Chills & Hot Flashes

What's My Pain? last week made its bow on Steve Allen's Tonight program (NBC, Mon.-Fri. 11:30 p.m.1 a.m.). As the panel of "experts" postured diagnostically on the edge of their chairs, the first contestant signed in. His name: Steve Passanante. His pulse: 78. His blood pressure: normal. The panel failed in its first snap judgments (upset stomach, twisted esophagus), and time ran out before they could correctly identify the ailment (a sty). Lucky Contestant Passanante (played by Singer Steve Lawrence) won the full prize: two weeks' free hospitalization and "a year's supply of carbolated soap."

Starched Angel. Allen's parody of radio & TV's painkilling programs was very much like the real thing. On ABC's Horizons, viewers last week got a quick briefing on children's blood diseases; CBS's The Search told them how to fight off the perils of old age. Some shows are more enraptured by the physician than the cure. On The Greatest Gift, noble Dr. Eve Allen (Ann Burr) labors five times a week to fight the stuffy prejudice against women doctors; on Janet Dean, Registered Nurse, Cinemactress Ella Raines plays an angel in starched cotton; on Road of Life, Dr. Jim Brent (Don MacLaughlin) applies a platitude with every poultice. CBS Radio boasts Guiding Light and Young Dr. Malone as well as City Hospital, "where life begins and ends . . . where around the clock, 24 hours a day, men and women are dedicated to the war against suffering and pain." There is even room for a touch of slapstick. On CBS's Professional Father, the psychologist, that stepchild of medicine, is considered a figure of fun.

NBC's Medic, which has brought Dragnet's style to the men in white, gets attention from both the wags and the woebegone. Typical gags: 1) when Medic is made into a movie, it will be called A Scar Is Born or I Dismember Mama; 2) a New Yorker reported TV reception so good that he caught an intestinal virus from watching Medic.

Limbed People. Medic, however, receives so many reverent letters written by sufferers from real or imagined ills that the program has called upon the Los Angeles County Medical Association for help in answering them. LACMA forwards the letters to the appropriate medical associations in the states of origin and keeps in touch with all cases, to be sure that "people are not left out on a limb." As a barometer of the nation's health, the biggest volume of letters was received after programs dealing with 1) deafness, 2) heart surgery, 3) corneal transplantation, and 4) cleft palate.

LACMA also rides herd on the program itself, ever since the first show brought in a flood of complaints that a resuscitation method used on a newborn baby was obsolete. LACMA acts both as a censor and a prod to Medic. A show dealing with homosexuality was "tabled" by the doctors, but they have lifted some TV taboos, e.g., in a film about an unwed mother, NBC balked when the doctor--as he normally would--asked the girl when her last period had occurred. LACMA insisted that the word stay in.

LACMA's Executive Assistant Jerry Pettis thinks Medic is good propaganda for the medical profession. His reasoning: "A lot of people have been propagandized by this or that group advocating socialized medicine or compulsory health insurance . . . But when Medic pictures medicine as it is actually practiced and Mrs. Jones looks at it on her TV set, it is not hard for her to believe that medicine is pretty fine and that doctors, by and large, are rendering good medical care to the American people."

NBC is so enthusiastic about the show that it has assigned Producer Worthington Minor to do a similar job on the legal profession. The title: Briefcase.

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