While digging around on YouTube looking for the Tiny Tim stuff, I happened to view one of the Beatles' performances on the Ed Sullivan show. In light of today's cultural sensibilities they looked very clean cut, with stylish coifs and smartly tailored suits. The biggest anachronism I saw was that after they sang they bowed in acknowledgement of the audiences' applause. Quite proper.
Steve Allen was one of my early television favorites, along with Ernie Kovacs. Between the two of them they established the style and substance of what was then a new medium, breaking away from the entertainment traditions of radio and vaudeville. You could tell when Allen was having a good time when he broke into his spontaneous cackling laughter when the program went off the rails and didn't go according to plan. But besides being a top notch entertainer he was a real smart guy, being both a writer and musician and not afraid to tackle some tough topics. I was happy to see a lot of the Meeting of the Minds episodes on YouTube; I'll have to watch them since I missed most of the original broadcasts.
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In retrospect, we may be the last generation of the one television (or no television) households. They were very expensive at the time and an investment that was not taken lightly. Maybe that was why the were in nicely made wooden cabinets, to mimic fine furniture. You would buy a TV based on your home decor, like Early American or Danish Modern. Now everything is squeezed into the bare minimum and is simply a thin, flat screen, just like another picture to hang on the wall. The days are long gone when you needed two burly guys to move a 17" TV.
The one TV family also meant that a lot of the programming was viewed by the whole family, except for the Saturday morning cartoons and other kid's programs. I recall it was quite scandalous and possibly decadent when TVs started to appear in children's bedrooms. Tongues were wagging in anticipation of the breakdown of the family unit. Maybe they were right. Now many folks, both children and adults, watch TV on their little handheld personal devices and viewing television is no longer the social activity it once was. Hell, it's not even television anymore; it's visual content, available anywhere at any time.
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Speaking of those devices, it's been a while since Uncle Ken took the plunge into the world of superduper smart phones. Is it too early to render a verdict?
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