Secret Longings

"Dear Art Baker," said a letter addressed to the M.C. of television's You Asked for It. "I would like to have my son Gary shoot a television set on your show. Perhaps you think this is a strange request . . ."

Inured to stranger ones, Art Baker and his staff of 8 scarcely gave it a second thought. In their six months of operating You Asked for It (broadcast from Los Angeles' KTTV, fed to the nation a week later by Du Mont from New York), they have already shown, in response to requests: a one-armed paper hanger in action, a man fighting a bear, another wrestling an alligator, a boxer fighting a wrestler, a 600-lb. cowboy mounted on a luckless nag, a close-up of a lady swallowing swords, a swallower of goldfish, a Hopi Indian rain dance complete with rattlesnake, a scientist who showed (with the help of liquid air at 300DEG F. below zero) what the world might be like if the sun went out. For last week's show, one "Cannonball" Martin came out of retirement to be pounded before the cameras with sledge hammers.

You Asked for It went on the air last January in Los Angeles, broadcasting pleasant sights such as $1,000,000 in cash ($10 bills arranged in 25 stacks, each stack worth $40,000). But it soon began to specialize in the dark, secret longings of its audience. Some longings that were too dark and secret to grant: several requests to see a man electrocuted; a re-enactment of Joan of Arc burning at the stake, requested by a Minneapolis classroom; a 60 m.p.h. head-on crash of two cars.

Baker, an ex-film character actor, decided not to let little Gary shoot up a TV set on the program. But there are plenty of other alarming requests to pick from. Some 2,000 come in every week, 45% of them from the not-so-innocent young. Last week Baker decided to gratify one of his most grisly requests to date, was going ahead with plans to film a face-lifting operation on a woman.

"We've got to be careful," says he, "not to let the show degenerate into a simple variety show." The tastes of the 1951 public being what they are, there seems to be little risk of that.

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