The Week in Review

In The Golden Ass of Apuleius, a stranger in a Greek town, weaving his way home late at night from a party, thinks himself attacked on his doorstep .by three footpads, and stabs them all. The next morning, badly hung over, he is dragged before the townspeople and accused of murder by the wailing widows and orphans of the dead. While the audience screams for his head, the terrified stranger is forced to draw back the blanket covering the corpses--and discovers that his "victims" were nothing more than three inflated wineskins that had been tied to his doorpost. Everyone but the stranger has a good chuckle as he learns that he has been the butt of the town's annual Festival of Laughter.

NBC's Truth or Consequences last week brought this hoary Greek joke up to date with a sequence about a vacuum-cleaner salesman who innocently calls on a housewife, is interrupted in mid-spiel by the arrival of the husband, and almost instantly finds himself in the center of a family quarrel. The irate husband throws his wife onto a sofa, then knocks her down against a table; she retaliates by belting him with a vase and breaking a chair over his head. While the salesman, cowering over his vacuum-cleaner attachments, quavers: "You shouldn't do that!" husband and wife batter each other around the room. Jovial M.C. Jack Bailey explains the hoax: the husband and wife are Hollywood stunt players; the smashed furniture consists of harmless "break away" props--and, while the audience howls, the vacuum salesman is congratulated on being a good sport.

The best measure of last week's tele vision is that Truth or Consequences' brutal hoax was about the most enter taining item shown. Jack Benny contented himself with a repeat film first shown a year ago; Producer Max Liebman tossed off a lackadaisical show starring Maurice Chevalier, Polly Bergen and Dancer Chita Rivera; Wide, Wide World contributed a go-minute thinly disguised commercial for General Motors with a visit to the automakers' new Technical Center in Detroit.

The drama was even limper. NBC's Television Playhouse offered a soporific love story about an Army nurse and a wounded boy lieutenant; Studio One had a rambling farce that required a parcel of adults to pretend that they thought a coffee urn was a top-secret ballistic missile; Playwrights '56 went arch and arty about a British murder trial; Kraft TV Theater contributed a cops-and-robbers bit that depended on the excessive dumbness of its hero to keep it alive for 60 minutes.

The week's best play came off the library shelves: U.S. Steel Hour's adaptation of Sir James Barrie's 41-year-old sentimental comedy, The Old Lady Shows Her Medals. Gracie Fields worked hard for every tear as the plucky charlady who pretends she has a son fighting in France during World War I, and Jackie Cooper gamely took the hurdles of a Scottish accent as the upstanding Highlander who threatens to reveal her deception.

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