Word: carson
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...past two years, most CBS stations have been gamely running late-night movies, while NBC and ABC have done nothing but talk, talk with Johnny Carson and Joey Bishop. But movies no longer automatically grab a big audience and, more to the point, talk shows are cheap to produce and show large profits. Last week it became talk, talk, talk as CBS offered its own late-night interviewer, Merv Griffin...
...going to be different. Maybe so, but his premiere appearance did not exactly inundate the audience with originality. First there was Jackie "Moms" Mabley, an oldtime black comic of the Pigmeat Markham variety and hardly a nationwide favorite of the post-11:30 p.m. crowd. At the same time, Carson was cracking wise with Bob Hope, and Bishop was encouraging the Smothers Brothers to pour out their souls on camera. Moms was followed by a curiously subdued Woody Allen, Leslie Uggams, who is taking the Smotherses' place on CBS this fall and Hedy Lamarr. Pleasant personalities, but hardly show...
Middleman. In the end, what Griffin's first week amounted to was more of Carson and Bishop. Any differences were subtle, to say the least. While Carson has Ed McMahon as his sidekick on the Tonight Show, and Bishop has Regis Philbin, Griffin uses his longtime TV majordomo, Arthur Treacher, as a kind of Jeeves. Carson prefers to stand out as the star of his own show, throwing out quips and gags, staging frequent offerings from the Mighty Carson Art Players, and frequently upstaging his guests. Bishop, on the other hand, uses his Los Angeles base to good advantage...
...eyes and ears tell me that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring has arrived...
Bastard Twins. Asked about the use of host as a transitive verb, as when Johnny Carson "hosts" the Tonight Show, Princeton Historian Eric F. Goldman wrote: "This is TVese and public-relationese, hardly an improvement over the English language." On the use of like as a conjunction, like in the Winston cigarette syndrome, Writer John Kiernan commented: "Such things as these persuade me that the death penalty should be retained." Isaac Asimov, the lucid science writer, also denounced finalize as "nothing more than bureaucratic illiteracy-the last resort of the communicatively untalented...