Bluebird

From the Paris Review:

ON TELEVISION

The Aristocrats

February 22, 2012 | by Meredith Blake

Let it be known that Lady Fiona Herbert, the eighth Countess of Carnarvon, occasionally answers her own phone. When I call the Countess’s office to discuss her new book, Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey, I am unusually anxious; it’s not every day I speak to a member of the British aristocracy. “Hello?” answers a startled-sounding voice. I nervously ask if Lady Carnarvon is available. “This is Lady Carnarvon,” the voice replies, erupting into hearty laughter—which, happily, is not directed at me. The Countess had been reaching for the phone just as it rang and was caught off guard. “I’m completely useless as a receptionist,” she says.

For a woman who lives at Highclere Castle, one of Britain’s most impressive “family piles,” as well as the primary setting of the spectacularly popular PBS costume drama Downton Abbey, Lady Carnarvon is surprisingly warm and unpretentious.

She projects an image of slightly disheveled glamour: her household is not a well-oiled machine, but something more akin to a living archaeological site, where one might just discover a decades-old scrapbook while foraging through an out-of-use desk drawer. “We found a staircase recently. That was quite exciting,” she tells me.

Downton Abbey isn’t Highclere’s first brush with fame—parts of Eyes Wide Shut were filmed there, and British tabloid curiosity Jordan celebrated her 2005 wedding at the castle, arriving via a pumpkin-shaped carriage—but the phenomenal success of the series has thrust the Carnarvon family’s ancestral home into the spotlight like never before. It’s also spawned a cottage industry of Downton Abbey tie-in books, including two competing biographies about Almina, the colorful and controversial fifth Countess of Carnarvon.

Widely believed to be the illegitimate daughter of industrialist Alfred de Rothschild and his French mistress, Marie Wombwell, Almina married George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, in 1895, when she was just nineteen. In Lady Carnarvon’s telling, it was a felicitous match romantically and financially. Dubbed “the Pocket Venus,” diminutive Almina was a renowned beauty, reportedly besotted with her new husband, a budding Egyptologist. More important, perhaps, Almina brought to her marriage the cash desperately needed to run Highclere. Lady Carnarvon’s book focuses on the tumultuous years of World War I, when Almina converted her palatial estate into a convalescent hospital for wounded officers, and ends rather abruptly in 1924, shortly after the Earl’s untimely death.

Downton Abbey fans will note the striking parallels between Almina’s life and that of her fictional counterpart, Lady Cora Crawley. This is hardly an accident: Lady Carnarvon and her husband, the eighth Earl of Carnarvon, affectionately known as Geordie, have been friends with Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes for more than a decade. Though Lady Carnarvon calls Fellowes a “genius,” she’s too involved with the show to call herself a fan. “It’s too much of a bloody muddle,” she says.

The Prince of Wales visiting Highclere. Lady Almina is front and center. Photo © Highclere Castle Archive

Yet Lady Almina portrays a lifestyle far more extravagant—and a hierarchy far more rigid—than anything on Downton Abbey. In one of the book’s most evocative passages, Lady Carnarvon describes how Almina spent the equivalent of £360,000 on a three-day visit by the prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII. On his first night at Highclere, the prince, a notorious glutton, enjoyed an impossibly decadent meal:

It began with a soup, a consommé, followed by the fish course: turbot grillé Dugléré, (after Adolphe Dugléré, who was one of the most famous chefs in nineteenth-century Paris and had cooked for the Rothschild family for years.) Then came the entrées: pâtés and a chicken dish. Next up were the roasts, a vast amount of game birds, stuffed with foie gras, all served with numerous vegetable side dishes. It was followed by a soufflé d'orange and ices.

After the entertainments (on this occasion, accounts show that a band played for the assembled guests in the Music Room), there was a light supper of cold meats such as pheasant and cold beef.

Later chapters about the war years at Highclere, while less exuberant, are full of sumptuous details, such as the “cheerful crushed-strawberry-pink” uniforms Almina designed for her team of pretty Irish nurses, or the soft down pillows and fine sheets on each patient’s bed.

In Lady Almina, Lady Carnarvon portrays her predecessor as a woman with a vast charitable streak and a knack for getting what she wanted—particularly from her “godfather,” Alfred, who footed the enormous bill for her war-time hospital. “She spent money like water, but she spent it saving lives. If you’re going to distribute your fortune, that’s a pretty good place to start.

