Golden years

WJAR looks back

by Robert David Sullivan

Despite its tie-in to WJAR's 50th anniversary, the home-grown special The Time of Our Lives: 50 Years of Television (January 21 from 7 to 8 p.m. on Channel 10) does not concern itself with local TV and makes only glancing references to local politics. Instead, it's a briskly paced look at the evolution of the "boob tube," as seen through the eyes of Providence residents.

About 20 people from the area offer memories and observations -- including Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Almond, Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci, radio talk-show host Arlene Violet, and a rabbi who reveals that he gets ideas for sermons by watching Seinfeld. Representatives of the African-American, Latino, and American Indian communities talk about the distorting and exclusionary nature of the medium.

Mostly, though, there is testament to the power of television to pull us together. One woman recalls someone yelling at her that President Kennedy had just been shot. "Of course, it was `look at TV' to see what happened," she says. The rabbi recalls being at a 1989 World Series game in San Francisco when the city was hit by an earthquake, noting that spectators learned what had happened only after turning on portable TV sets. And Bishop Robert Mulvee of Providence, referring to the impact of televised reports on famine in Africa, proclaims that "Americans always respond to poverty that they can see."

The clips are mostly familiar (Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, the Challenger Space Shuttle blowing up), but there are a few surprises from the early 1950s, including I Love Lucy's Vivian Vance and William Frawley doing a refrigerator commercial (in character). One woman fondly remembers the children's show Winky-Dink and You, which encouraged viewers to place a "magic" sheet of plastic over the TV screen and draw objects on it. We then see a clip of host Jack Barry shamelessly hectoring kids into buying this visual aid: "You kids really can't have as much fun without it . . . so I hope you'll send for your Winky-Dink kit right after the program." So much for the idea that product tie-ins are a recent phenomenon.

The narration includes the commonplace observation that television coverage galvanized opposition to the Vietnam War. But then we see a man who organized pro-Vietnam rallies in a vain attempt to counteract the images of dying soldiers. Television can be a "power for evil," he warns, when it is used to influence people in ways "inimical to our national interest." Not surprisingly, his rhetoric is no match for the war footage, and he ends up further strengthening the argument for TV.

One of the few local angles in the documentary is the crusade by Rhode Island Sen. John Pastore, in the late 1960s, against violence and sexual topics on TV. The clips of Pastore make him seem, like most politicians who take a stand against the arts, rather proud of his ignorance: After the stars of the controversial Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour answer his charges, he brushes them off with "I've never seen a Smothers show in my life." Politicians in general don't come off too well on this documentary -- with the exception of Cianci, who claims that television advertising helped him to build a power base independently of the fossilized party organizations.

While the narration is concise and straightforward, it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. We're told that "viewers were enthralled" by live drama during the Golden Age of Television, but we're not told that canned Westerns and sitcoms became more popular, leading the cost-conscious networks to kill off the shows remembered so fondly today. There are also plenty of clichés (one segment actually closes with the words "only time will tell," in what we can only hope is an homage to lazy TV reporters) and sentences that are just plain weird. ("Image may not be everything, it may be the only thing.") Of course, the whole point of The Time of Our Lives is that television is an effective visual medium, so the disembodied narration here is secondary to the old news clips and the on-screen testimony of Providence citizens.

Television is also a for-profit business, so the documentary boosts WJAR in not-so-subtle ways: mentions of contemporary television are limited to NBC programs, a couple of the interviewees obligingly take knocks at cable TV, and the ostensibly off-the-cuff answers to the query, "How would you improve television?" are surprisingly tame. One person, for example, ridicules the idea of forcing TV stations to provide free ads to political candidates. Still, locally produced TV documentaries are so rare these days that WJAR deserves credit for knocking off Inside Edition and Entertainment Tonight for one evening.

The making of The Time of Our Lives was headed by WJAR's "director of special projects," Robert Rose, who has produced such documentaries as Our Neighbors -- The Narragansetts, The Hidden History of Pirates, and the Emmy-winning Old Enough to Fight, Old Enough to Vote. Dan Tobin can be reached at dtobin[a]phx.com.