Word: carsons
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...Brits are baffled. Burbank? Governor Jerry Brown? Medflies? Orson Welles on a windy day? Cronkite? Rather? And what is that marmoset doing on Johnny Carson's head...
...weirdest export since Dallas got dubbed and sent to Japan. The NBC Tonight show has been shipped to Britain, where a 40-minute version airs once a week, some days after its U.S. showing, to a bit of national befuddlement, considerable indifference and a few shreds of outright hostility. Carson's opening monologue, with its repeated references to daily U.S. political folk ways and wild consumerism, may be delivered in what is-roughly-considered a common language, but the jokes turn out to be not fully translatable. May be subtitles would help. Or footnotes...
...maybe nothing. London Weekend Television Ltd., which ordered 13 Carson shows, and has since signed up for 13 more, is flying directly against heavy weather from both viewers and reviewers. Michael Grade, director of programs for L.W.T., says he chose to start running the Tonight show eleven weeks ago because "American TV is extremely popular. The critics ask us why we put on so much American rubbish, but what they hate the public loves...
Statistics do not necessarily bear out this conclusion. Up against weekly Saturday-night competition of soccer highlight and a drama on the BBC, Carson "has averaged a 36% share of the viewing audience," by Grade's reckoning. But Britain's Broadcasters' Audience Research Board lists the top ten programs on each channel. Tonight has not joined the roll call. It seems for once that the viewing public may be speaking as one with the critics...
...this Johnny Carson guy?" wrote a London Standard reader. "I find it very difficult to laugh when the chat-show king is earning a multimillion-dollar salary reading cue boards." The pros were even rougher. Announced TV Critic Margaret Forwood in the Sun: "To be frank, Carson got right up my nose." Said Joe Steeples of the Daily Mail: "His monologue could be in Swahili for all we get from...