week in Review

Much of the time, television lurches through the nation’s living rooms like an amiable slob—firing off six-shooters, taking pratfalls, scattering money. But on Sunday afternoons, TV slicks down its hair and straightens its tie. Last week TV went on a bigger than usual cultural binge and to the surprise of many proved vastly entertaining as well.

Two of the best shows, typically, ran opposite each other. NBC’s Wide Wide World whisked its audience all over the map. The camera lazed its way down the Mississippi, poked into a New Jersey lane where lovers walked and old men raked autumn leaves, wandered around Gloucester harbor as fishermen mended nets. There were vivid contrasts between the chasm of the Grand Canyon and the topless towers of Rockefeller Center, the swaying wheat fields of Nebraska and the money-conscious hubbub of the Texas State Fair, an underwater ballet from Florida and the overwater speed trials of Donald Campbell’s jet racer at Arizona’s man-made Lake Mead.

Always there was the immediacy of things happening this very minute, but the real brilliancy of Wide World may lie in its avoidance of the TV interview. The only one attempted, at the Texas Fair, proved again that—given a microphone and someone to interview—an announcer can turn any subject into a crashing bore. The words needed in Wide World were supplied by Dave Garroway and kept to a literate minimum.

CBS’s Omnibus got off to an interesting start with Author William Saroyan’s recollection of his California boyhood and was memorable for the sharply played vignettes of adolescence by Actors Sal Mineo and Pat De Simone. Then Composer Leonard Bernstein took over for a splendidly lucid primer on the world of jazz. Pointing out that blues are based on a rhymed couplet in iambic pentameter with the first line repeated, Bernstein developed a lowdown blues song from Shakespeare.* Bernstein looks like a young Burgess Meredith, speaks with extraordinary clarity and intelligence and is always able to demonstrate precisely what he is talking about.

Culture kept busting out all over. Producer’s Showcase devoted 90 minutes to the bravura extravagance of Cyrano de Bergerdc. As the Pinocchio-beaked hero, José Ferrer gave the season’s best starring performance, whether spitting an opponent on his sword or agonizing for love of Roxane, who, as played by Britain’s enchanting Claire Bloom, seemed well worth it. Playwrights ’56 struck a more sombre note with Ernest Hemingway’s The Battler, whose familiar plot (a heavyweight champion is broken by success) was well-served by Paul Newman as the crazed, broken-faced pug, and Dewey Martin as a young runaway who finds the world both terrible and tender.

At week’s end, Noel Coward and Mary Martin took the stage for a 90-minute CBS-TV show and, after a shaky start, proved that talent has no need of big production numbers. Coward, born with scarcely any singing voice, doesn’t so much sing a song as suggest that he is singing one. His best: Loch Lomond and Mad Dogs and Englishmen. Mary Martin was brilliantly funny in a scene from Madame Butterfly, and happily belted out a long—but not long enough—succession of Anglo-American tunes.

*The Macbeth Blues, as sung by Bernstein:
I will not be afraid of death and bane,
I said, I will not be afraid of death and bane,
‘Til Birnam forest comes to Dunsinane . . .