Though the book is explicitly aimed at fans of Downton Abbey, reading it doesn’t feel quite as silly as it perhaps ought to. With or without the series, the Carnarvon family is intriguing and eccentric in a way that seemingly only wealthy British aristocrats can be. Almina’s husband would discover the tomb of Tutankhamun, dying shortly thereafter of a mysterious blood infection popularly attributed to the “Pharoah’s curse.” An even more fascinating character is the Earl’s half-brother, Aubrey Herbert, who was close friends with T. E. Lawrence and was twice offered the throne of Albania. His daughter, Laura, would become Evelyn Waugh’s second wife (his first wife was Laura’s cousin, also named Evelyn).

Though Lady Almina is little more than a frothy, well-executed piece of Highclere marketing, it is not, it turns out, an entirely uncontroversial book, nor is it the first Almina biography to hit the market. Historian William Cross beat Lady Carnarvon to the punch by a few months with his self-published The Life and Secrets of Almina Carnarvon.

Lady Almina © Highclere Castle Archive.

A few weeks ago, I called Cross at his home in South Wales to discuss the considerable discrepancies between his book and Lady Carnarvon’s. He was gracious and curiously charming, but it was difficult to get a word in edgewise; over the course of our nearly ninety-minute conversation, I asked him perhaps a half-dozen questions. Cross takes issue with Lady Carnarvon’s decision to end Almina’s story in 1924, shortly after her first husband’s death and her hasty remarriage, barely eight months later, to Colonel Ian Dennistoun. In the very last paragraph of the book, Lady Carnarvon tosses in a pointedly brief mention of a “damaging court case brought by Ian’s ex-wife, Dorothy,” a case that was, in fact, a massive and very expensive sex scandal revolving around her new husband. When Colonel Dennistoun's ex-wife, Dorothy, learned that he'd remarried a wealthy widow, she sued for alimony. In court, Dorothy further alleged that her ex-husband had forced her to sleep with a high-ranking military officer in order to secure a promotion. Because of Lord Carnarvon's fame, the scandal was front-page news in the U.K.

The fifth Countess would live for another forty-five years, eventually dying in 1969, at ninety-three, after choking on a chicken bone. Having long since squandered her inheritance from Alfred, the former chatelaine of magnificent Highclere Castle was living in a modest row home in Bristol. None of this depressing business is covered in Lady Almina. “I stopped it in 1924 because that to me was a beginning and an end that I could manage,” the Countess says of her decision to omit Almina’s checkered post-Highclere life.

In his book Cross makes a slew of sensational allegations, some more plausible than others. According to the author, Alfred de Rothschild was not Almina’s real father, but he encouraged the illusion as a way of deflecting attention from his homosexuality. (For her part, Lady Carnarvon never conclusively states that Rothschild was Almina’s father.) To make ends meet in her later years, Cross says Almina provided costly but illegal abortions to upper-class women at Alfred House, the London hospital she opened in the late 1920s. (Evelyn Waugh reportedly called it “Almina’s abortionist parlor.”) His version of Almina is an inveterate maneater, a woman who seduced her second husband’s undertaker and later took up with a decades-younger working-class lover named James Stocking.

A soldier recuperating at Highclere. Photo © Highclere Castle Archive.

Not surprisingly, the ever-judicious British press has latched on to Cross’s allegations, especially his outlandish claim that Almina’s son, the sixth Earl of Carnarvon, was in fact sired by Prince Victor Duleep Singh—the fifth Earl’s best friend and a frequent guest at Highclere. The incomparable Daily Mail even contacted the “real Earl of Carnarvon,” a Devon school teacher named Alan Herbert, to tell him that he has “a strong claim” to the title. (His reported response: “Wow.”)

Cross himself is not exactly diplomatic. He accuses Lady Carnarvon of writing a “hugely diluted and sanitized” version of Almina’s life and sees her hagiography as part of a broader conspiracy to consolidate power among the landed class. “Britain is still absolutely under the control of the aristocracy,” he says. “That, in 2011, isn’t right.”

Cross is even less restrained online, where he’s posted scathing reviews of Lady Almina on Amazon. “Know that toffs will not be transparent,” Cross warns the would-be reader, describing the fans who “follow this TV series as mesmerised as grazing sheep watching car headlamps flicking in the winter darkness of night.” He likens Lady Carnarvon’s book to Orson Welles’s famous “War of The Worlds” broadcast and, yes, to Nazi propaganda: “It seems a case of employing the technique of Mr. Goebbels that if one utters a big enough untruth and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

So what does Cross think of Downton Abbey? “Oh, I enjoy it very much,” he tells me. “I think the story lines are fantastic.”

Meredith Blake is a freelance writer living in New York. She is a frequent contributor to The A.V. Club and The Los Angeles Times.

