When it's not the 1960's, it's Victor Borge, Perry Como, or Harry
Belafonte. Who runs this network?
It doesn't make sense to me. The average age of the PBS viewer must
surely be sliding ever closer to the grave-- they will, sooner or later,
require younger viewers to survive the next round of Republican attacks.
To attract younger viewers, they have to start bringing in musical artists
like Leslie Feist, Arcade Fire, Royal Wood, Bon Ivor, Conor Orbest, Wilco,
please, anybody from the last ten or fifteen years!
When I was in college back in the 1970's, the only
decent music program on TV was Soundstage (earlier known as "Made in
Chicago"), which presented relatively current, relatively serious artists
like Harry Chapin, Arlo Guthrie, Gordon Lightfoot, and Emmy-Lou Harris, in a
one-hour format, no commercial breaks, no light shows, no lip-synching.
Okay-- so they also presented-- geez!-- Burt Bacharach and the Bee Gees.
It absolutely blows my mind that the same minds that would put together a
program like this for Emmy-Lou Harris would think it was a great idea to
give the Bee Gees an hour of rapt attention. The Bee Gees were worse
than mediocre. They were aggressively mediocre. Their
mediocrity pounded you on the face and stuck it's waxy fingers into your
ears and wobbled your head from side-to-side to scream at you that there is
not a single interesting thing musically or intellectually in any of this
noise you are hearing.
But then again, in 1976 Lightfoot appeared on Hee-Haw
to lip-synch "Sundown".
Anyway, two or three of my favorite shows are on PBS: the News Hour which
is about the only television news program that I watch without getting
nauseous nowadays (I know I'm mean but even Peter Mansbridge looks and
sounds like a pharmaceutical salesman-- think about it-- doesn't he always
seem about to ask, "and how often should the patient take this dosage,
Mary?") and "Frontline"
(documentaries) and "Inside Washington". And "Nova" can be
pretty cool thought it can also get annoyingly breathless at times.
And cheesy.
But mostly, when they need money, they present John Sebastian presenting
endlessly recycled clips of the "Do You Believe in Magic" or the Mamas and
the Papas singing "California Dreaming" on Hullabaloo, or Peter, Paul, and
Mary doing their farewell concert to end all farewell concerts at Carnegie
Hall. Over and over and over again. And over and over and over
again. And over and over and over and over again. I don't think
they have done pledge week once in the last 20 years without showing Peter,
Paul & Mary singing "Lemon Tree" or Pete Seeger doing "Turn, Turn, Turn" and
John Sebastian strumming his autoharp and creeping me out with that
harmless, aimless expression, grinning and looking folksy and trying
to make you believe that the 1960's was a happy place of delightful
experimentation and joyful frolics in psychedelic meadows of unicorns and
marshmallows.
