Inspiring Post-Mortem

"There's nothing here," began Jackie Gleason, "except the orchestra and myself." It was to have been the second telecast of his new CBS panel show, You're in the Picture, but the studio was stripped to the brick walls. After sipping from a coffee cup ("a new coffee: Chock-Full-o'-Booze"), Gleason squarely faced the camera and continued: "We have a creed tonight, and the creed is honesty . . . Last week we did a show that laid the biggest bomb--it would make the H-bomb look like a two-inch salute."

For the rest of his 30 minutes, Gleason held an inspiring post-mortem on the bomb, a dreary affair in which guest panelists had peered through cutouts in prearranged backdrops (among them: John Smith saving Pocahontas, four playing cards, high school hurdlers in a track meet), tried to guess the picture they were in. Discussing the vagaries of show business, Gleason asked rhetorically how it was possible for a group of trained people to put on so big a flop. "If this happened in a hospital . . . " He might also have asked how it was possible for one of TV's funniest performers (in the great days of The Honeymooners) to accept a mere M.C.'s part in an elaborate parlor game. At any rate, he nobly exonerated all the reviewers who had panned the program, even though they themselves don't know how to put on a show: "You don't have to be Alexander Graham Bell to pick up the phone and find out it's dead."

Then Gleason recalled the post-premiere celebration and the victorious return to his hotel ("I opened the window to look out and see if it was still snowing, and they had the nets up"). His conclusion: "This isn't a requiem for a heavyweight. I'm coming back next week. I don't know what we're going to do, but tune in on the next chapter, because this might be the greatest soapless soap opera you've ever seen."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.