 

My favorite telly writer

 

Horacio Silva from the LATimes mag:

Julian Fellowes

PHOTO: PERRY OGDEN

Julian Fellowes is as English as Earl Grey and clotted cream. As an actor, director and writer, he has continually peeked under the petticoats of British mores and conveyed the details with relish to audiences. His writing of the upstairs-downstairs whodunitGosford Park won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2002, and his subsequent films Vanity Fair andThe Young Victoria established Fellowes as the class-fixated Anglophile’s Anglophile. His two novels, Snobs and Past Imperfect, mined the same dishy blueblood vein, and both were Sunday Times bestsellers.

A lifelong Conservative, Fellowes was made a Peer of the Realm in 2011 and bestowed with the title Baron Fellowes of West Stafford. Now with season two of the Edwardian-era Downton Abbey, the internationally syndicated costume drama he conceived and wrote for ITV, airing in the States as part of PBS’ Masterpiece, Fellowes—who was once shortlisted to replace Hervé Villechaize onFantasy Island—stands tall as the reigning lord of ka-ching. Downton, the period piece most watched in the U.K. since Brideshead Revisited, left off last season with the outbreak of WWI and the able-bodied men in the household heading off to the trenches. We caught up with its creator by phone, during an uncharacteristic break in his schedule.

Hello, Julian. Where am I calling you—in the country or the city?
I’m actually at my office in the House of Lords in London. Well, an office is a rather optimistic description. It’s sort of a giant cupboard.

Congrats on your peerage.
Thanks. I mean, it’s been very, very interesting. I am quite political, so being actually here and a part of it all is thrilling. I do what I can—everyone recognizes that I have other things going on.

What else are you juggling?
A third season of Downton, a miniseries Titanic, due in April, and two or three film projects, including a piece set in the Vienna of Maria Theresa. My professional life is rather like a cake show at the moment. You know—“Here’s one I made earlier!” But it seems to be working.

You’re busier than a one-armed fan dancer. I’m surprised you’re not on the En--glish Olympic debate team.
Is there a debate team?

No, but there ought to be. It may be the only sport En-gland would be good at! Sorry to poke fun, as obviously the country is at the heart of your work. Downton Abbey’s season two begins this month, and without revealing too much, what can we expect?
We do go to the Front [WWI], because it would seem dishonest not to. But really the season is about how the home front dealt with the war. It’s not giving it away to say that eventually Downton becomes a convalescent home for officers, because the family can’t stay out of it any longer. In fact, Highclere, the castle in Hampshire where the show is mostly shot, was a hospital during the war. But I didn’t think it would be believable that the family would remain in residence if it had become a hospital, and of course, we wanted the family to stay at Downton.

So, the house itself becomes an even stronger character.
Yes, it does. I love Highclere. In fact I tried to get Robert Altman to use it for Gosford Park. I think why it is so successful as a character—and you’re quite right, it is a character—is it is a terribly proud house, a tremendous procla-mation of the confidence of aristocratic worth. I felt it was a rather marvelous irony to use such a house to chronicle a family negotiating its way into the modern world, where such values would be challenged at every turn.

The popularity of Downton under-scores the enduring—some may say perplexing—fascination with the English class system. Why are you so enamored of that?
I’ve been given this role, really, as a kind of chronicler of those times. I can’t deny that I am interested in the class structure—I am! Sometimes I think the whole thing’s a terrible cosmic joke, and other times I wonder if there isn’t a kind of comfort in the security it must have offered. I feel quite undecided about it, actually. You know my favorite thing I’ve ever done was a contemporary film I wrote and directed calledSeparate Lies. So I wouldn’t say it’s my exclusive interest, but you know, in this business, whether you’re an actor or a director, you have to be seen as a safe pair of hands for something.

Is there any aspect of the prewar class system whose passing you particularly mourn?
There were aspects to that simpler world that are quite enviable. They had this extra-ordinary belief in themselves. It’s like America in the 1950s before Vietnam, when they had an extreme conviction that every-one wanted to be American. I grew up on the films of Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee, and there was something beguiling about American self-belief in those days. I don’t believe in a society as fixed as the one inDownton. In fact, one of the great failures of modern Britain has been that our social mobility has very much been compromised, a development I think is disgraceful. Again, America is ahead of us on this. Americans, on the whole, have a much more fluid society.

