Shotgun week. Random thoughts on some randy topics.
I always like to know if the men whose criticism I read are beyond corruption, above reproach, out of reach of their own base desires and greeds. I think you’d like to know that about me, as well. So to put your mind at rest, be advised: I can be had. (In fact, I’m such an easy lay, I don’t understand why I don’t get more dates. But, be that as it may…) How many other critics do you know who’ll own up to being corruptible?
I mention this, because I’m going to make some remarks about a new ABC situation comedy, Nanny and the Professor, and I want you to know out front that I met and had lunch at 20th with the star, Ms. Juliet Mills, and she is a stunner. She is English, which gives her a runaway head start with me…as friends who know my ladyfriend, Louise, will tell you. But she is also reserved, witty, charming, totally professional, and an Actress with the cap A who speaks about having been on the London stage but doesn’t lumber the listener with hideous starlet talk about her agent, her parts, her dressing room, her likes and dislikes in show biz, ad nauseam. From all this you may gather that I found Ms. Mills (who is related by birth to John and Hayley and that whole crowd, but who need borrow no credentials from any of them) quite the winner.
And from that you may understand my distress at having to report that Nanny and the Professor is about as nitwitty a piece of persiflage as I’ve been forced to watch in many a season. I think, for dumbness, it even rivals The Good Guys, Gomer Pyle, and Gilligan’s Island. But it isn’t quite as bad as The Lucy Show—only because one has Ms. Mills and the other has Lucy.
The situation is a widower, a physics professor, played by Richard Long (whose range of emotions in this show flings itself from boredom to bemusement), with three little moppets, and an English “nanny” with claims to metaphysical/supernatural/leprechaun-type powers. Mr. Long does what he is required to do, and tries very hard not to look like a man about to get an enema with a thermite bomb. He, like Ms. Mills, is a professional, and we should sometime dwell on the horrors through which we put our competent, craftsmanlike actors. It must be a dreadful life they lead, succored only by the nice green money people give them.
So. Ms. Mills and Mr. Long. They’re fine, acting-wise. But those three noneck monsters, and their moronic dog, are quite another can of worms.
One cannot blame the kids. Several years ago I knew a young married couple who had a sweet child, a blond and blue-eyed moppet in whom they had dumped all their dreams and hopes. This lad had the singular and charming habit of coming downstairs during his parents’ frequent parties, standing in the center of the room where he could drink in all the attention, and announcing in a voice frighteningly like that of Walter Brennan, “I have a pee-pee!” He would then whip out of his Dr. Denton’s a pee-pee-sized penis and piss all over the rug. Well, sir, may I tell you that the first time it happened, I was a bit startled. But, being a true liberal, I shrugged and mumbled something about the kid’s doing his thing…or doing it with his thing…or something…and went back to whatever conversation it was I’d been having before the interruption. On subsequent occasions, I must say the novelty of the act wore off. It was like your second or third exposure to Jerry Lewis. (I know of few rational people who can report having had a fourth.) But the tot’s parents thought it was a wonderful expression of the child’s individuality and cleverness and perceptions about his own body and bodily functions. And they applauded wildly every time he did it. Maybe they were right; I don’t know. All I do know is that the first time the kid missed, and scored my pant leg, I stopped accepting invites to their brawls.
Let the little ankle-snapper express his individuality on somebody else’s pant leg. Which, of course, is the point about the kids on Nanny and the Professor. Let the little darlings express their individuality, their cuddlesomeness, their precociousness on somebody else’s television tube. Because, all shilly-shallying aside, they make my gorge become buoyant.
And if you add three lovable urchins to plots devised by a gaggle of waterheads, you have what is unquestionably the lowest point in tv programming this year, and in many years of recent memory.
Please, someone, won’t you build a new series around Ms. Mills? She’s really lovely, and she can act, and her accent is trilling, and she even ate my avocado so it wouldn’t go to waste. Now that is a lady.
Onward and downward. George Hamilton. Paris 7000. The Hee Haw of the dramatic shows. ABC has a positive penchant for masochism.
Of all the things to save from The Survivors (and I don’t know about you, babies, but I break up and fall down twitching when I think of the irony of that title), why ABC had to save old taciturn George is beyond me. The only difference between his character on the former show and his character on this one is that he let his hair grow longer.
If ever there was a no-talent, it is George Hamilton. He walks like a man who has just gotten his peg leg caught in a knothole. His face shows every subterranean bit of dissipation in which he’s ever indulged. His sloe-eyed and supposedly sexy glances merely register as heartburn. And if the word “actor” should ever be applied to him by anyone but a studio PR man, the offending semanticist should be taken out, put in the stocks, and flayed alive.
Well, dammit, there goes another hour of primetime. But I certainly am getting a lot more books read these days.
Two weeks ago (in The Glass Teat), on the occasion of the birth of a two-headed calf, I made some passing remarks about war, the love of glory on the battlefield that drenches this country, the way we substitute war games like football for the real thing, and tsk-tsk’d the whole affair.
The other night I saw the film Patton, and I recommend it highly to left- and right-wingers alike. It manages to walk a line of ambivalence that should pleasure both extremes, if you can conceive of such a thing. It at one and the same time provides a portrait of General George Patton as a megalomaniacal, psychopathic war-lover whose comment, “Next to war, all other endeavors of man pale into insignificance,” sums him up just nicely thank you—and provides superpatriots in the audience with the opportunity to see him as the instrument of a great American Destiny, destroying our enemies and bringing us to the greater heights of nobility through destruction.
That film, and a segment on First Tuesday dealing with the basketball mania in Galesburg, Illinois, coupled with a documentary earlier that week called The Day They Closed Down the Schools, made a tidy little object-lesson package in my mind about the gullibility of the American People. (You’ll forgive me for belaboring the poor American People so regularly, friends, but there just ain’t no one else around this country these days.)
I’m reminded of the Romans, in the Gibbonesque days of decline that civilization knew. The people closed their eyes to all manner of really ugly things like slavery, butchery, contamination, violence, and the debasement of the individual, chiefly because they had bread and circuses. You’re hip to bread and circuses, of course. Toss a few zealots to the crocs, or let the Nubians battle the Sumatran panthers with toothpicks, and the crowd goes cuddly with joy.
Have you ever thought to compare basketball and football and the antics of Bob Hope to bread and circuses?
Now I dig pro football a lot, and Hope even makes me smile sometimes, but when I think that the schlepps in Galesburg, Illinois, keep putting gold stars up in their windows and can’t find anything better to worry about than whether or not they get a season pass to the ball game…well, I begin to think about the last days of the Roman Empire, and I have ghastly visions of Spiro Agnew in the window of the White House, tootling on a harmonica while the land of the free and the home of the brave goes up in a pillar of smoke.
But, then, what more than cynicism can you expect from a dude who hates cute little kids?