That Was Weak, That Was

Last season in Britain, the BBC presented a program called That Was the Week That Was, a sort of U.K. News & World Retort in which a group of bright and biting youths said what they pleased about Parliament, the Crown and current affairs. It was ragged and embarrassingly sophomoric, but it had the stamp of originality, and it became a sizable milestone in British television.

Last week NBC--having been pleased by a trial show broadcast last autumn--began a new weekly series of That Was the Week That Was in the U.S., produced by Leland Hayward and written by Robert Emmett and Gerald Gardner. It promised a lot: a live program full of uninhibited topical satire, laced with guts and gaiety and the spirit of no tomorrow. But this side of Menninger's, no one could have dreamed that such a promise would be delivered. The actual result was bland and unfunny, full of toothpicks masquerading as rapiers.

The Pope, according to one lyric, "flew to Galilee across the Apostolic See." Yuk. Chancellor Erhard, someone announced, admiringly changed the name of Unter den Linden to Unter den Lyndon. Hah, hah, jawohl Within the Republican Party there is a "strong underground movement" for Richard Nixon (onto the screen popped an old news photo of Nixon wearing a coal miner's headlamp).

Deftly fusing the activities of Barry Goldwater with the street-corner remarks of Harry Truman, the program delivered this deathless lyric:

Barry goes for Johnson's jugular,

Harry wants to take away MacArthur's star;

If Harry gets any meaner, he can join Jack Paar.

Instead of savage young malcontents, the American program is largely staffed with familiar commercial personalities like Elliot Reid and Henry Morgan flinging around nightclub material that would be tossed out of the thinnest of topical revues.

There were two glimmers of real humor. One had to do with General de Gaulle's fondness for the possessive --how he likes to say "my bomb, my army, my Europe and even, on occasion, mon Dieu." The other was a remark about the virus that has got the best of Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home. Said David Frost, British M.C. of That Was the Week That Was and a guest on the American show: "Hume is in bed with flu, or if you prefer, Home is in bed with Flo."

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