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Thank you.

Do you remember when television shows were something the whole family could watch together?

Shows like Father Knows Best or maybe GE Theater?

Dick Van Dyke or Bob Hope.

Hello, I'm Peter Noll, and this Tennessee is Talking the topic is classic TV shows and how they're coming back to TV here on Channel 11, so let the conversation begin.

[murmuring] That's so cool.

Then that's when I said that.

The problem with that idea is.

Wow, that was amazing.

Then I came up with the solution.

[music] What was that about?

Here's what I think about it.

Now we're talking.

West Tennessee PBS presents Tennessee is Talking.

Let the conversation begin.

Thanks for joining the discussion.

I'm Peter Noll.

Today, we're talking about the ye.. classic TV shows, like the Smother Brothers, I've Got a Secret, The Honeymooners, and more.

We have the man that knows more about classic TV than just about anyone in the country, Steve Beverly.

Thank you for joining us, Steve.

Good to be with you, Peter.

Let's start out with what is Steve Beverly's TV Classics?

Oh my.

It's been nearly 15 years since I was appr.. by local cable television in Jackson.

They knew that I was a classic TV buff, TV historian, I guess, would be the formal term.

They asked, "Is there something that you could put together that has shows that are in public domain from the past that we could use?"

Really, we thought it was just going to be a time filler, and I thought maybe this would be something that would happen for maybe a few weeks, a few months, and that would be it.

Here we are almost 15 years later, and we're still going.

Now, we're about to join, right here on West Tennessee PBS, as part of the lineup.

What it is, it's really, I call it a feel-good period.

It's going to be an hour here on Channel 11, but it's a feel-good period that you just mentioned is the kind where people didn't have to worry about sending their kids out of the room, and there was always in the situation comedies, particularly the family sitcoms, it was always one that would end with a moral behind it.

Good would conquer evil and there would be lessons learned.

It takes people back to a time when it just makes them feel good about being around the TV set because a lot of them watched it with their families.

That's what, as I've watched Steve Beverly's TV Classics, I kept thinking, "How can we bring that to Channel 11?"

We air Lawrence Welk.

They're old episodes, but they're still shown, and we air them every Saturday night at seven o'clock, and it's got quite a big following.

I just thought-- That's when I came to you as like, "Do you have any shows that it would pair up nicely?

Because it would be two hours of really family-friendly television."

One of the shows that is in public domain is the pilot that was done for The Lawrence Welk Show- Oh, wow.

-back in 1955.

The very first one.

This is the very first one.

What it was, was done as a half-hour, rather than an hour.

He had been on local television for four years on KTLA in Los Angeles, and so the sponsors decided at that point in time, that he would be good, and it was initially planned to be only a summer replacement show.

As a sample film, they did a 30-minute show with the band and with the then Champagne Lady, Alice Lon, Larry Hooper who was the deep bass in there.

They did this as a test film to see if the affiliates for ABC would like it.

It sold the show because they said, "With this, we think we've got a winner," so it came on.

The idea was it was going to be on for 13 weeks in June of 1955.

It never left the lineup for the next-- It's 16 years on ABC, and then he went right into syndication after that.

27 years.

Wow.

Longest running variety hour in.. Let's pause there and take a little quick preview of that episode.

[music] [applause] Thank you so very much, my good friends, and hello, everybody.

We're indeed grateful to you for inviting us into your home, and we do hope our program pleases you.

Our very fine accordionist, Myron Floren, all of the Champagne music makers, join me now with that all-time favorite, Stumbling.

One, and two, and-- [music] [applause] Thank you, my good friends.

Wow, that is a TV classic.

It is.

This is the way shows were sold in that era, is that they went into a studio, and it was done by Guild Films, which is the same company that had been doing Liberace's daily show.

Don Fedderson was the producer.

Don Fedderson went on to do shows like The Millionaire that was so popular for six years, and then later, My Three Sons and Family Affair.

Fedderson was really a genius at family programming, and so when Lawrence expressed the desire to go into national television, Don Fedderson went to him and he said, "I'd like to represent you in doing this."

That's why that clip that we just saw, why it was put together as a half hour, and so we're going to show that on TV Classics.

When people tune in, what can they expect to see?

Because it's not just the show, they're going to see you, too.

Yes.

I try to look on myself in this show, the same as you would see some of the hosts that are on Turner Classic Movies, in which they come on, and in between the films, they tell you something about how the cast all came together.

Then, at the end of it, they'll tell you maybe some trivia, and also, maybe some interesting things that happened on the set or during the production That's what I try to do is to bring everybody together with, okay, what night of the week was this show so popular?

Of course, for Lawrence, he never left Saturday night.

Then you look at how so many different shows through the years, sometimes you had a cast that didn't get along with each other.

The two stars of The Cisco Kid, which was the first show that was ever done in color, they, by the time the show had finished its sixth and last season, they were barely speaking to each other because Leo Carrillo, who was the Pancho, he had had a mariachi band and had been in a number of movies, and he thought he was the big star, and so he began to minimize the fact that Duncan Rinaldo, is the Cisco Kid, became the big favorite with the kids.

