Ad Hoc Hookup

The open season on NBC's Tonight show continued, but Johnny Carson was not perceptibly pinked. ABC had already taken a pot shot with Joey Bishop (TIME, April 28). And last week, a new ad hoc hookup, the United Network, took aim with a cap pistol called the Las Vegas Show.

The United show is a two-hour, five-night-a-week club crawl of Vegas, with Comic Bill Dana introducing the pretaped acts. Dana's putative advantage over the competition is that there is more top cabaret talent in Vegas in a week than Carson's New York or Bishop's Los Angeles sees in a month. Trouble is that about half of Dana's ten-odd nightly guests are lounge (or second-string) acts rather than the featured stars.

For example, Phil Harris, Bobby Darin and Alan King were all in Las Vegas but not on the Show. So Dana had to settle for the likes of Abbe Lane, Jerry Lester, Frankie Laine and Helen O'Connell. Dana himself was hardly the picture of authority, and just barely held the rambling shows together.

Carrying the Las Vegas Show are 125 U.S. channels. In many instances, they are taking a United flyer because the program provides them with free competition against Carson and Bishop just when old movies are scarce and expensive.

This fall United hopes to become a full fourth network starting with six hours of daily programing. To keep going, it will need something more solid than Dana's variety show. Commercial time sells for $6,000 a minute, but last week United couldn't peddle much of its time and gave a lot away free to such public-service sponsors as the U.S. Post Office, the Navy and the Peace Corps.

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