As much as Downton Abbey depicts an England of the imagination, its storylines are clearly indebted to contemporary stateside episodic TV.
Absolutely. At first it looks like a traditional 1970s period drama, but those shows tended to be single-narrative episodes: Lady Marjorie buying a new hat or what have you. We borrowed the much more American structure of, say, The West Wing, where you have five, six, seven plots at once. It seems more apt for the zeitgeist, and it has a higher energy quotient.

And what of the American heiresses that came to the short-term rescue of the upper class and their estates at the turn of the century?
I’m fascinated with them—and obviously, the character of Cora, Countess of Grantham, comes from that stock. Girls like Cora had these enormous dowries, and something like 350 of them married into the English upper classes. Consuelo Vanderbilt brought something like $9 million to the Marlborough family in the 1890s, which was a colossal sum—and she had two brothers! That would never happen in England because the oldest boy would get everything. And these American girls had a totally different idea of comfort, so suddenly houses started springing up with heating and bathrooms and all of that stuff, which the English had kind of resisted. Of course, their money was finite, and that way of life was essentially living on borrowed time, but these American women undoubtedly had a long-term effect and made the En-glish aware of comfort in a way they had not been before.

Were you a child of privilege?
My parents were never rich on that scale. I grew up in an ordinary vicarage-type house, and we had a flat in the city. I’m not pretending I was lying under a sheet of corrugated iron! I always get rather irritated by people who talk down their own backgrounds. And you know, I was picked up later as a young man for what used to be called “the season” [to meet eligible young debutantes], and I was put on lists and things. I would go off and stay with friends and relations in versions of houses like Downton, but I was always the rather unimportant guest. In a funny way, you have a better view of the whole thing because nobody’s concentrated on you. Nobody’s worried about whether you’re comfortable or whether others are laughing at your jokes. And I think my bird’s-eye view of that world proved to be rather useful.

HORACIO SILVA, a writer and digital strategist obsessed with English costume dramas, wishes he had his own evil footman.

 

My fave show ever

 50 years of classic love...

 

 

"The Dick Van Dyke Show"

( CBS )

The CBS show starring Van Dyke as TV comedy writer Rob Petrie lasted five seasons, but with a cast that included Mary Tyler Moore as his young, fashionable wife, it went on to become one of television's classic comedies.

Danger, Will Robinson!

Advertising

With a Click of the Remote, Impulse Purchases

By TANZINA VEGA

Published: December 4, 2011

Giving television viewers the ability to buy products they see on their screens with a click of a remote control — say the Manolo Blahniks on Carrie Bradshaw’s feet or Ross’s sweater on “Friends” — has been talked about by advertisers for years without much success.

 

Delivery Agent

Some viewers of the History Channel will be able to buy items offered during shows.

A new service being introduced this week to Verizon FiOS customers, however, will allow viewers to do just that — for items like bicycles, radios and coins — directly from shows on the History Channel, owned by A&E Network. The idea is to put products from brands like Schwinn, Crosley Radio and the Franklin Mint in front of consumers at the moment they see a similar item on shows like “American Pickers” and “Pawn Stars.”

The products will be “contextual to what you are watching on television,” said Rachelle Zoffer, director of content acquisition and programming for FiOS TV at Verizon. “Our goal is to put things on the television that enhance the programming and create value for our subscribers.”

A small icon in the upper right corner of the screen will signal that an item is available, and with the touch of a button on a remote control, the screen will split in two, with items for purchase on the right. After setting up a user account on TVWallet.com, viewers can complete their transaction by entering their phone number and four-digit PIN.

The service will be available to nearly four million Verizon FiOS subscribers primarily in the Northeast, California, Texas and Florida, Ms. Zoffer said. Verizon will promote the service with 30-second spots during History Channel programming. She said the company had plans to include the service in other networks soon.

Mark Garner, senior vice president for distribution at A&E Networks, said the service’s success would be measured by how much consumers use it and whether they buy anything. The History Channel already has “a very healthy commerce engine” on its Web site, Mr. Garner said, and if 5 percent of the people who see the new feature make a purchase, that would be considered an initial success.

Men ages 25 to 54 make up the primary audience of the History Channel, and these men are the ones meant to be served by the new feature. In deciding which shows will add the shopping feature, Mr. Garner said: “We look at it from a network level. Which programs are more likely to have engaged customers?”

Shows on the Lifetime network like “Project Runway,” “Drop Dead Diva” and “Army Wives” may eventually adopt it, Mr. Garner said. The data collected on buyers will help the network decide “how we market, how we program, how we develop our promotions,” he said, adding that there were no plans to share that data with advertisers directly.

The brands in the introduction are optimistic about the exposure, even if results are not immediate.

