Hot-Weather Diet

As they do each summer, the networks this week were rummaging desperately in their idea departments. What they were looking for were inexpensive, lightweight replacements for the big radio & TV shows that go on vacation during the next three months. This year, the networks' annual problem is reduced by at least one-third because July will be amply filled from Chicago with the hoopla and oratory of the two national political conventions.

For the remaining two months, radio is concentrating on music and drama. NBC is ready with half a dozen musical programs, ranging from an Armed Forces talent show called Stars in Khaki & Blue to the Stan Kenton Concerts, a weekly series of "revolutionary jazz" broadcast from different cities in the U.S. and Canada. CBS, aiming at the beach and auto trade, will broadcast 2 1/2 hours of music, news, weather reports and baseball scores each Sunday afternoon.

In radio drama, NBC is passing part of the load back to its affiliated stations with Portrait of a City, a show intended to let local stations dramatize the "personalities" of their home towns. The Author Speaks offers such dissimilar writers as Mary McCarthy (The Groves of Academe) and Princess Ileana of Rumania (I Live Again). CBS has on tap the Frank Fontaine Show (situation comedy) and Romance ("The dramatization of light, romantic stories").

If music is the summer savior of radio, films come to the rescue of TV. Televiewers should be prepared to sit through again the same old westerns, English movies and Hollywood B pictures they have already seen five or six times. CBS is also bringing out of retirement the 14-year-old ex-radio show, Information, Please for its TV debut, and will give another chance to such TV veterans as the Arthur Murray Show and Pantomime Quiz.

About the only nonpolitical novelty scheduled by any of the networks is NBC's Curtain Call, to be produced in June by Worthington Miner, late of CBS's Studio One. Curtain Call will dramatize modern and classical short stories.

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