TELEVISION: A Touch of Sadism

The Lincoln convertible rolled down the hill and straight into a filling station. The arresting blonde at the wheel told a solicitous mechanic that she was having trouble. He raised the hood, looked up wildly and announced: “Lady, you don’t need a mechanic, you’d better call the police. Somebody stole your motor.”

The elaborately arranged stunt—motor carefully removed from the car, movie camera concealed to catch the mechanic’s panicky reaction—was typical of Candid Camera, probably the longest-running practical joke in history. For 13 years, the program (known as Candid Microphone in radio days) has kicked about on the networks, intermittently joined the Jack Paar, Steve Allen, and Garry Moore TV shows. This season. Candid Cameraman Allen Funt is back on the air (CBS) with a new half-hour show that features Ar thur Godfrey and Singer Dorothy Collins (the girl in the motorless car) as fellow cards, plus innumerable new gimmicks. In a season in which the canned far out weighs the candid, Camera has grabbed one of the highest ratings on the air.

Ramble in Reality. “When the program first started,” recalls sometime Adman Funt, “we used to just ramble in reality.” But gradually the show got more complicated and developed a kind of comic-strip surrealism. A stooge would enter a florist’s shop, order orchids and then eat them to the consternation of other patrons. Or Funt, in the guise of a barber, would say, “You know, this is the first time I ever shaved a man.” Once a customer threw off the sheet, chased Funt with a razor. “You can only aggravate a guy so far,” he discovered. “Beyond that, you are skirting the point of no return.”

Sometimes the show passes that point. On one sequence during each broadcast. Funt shares his “aggravating” chores with a guest celebrity—Yogi Berra has served as a lost-ball-peddling golf caddy, Jonathan Winters as a customer-baiting complaint-department manager, and Host Godfrey as a gemutlich Good Humor man. As Funt points out: “We try for familiar frustration; anything we do in a complaint office or a tax bureau—we’re in velvet.”

Most of the situations are inherently amusing, but are sometimes spoiled by elaborate explanations to the audience and by heavily milked recognition scenes (“You know Jonathan Winters.” “Jonathan Winters? Yeah, sure.” “Well, this is Jonathan Winters.” “No. Yeah?”)

Suggested Situations. The original, beautifully simple Candid Camera needed such contrivance and coyness like a hole in the lens, and when Funt screens his reliable, inspired shots of women trying on hats or children slurping ice cream, the show still is almost as delightful as Godfrey’s guffaws would suggest. So far. benign Big Brother Funt has not run out of situations to exploit, although only 10% of his film footage ever proves usable. Most of it is too dull, and much too embarrassing to be shown. “We get a large number of suggestions.” says he, “that reveal a kind of frightening sadism in people. School children ask us to trap their teachers in undignified or compromising situations. Little businessmen plead with us to capture the off-the-record attitudes of their large competitors. Ordinary citizens want us to catch policemen unawares.”

But many a viewer also dreams of catching Allen Funt unawares. The possible situations are endless. Have someone dress up as the sponsor and cancel the show? Or a phony lawyer suing for a million dollars? Just such visions make up the cozy, everyday sadism on which the show thrives.