I don't think Leo Carrillo liked the fact that Pancho became somewhat of an oaf, if you will.

Those are the kind of stories I like to tell.

Every week when viewers tune in at Saturday at six o'clock, they're going to get these little stories behind the story.

Yes, stories, I think, really, people love that, and they love to hear those kinds of things.

You think about the fact that Vivian-- Now we can't show I Love Lucy because it's tied down contractually, but you think about Vivian Vance and William Frawley, and we love them as Fred and Ethel Mertz, but they couldn't stand each other.

Fred Mertz, the characterization of that and Ethel, the writers on I Love Lucy actually wrote around the way they watched them with each other.

There was an old story told about how Bill Frawley was being taken by another actress and her husband to a testimonial dinner one night in Los Angeles.

They got there and they found out it was valet parking.

Frawley gets out of the car and he goes, "Valet parking, valet parking.

I can't stand valet parking.

You know, I don't like valet parking any more than I like Vivian Vance."

[laughter] Those are the kind of things we love to tell on TV Classics.

How did you come out with this?

How did you find shows that--?

How did they become in the, lose their copyright and become in the public domain?

Some of them, of course, back in the early days, the copyright was for 26 years, and it could be renewed for another 13 What would happen sometimes, as some of the writers would suddenly pass away, their estates would not know all of the things that were in their portfolio, and so what would happen is they just lapsed into the public domain.

There are about 40 episodes of The Lucy Show, which was Lucy's second series, that are in public domain.

The first couple of seasons of The Beverly Hillbillies, most of those episodes are in public domain.

It's simply because you had people who were part of the creative staff of the show that had a piece of the copyright.

If they passed away, then their families, who were handling the estates, just didn't know it, and so they just let it go.

Is it the writers who hold the copyright for the television shows?

In most instances.

There are some exceptions.

You think about, just to give a movie example of this, some people may remember back in the mid-1980s, It's a Wonderful Life, suddenly lapsed into public domain.

I don't know how Frank Capra allowed that to happen, but it lapsed into public domain.

For a period of 10 years, anybody who wanted to show It's a Wonderful Life, either in the colorized version or the original black and white, could run it.

You had cable TV stations that .. because it was a fun movie.

The fact is, finally what happened in that case, was that Republic Pictures, in 1994, bought the rights to the music from It's a Wonderful Life, and so therefore, it killed anybody else being able to run it without having to pay the music licensing fees, which are rather expensive.

Those are the things that sometimes trend it back in the other direction, but there is probably 6,000 episodes of classic TV that are in public domain.

Wow.

You mentioned colorization.

Back, I believe, it was in the '80s when that technology first came out and I think it's been improved upon, but that was all the rage, and there was controversy whether you should do that or not, and there were debates on it.

You don't hear so much about it.

Where do you stand on colorizing black and white classic movies and TV shows?

I don't have any problem with it.

Now, I know purists do.

I have no problem with it because of the fact that if you're going to watch it for the story, which is what most of us do, you're a little bit over the edge if you just think that colorizing diminishes what was an original black and white presentation.

If you look at what CBS has done in recent years with things like classic I Love Lucy episodes, The Andy Griffith Show Christmas episode, or The Dick Van Dyke Show, now, the computer colorization is so just absolutely pristine, that these shows look now as if they were made in color.

The process originally made colorizing look very pastel.

You might see facial tones that looked alike with everybody, but it looked very, very pale.

Then, you might look in the background and you would see the wall, and the wall would look somewhat black and white, so it was not-- I think that's what stirred up so much of the protest back in the '80s.

The purists would say, "If it was meant to be in color, it would have been in color."

The fact is, a lot of movies were done initially, as was television, done in black and white because of economics.

They just couldn't afford the color process of it.

I'll give you another example of this.

The Cisco Kid, all six seasons were shot in color because the distributor, Frederick Ziv, he knew that there was going to be a day that color TV would be around.

Most of the TV stations did not have color capability to air these films.

They didn't have color film chains to be able to run the films.

It was aired in black and white.

All of a sudden in the mid-'60s, when color came to the networks and to local stations everywhere, you had a situation where there was a brand-new audience for The Cisco Kid and the color that was part of that.

Some people were very forward-thinking in that, even if the initial run of the show was not in color.

What do you think connects people to these classic TV shows?

Especially here in West Tennessee, they seem to just-- Every time I'm out, I'm out and about all week long, people say, "Don't touch Lawrence Welk."

"Thank you for watching Lawrence Welk."

I can show you the letters I've gotten in just one year of being at this station, how much people love Lawrence Welk.

Why do you think they connect with these shows?

All right, I was asked that question before I retired from Union University by one of the student journalists.

He said, "Why is it that people, particularly from your generation, and say, about people who were born 10, 15 years after that, why is it that these shows mean so much to you?"

