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Six Minutes
Apr. 17th, 2018 10:57 pmIt's 2018, and here I sit watching Ed Sullivan. He's got Petula Clark, a magnificent singer, a bit like an underpowered, smoother version of Grace Slick, but I'm just cringing watching her stage presence. She looks self-conscious on stage. She needs a microphone to hold. He's also got Little Anthony and the Imperials, and Bobby Vinton, who I remember chiefly from a variety show he used to have in the late 70s. Here he looks like a college kid. This seems to be the show from March 14, 1965. The fact that I can find that out in ten seconds while still watching TV serves to underscore how much the world has changed.
You don't see TV like this anymore. Ed Sullivan was aiming at the entire family, rather than any particular audience. I remember watching him when I was little, and we'd all sit around and watch, and sometimes the neighbors too. Parts of it were boring - sometimes the singers didn't impress me, and I didn't really understand the standup routines (and still don't, for that matter), but then there were acrobats, performing animals, etc. It's analogous to the general-interest magazines of the early Victorian period, and for much the same reason. Sullivan's trying to appeal to an audience in which the tamily has one TV, and they all watch it together, just as a hundred years before the family would sit in the parlour of an evening, reading aloud to one another from Harper's Magazine.
You don't see TV like this anymore. Ed Sullivan was aiming at the entire family, rather than any particular audience. I remember watching him when I was little, and we'd all sit around and watch, and sometimes the neighbors too. Parts of it were boring - sometimes the singers didn't impress me, and I didn't really understand the standup routines (and still don't, for that matter), but then there were acrobats, performing animals, etc. It's analogous to the general-interest magazines of the early Victorian period, and for much the same reason. Sullivan's trying to appeal to an audience in which the tamily has one TV, and they all watch it together, just as a hundred years before the family would sit in the parlour of an evening, reading aloud to one another from Harper's Magazine.