“When you sell jukeboxes, turntables and old radios, you’ve got to be patient,” said Bo LeMastus, the president of Crosley Radio, whose company has been selling products through the History Channel Web site for more than a month. Mr. LeMastus said the company became interested in doing business with the History Channel after an episode of “American Pickers,” where the show’s stars came across old Crosley radios in a barn.

“This is going to take some time to develop and for the consumer to catch on,” Mr. LeMastus said. “It’s more about the long-term picture.”

It is Schwinn’s first time working with the History Channel. “There are a lot of people who are very nostalgic about Schwinn,” said Lori Peters, the company’s director of consumer activation for North America. “Now they have the opportunity to act very impulsively. Kind of like buying a memory through your TV screen.”

Those memories have the potential to be quite lucrative, according to projections provided by Mike Fitzsimmons, chief executive of Delivery Agent, the company that is providing the technology that powers the transactions.

In trials, Mr. Fitzsimmons said, the value of the average order placed by viewers was $75, which could mean $285 million in revenue in the first year if all FiOS households made one purchase during that time. “It doesn’t take much for this business to end up with too many zeros to count,” he said.

What a surprise: Fox News is for dummies

Fox News viewers less informed about current events, poll shows

Sean Hannity talks to the audience during the taping of his Fox News show recently. (John Amis / Associated Press)

By Michael A. Memoli

November 21, 2011, 4:08 p.m.

A new survey of New Jersey voters comes to a provocative conclusion: Fox News viewers tend to be less informed about current events than those who don't watch any news at all.

Fairleigh Dickinson University recently questioned 612 adults in New Jersey about how they get their news, offering as options traditional outlets like newspapers and local and national television news, or blogs, websites and even Comedy Central's "The Daily Show."

They then asked a series of factual questions about the major events of the last year, from the "Arab Spring" to the Republican race for president.

For example, respondents were first asked whether, to the best of their knowledge, opposition groups in Egypt had been successful in bringing down the Mubarak regime.

Among NPR listeners, 68% correctly said they had been; only 49% of Fox News viewers answered correctly. In fact, the survey found, Fox viewers were 18 percentage points less likely to answer correctly than those who watched no news at all.

"The results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don't watch any news at all," said Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson.

Those who watched Sunday public affairs shows tended to be the best informed on current events, the survey found. Readers of national newspapers also were more likely to respond correctly.

And it seems Jon Stewart may be more reliable than cable news anchors. On Occupy Wall Street, the survey found viewers of "The Daily Show" were 12 percentage points more likely to say protesters were predominantly Democratic. MSNBC viewers were the most likely to say the protesters were mainly Republicans.

"Jon Stewart has not spent a lot of time on some of these issues. But the results show that when he does talk about something, his viewers pick up a lot more information than they would from other sources," Cassino said.

The overall survey, conducted from Oct. 17 to 23, had a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points. Because of the smaller sample size among those who selected a specific news source, the margin of error would be much higher.

TV Haunts

Ghosts haunt all corners of television

Shows like 'American Horror Story' and 'Ghost Hunters' make it clear that spirits will live on.

Casper the Friendly Ghost. (Shout! Factory, Classic Media / August 9, 2011)

By Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times Television Critic

October 30, 2011

There have been ghosts on television since there was television: "Ghost" was the word for the faintly doubled image that was common back when pictures were beamed straight to your set over the air. (Through walls — like a ghost!) And though modern technologies guarantee that current and future generations of viewers will live free from that small terror, spirits have continued to haunt the vast wasteland, both in fictional series such as "American Horror Story" and "nonfictional" series like "Ghost Hunters" and its abundant ilk, wherein variations on a team vet strange noises, weird lights and restless furniture for supernatural influence.

Some ghosts, as seen on TV, are indistinguishable from angels, specifically of the guardian variety; others are basically demons not yet living full time in hell (or, as in the late "Reaper," who have made their way back from it). They prompt the living to be good or tempt them to be bad. They are deadly threats or harmless busybodies, pests or pals, unhappy roommates who never asked you to move in in the first place or great roommates who will help you with your love life or problem at work.

Some will help you solve an unsolved murder — as in "Haunted" or "Raines" or "Medium" or "Tru Calling," with characters played by Matthew Fox, Jeff Goldblum, Patrica Arquette and Eliza Dushku, respectively, collaborating with the passed-on-but-not-over in the name of criminal justice — or ask for help accepting their own sudden death, if you are Jennifer Love Hewitt in "The Ghost Whisperer" or Ellen Muth in "Dead Like Me." But every cold case, even of the nonsupernatural sort, is a ghost story, and every police procedural is haunted by the souls of the prematurely departed.

