Oldtimer

In a St. Louis department-store show window one day in 1932, Fred Allen, a reformed juggler, made his television debut. The performance was part promotion stunt for his touring show (Three's a Crowd), part demonstration of a new gadget called Sanabria Giant Television,* which transmitted a fuzzy image of Allen to an audience on the store's third floor. "I just stood there and talked," Allen recalls. "It must have come out on the screen like a jumping passport."

Last week Comic Allen, who retired from radio in 1949 because of failing health (hypertension) and a falling Hooper, was back on television. It was his third attempt to find a niche in a medium which he sneeringly calls "a triumph of equipment over people," a form of entertainment that has doomed the next generation to "eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all." Allen had agreed to put his sagging face, rasping voice and acid wit to work as master of ceremonies of NBC's Judge for Yourself (Tues. 10 p.m.). "I figure this show will take one day of thinking and one day of doing," he said. "It's not mine. I just work there."

It was a strange job for a man who has often blasted television's tiresome cliches. The new show had them all: a panel of experts, guest contestants, talent acts, a big cash prize ($1,000), dancing cigarette packages (Old Golds) and a studio crowd slavishly applauding everything in sight, including the commercials. In repartee with the amateur panelists (a device Groucho Marx has used with immense success) Allen's gift for ad lib is supposed to shine forth. Shine it did on the first show, but all too briefly in the half-hour clutter of people and performance. The acts--a girl singer, a ballroom dance team and a pair of "electronic harmonica" players--were adequate but undistinguished, raising the question whether another talent show is really TV's crying need.

As the premiere ended, Allen sat with his cheeks puffed out like a man who had just missed his train, shuffled his wad of gum to the side of his mouth, and pleaded: "If you don't like the show, for heaven's sake keep quiet until we get the thing fixed up."

* An early TV, developed by Ulises A. Sanabria, now president of Chicago's American Television Inc.

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