In the early days of television, ghosts were most likely to be friendly spirits, like the madcap Kerbys (and their martini-drinking Saint Bernard) who cheerfully rattled the peace of the staid hero of the mid-'50s sitcom "Topper" — a forerunner of such 1960s series as "My Favorite Martian," "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeannie," in which uncanny beings kept house with ordinary mortals. In "The Smothers Brothers Show," from 1965, ghost brother Tommy (in "apprentice angel" mode) attached himself to living brother Dick; in "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" (1968-70), the shade of a 19th century sea captain shared his house with a 20th century mom.

My own first ghost, as he has been for so many, was "the friendliest ghost you know": Casper, whose afterlife was after-lived in theatrical shorts, comic books and on television. ("Casper the Friendly Ghost: The Complete Collection 1945-1963" was released on DVD this month by Shout Factory.) "Wherever he may go," ran his theme, "he's kind to every living creature." That Casper is, by the traditional terms of ghostliness, a dead child is never discussed, nor would you want it to be. He had trouble enough convincing potential playmates that he was good company.

This was not the case with the less friendly spirits who followed, dealing out incorporeal punishment in the 1980s and '90s in anthology series like "Tales from the Darkside" and "Tales from the Crypt," which reflected an explosion of horror on the big screen. (In the 1982 movie "Poltergeist," produced and co-written by Steven Spielberg, whose first directing job had been on Rod Serling's "Night Gallery," the spooks make themselves felt through a static-filled TV screen.) They have made their way into modern serial anthologies like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Supernatural"; there are ghost characters in "The Vampire Diaries" and "Being Human."

They also inhabit nonsupernatural dramas such as "Rescue Me" and "Six Feet Under," where their status as "real" or hallucinations is dramatically beside the point; they are there to turn monologues into conversation and to represent conscience. "Northern Exposure" was always a friendly place for ghosts, to similar though funnier purpose. And on this season's "A Gifted Man," in which the saintly, spectral ex-wife of a doctor moves his worldly mind to good deeds, the ghost (I think) is real, but her job remains the same.

But nowhere do the deceased live so successfully as on the ghost-hunting reality shows, too many to name here, that have colonized basic cable. Perhaps only the home makeover has proved as variable and tenacious a genre, and in a way the two are related, the undead being a well-known drag on property values. (Still, as on "American Horror Story," there is always some chump happy to take the discount.) These series take ghosts as a given and are no more "skeptical" than is necessary to look "scientific." The judgments of their investigators range from the hopefully noncommittal (Just because we haven't proved a ghost did this doesn't mean a ghost didn't) to the irrefutably personal (I definitely felt something there).

However you regard their substance, as metaphors they are always hanging about, right over your shoulder, the most ordinary sort of monsters. Ghosts were people too and in most respects remain so. We're all haunted, occasionally or chronically, by our own past — and by our own remembered dead — which we reciprocally haunt, as powerless as ghosts to change what happened there. And who hasn't heard something go bump in the night or seen someone who wasn't there, in the wee hours, out of the corner of an eye — however we like to explain it? Or not.

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

Dessert tonight

Packers playing poorly but the Mounds are good.

I love Dick Van Dyke

Classic Hollywood: Doctors, lawyers invade TV in '61

Sitcoms such as 'Dick Van Dyke,' 'Hazel' and 'Phil Silvers' reigned also.

By Susan King, Los Angeles Times

September 5, 2011

Every fall the broadcast networks unveil their new series — some will become hits, a lot more will disappear in a nanosecond. The same was true 50 years ago, though the TV universe was a lot smaller.

In 1961, there were only three networks — ABC, NBC and CBS — and prime-time began at 7:30 p.m. (and 7 on Sundays) instead of 8 as it is now. Five decades ago, the fall season featured the arrival of several popular comedies, medical series, an acclaimed legal drama and even a circus variety show (you don't see much of that on TV anymore). Here's what played big on the small screen back then.

Comedy is king

Fall 1961 heralded the arrival of the seminal CBS comedy series "The Dick Van Dyke Show," created by Carl Reiner, starring Van Dyke as Rob Petrie, a writer on the Alan Brady (Reiner) TV series; Mary Tyler Moore played his capri-wearing wife, Laura; and Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie were Rob's fellow writers, Buddy and Sally. Though "Dick Van Dyke" was the sitcom that defined the decade, audiences were scarce that first season and the show was nearly canceled. By the following year, though, it was No. 10 in the ratings. It continued until 1966 but has lived on thanks to reruns and DVD.

Oscar-winning actress Shirley Booth ("Come Back, Little Sheba") came to series TV in NBC's comedy "Hazel," a sitcom based on Ted Key's "Saturday Evening Post" cartoons about the well-organized maid-housekeeper of the Baxter family. The series was an instant hit, and Booth won an Emmy for her performance. The series ran until 1966.

Nat Hiken, the force behind the fabulous "The Phil Silvers Show" in the 1950s, also created the NBC comedy series "Car 54, Where Are You?" It starred Joe E. Ross and Fred Gwynne as the clueless New York policemen Gunther Toody and Francis Muldoon who worked out of the 53rd precinct in the Bronx. Al Lewis, Nipsey Russell and Bea Pons also starred in the slapstick comedy. The series was memorable, but it lasted only two seasons.

Other comedies making their debuts: "The Joey Bishop Show" (NBC); "Mrs. G Goes to College" (CBS), "Window on Main Street" (CBS) "and "The Bob Newhart Show" (NBC).

The doctors are in

NBC and ABC unveiled their new medical dramas that fall. Vince Edwards, known for his tough-guy roles in B movies, became a TV superstar as the gifted, young resident surgeon at a general hospital in ABC's "Ben Casey." Veteran character actor Sam Jaffe played his mentor, Dr. David Zorba, and Jaffe's wife, Bettye Ackerman, played Dr. Maggie Graham. The series became the biggest hit on ABC that season. It continued through 1966.

An even bigger sensation was NBC's "Dr. Kildare," starring über-handsome Richard Chamberlain as the earnest intern at Blair General. The character of Dr. James Kildare had been introduced to audiences in the late 1930s in a popular MGM movie franchise starring Lew Ayres. Oscar-nominated actor Raymond Massey played his crusty mentor, Dr. Leonard Gillespie. Like "Ben Casey," "Dr. Kildare" lasted until 1966.

Dramatic chops

The breakout new dramatic series of the season was CBS' courtroom drama "The Defenders," which went on to dominate the Emmys, winning for dramatic series, dramatic actor for E.G. Marshall as well as for Franklin Schaffner's direction and Reginald Rose's writing. Marshall and Robert Reed, who would later headline "The Brady Bunch," played father-and-son attorneys. Each week they would be involved in a court case that included such hot-bed issues as abortion, euthanasia and the Hollywood blacklist. The series was based on the 1957 two-part episode of "Studio One" called "The Defender," written by Rose, which starred Ralph Bellamy and William Shatner as the attorneys and Steve McQueen as their defendant. The series continued through 1965.

Other dramas premiering: "New Breed" (ABC). "Cain's Hundred" (NBC) and "Frontier Circus" (CBS).

Variety shows

Variety was a staple of TV in this period, and perhaps the most offbeat one was NBC's "International Showtime," hosted by movie star Don Ameche. Each week, Ameche would present various European spectaculars, including circuses and ice shows. Though never a huge ratings' success, the series continued through 1965.

susan.king@latimes.com

When 2 hours = billions of years

 

Flight 33 Productions

“History of the World in Two Hours,” on History, skips minutiae like kings and battles to focus on bigger things, like the discovery of fire and the formation of the Earth and the Sun.

From the Big Bang to Today: Just the Highlights, Please

By NEIL GENZLINGER

Published: October 5, 2011

It’s every high school student’s dream: Sit through one two-hour lesson and be done with history classes for life. It’s also, at some point in adulthood, every grown-up’s reality: “I sat through all those history lessons in school, but today what I remember from them would fill up about two hours.”

Dream and reality meet on Thursday night on History in “History of the World in Two Hours,” a spunky recap of what’s been going on since the Big Bang that really does, by the end, feel like everything you need to know about history. No analysis of troop movements in century-old battles here. No who cut off which wife’s head in what European monarchy. Just the very-big-picture stuff: creation of complex elements; continental drift; fire; human migration; industrialization. And — here’s the important part — how they all fit together.

“More than 12 billion years ago stars are already forming the elements that will spur the Iron Age,” the narration says about the young universe. The history here may be compact, but it doesn’t feel dumbed-down; this little program — first seen on Sunday on History’s sister channel, H2 — might also qualify as almost everything you need to know about physics, geology, paleontology and a few other subjects.

“Within a fraction of a second the Big Bang creates all the energy that will ever exist,” we’re told. Everything that has come after that formative explosion has been a variation on the theme of finding and using that energy, whether the entity doing the finding is a coal-mining company or a primitive plant. Bringing matter and energy together is what has spawned bursts of innovation, whether we’re talking about matter slamming together to form complex atoms or humans taking up residence near a water source and trading ideas.

The program gives attention to the usual suspects when talking about pivotal moments in history: ice ages, Christopher Columbus, the first steam-driven machine. But it also notes some game changers that might not immediately spring to mind: grasslands, for instance, which appeared seven million years ago and forced apes out of trees, with profound consequences.

“It’s a landscape better suited to primates that can walk on two legs, keeping their heads up above the tall grasses to watch for predators,” the narration notes. “Standing on two feet is a revolutionary advance because it frees up our hands — hands we will need to shape human history.”

That tidbit is heard over a picture of an ape hand that transforms into a human hand, then into a human hand holding a stone ax, a sword, a pistol. All because of grass. Might leave you with a new respect for your lawn as you’re giving it that last mowing of autumn.

Sad political discourse

Tv Sports

Are You Ready to Put Your Foot in Your Mouth?

John Raoux/Associated Press

Hank Williams Jr. has kicked off Monday Night Football for two decades.

By RICHARD SANDOMIR

Published: October 5, 2011

Sometimes people surprise you. For more than 20 years, Hank Williams Jr. sang his adapted version of “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight” to open “Monday Night Football.” Over the years, the production values grew but the message stayed the same: “Are you ready for some football?” The musical bit traveled with “Monday Night” from ABC to ESPN. Although it has grown stale, it was harmless.

And there was no reason to think about Williams’s right-wing politics.

Then on Monday, Williams compared President Obama to Hitler during an appearance on Fox News Channel. He described the round of golf between Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner last summer as “Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu” — referring to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu — then punctuated his political tirade by calling Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “the enemy.”

ESPN quickly pulled Williams’s opener from Monday’s Indianapolis-Tampa Bay game (the national anthem replaced the song) and left open further action against him.

Williams has issued two statements, one an apology of sorts, the second a condemnation of news media characterizations of Tea Party members as racist and extremist. He admitted that his Obama-to-Hitler analogy was “extreme” but said he did it to make a point. He canceled a follow-up appearance Tuesday night on Fox News Channel.

ESPN is contemplating whether to cut its ties to Williams, who is not an employee and is tangential to the company’s success. Comparing Obama to the epitome of pure evil seems to be a dismissible offense. But ESPN executives could conclude that Williams’s contrition is sufficient (despite the semi-sincere “if I offended anyone” part of his de rigueur celebrity apology) and declare a one-week suspension adequate.

But James Miller, the co-author of the recent book about ESPN, “Those Guys Have All the Fun,” said that the importance of “Monday Night” to the Bristol, Conn.-based empire has accelerated an internal debate about what to do about Williams. “Even before this occurred, there were people who thought the opening was past its prime and were advocating a new one,” he said. “Others want to keep it for its tradition and legacy.”

Williams’s remarks demonstrated the potency of Hitler’s name — and how almost any comparison, except to another genocidal tyrant, is extreme.

Mel Brooks angered some people by his mockery of Hitler and the Nazis in the film and stage versions of “The Producers.” Several years ago, he explained his approach to satirizing Hitler to the German publication Der Spiegel: “Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.” He added that “by using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths.”

ESPN has past experience — none of it comedic — with personnel who could not resist including Hitler in their analyses. In an online column, Jemele Hill said that cheering for the Celtics “is like saying Hitler was a victim,” for which she was suspended. She apologized.

On the air, Lou Holtz discussed Michigan’s tough start in 2008 and Coach Rich Rodriguez’s leadership. Holtz’s point was simple: “Ya know, Hitler was a good leader, too.” (You wonder when Holtz the historian thought Hitler’s skills eroded.)

Unlike Hill, Holtz was not suspended, which suggested a double standard. In “Those Guys Have All the Fun,” Holtz defended himself by saying, “I think the point I made was very valid, very solid, and it was a different angle than the way people look at it.”

Ron Rosenbaum, the author of “Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil,” said that the Tea Party “has legitimized the kind of casual comparison of Obama to Hitler.“

“We’ve seen it at rallies with posters of Obama with Hitler mustaches and in the comments sections of right-wing news sites,” he said. “I think that’s what he’s picking up on.”

Last year, the North Iowa Tea Party put up a billboard with pictures of Hitler and Lenin flanking Obama that said: Radical Leaders Prey on the Fearful & Naïve.

Rosenbaum lamented that “it’s sort of sad that our political discourse has come to a point where we’re discussing Hank Williams on Hitler.”

He added, “Somehow, one hopes for more.”

E-mail: sandor@nytimes.com