I'd never really thought seriously about it up until that point.

I believe that it is because when we were coming along in the age before you had a proliferation in the 1980s of cable networks, that was all we had.

We only had, in most cities, one, two, or three channels.

If you lived in a big metropolitan area like New York or Los Angeles, okay, counting independent stations, you might have seven or eight.

In most cities across the country, and particularly right here in West Tennessee, Jackson, Memphis, and you get down into the areas of Tupel and then Paducah, all of those areas, most of those places literally had either one or three television stations, and that was it.

These things were very precious to us because we didn't have all of this volume of content that you have with streaming that tends to get lost in the shuffle once it's been seen What is your all-time favorite TV classic of them all?

It's an easy one for me.

If we were calling this the Kentucky Derby, I would say, by a nose, Leave it to Beaver over The Andy Griffith show.

Andy Griffith would be number two with me all time The reason for me, Leave it to Beaver, is because the character of Beaver Cleaver, as was brilliantly done by Jerry Mathers, the character of Beaver Cleaver was my alter ego when I was growing up.

Some of the same things that Beaver encountered, I did.

I knew a guy in my hometown that was, we called him the Eddie Haskell of Waycross, Georgia, and he knew-- I think we all had an Eddie Haskell friend.

Yes, I knew that, and there were just so many things that were comparable to a Leave it to Beaver script that I encountered.

The thing that for me was the exclamation point is that Ward Cleaver, I say, was the best television dad ever because they didn't try to make him out to be a buffoon as today you see on a lot of "family sitcoms".

The father was not made out to be a buffoon.

He admitted when he made mistakes, he realized that not all the time was his discipline correct, but there was always a sense of right and wrong in that family.

For me, Ward was very similar to my father, in the way I was treated.

It was just really for me, I thought almost encapsulated what life was like if you grew up in the late '50s or the early 1960s in small town Midwestern America or Southern America.

It was very much like that.

The Andy Griffith Show similarly because all of those people that were the townspeople in Mayberry, I knew people just like that because I grew up in a small town in the south.

There were people that were just like an Aunt Bee, or an Opie, or a Goober, or a Gomer.

I knew people like that, and it was like getting a weekly visit with a little bit of gossip in a town that you love to be a part of.

I guess if I had to say number three, it would be one in the genre that I happen to know is one of your favorites as well as mine, and that is Name That Tune.

[laughter] I can picture sitting in my living room with my dad playing that game at 6:30 after the six o'clock news.

My career took me all these places, I got to meet Kathie Lee.

Yes.

She was the singer.

She was the singer on the '70s version of Name That Tune wi.. that I became good friends with, up until he passed away about three years ago, Tom Kennedy.

He was brilliant doing that show.

When he would put somebody in an isolation booth and say, "For $100,000, name that tune."

When he would do that, your whole living room would shake because he could build the drama and the tension just like a sporting event.

I love that show because I could compete at home.

The best of the game shows have been the kind that the rules aren't too complex.

You keep it simple and the folks at home can play along.

That's why shows like Password, To Tell the Truth were so popular because you could, particularly To Tell the Truth, you could listen to the stories about the three contenders, and try to find out through a process of elimination or listening to the panel's questions who you thought the real one of those three was.

It was wonderful television and it was-- I think that game shows have been somewhat just absolutely misappropriated for what they are.

Yes, there are some dumb ones, there are some that should have never been on the air, but they're not all mindless.

They give us an opportunity to drift away from our problems for a half hour and enjoy.

That's why Jeopardy is still with us today.

Wheel of Fortune is so simple.

You spin the wheel, you try to solve a puzzle.

Those things we watch and keep watching consistently 50 years after they premiered, even 60.

I'm going to wager that they bring people together.

They bring families together because we can all remember watching those with our pa..

Yes, with our parents.

That was the key thing is so many of .. Or our grandparents.

Yes.

So many .. and that's what made it so-- That's again, another of the reasons why I think they mean so much to us, in particular, those in the baby boomer generation.

I think some of the game shows forget the star of the show is the ga.. And the contestants.

-and the contestants.

It's not the host.

The host basically is the glue that presents the stars to everyone.

Yes, as Tom Kennedy and Bill Cullen used to say that the best thing about the best game show host is they know how to set the table, and then back out of the way, and let the contestants be the stars of the show.

Very true.

Our viewers will be able to see some of these classic game sh..

Particularly some of the ones that came from the '50s and '60s.

We're going to show some of the ones that came out of the quiz scandals era, when one of the greatest PBS documentaries that I think was ever done in the American Experience series was The Quiz Show Scandals, in which, in an hour, it detailed in great detail about why quiz shows were fixed.

The big money quiz shows that were fixed back in the 1950s, why it happened?

What was the ultimate offshoot of all of .. We have our hands on probably about two dozen episodes of some of these shows that were rigged just like professional wrestling, but they're fun to watch because you can see, and I try to also embellish before and after the show how they actually did it, and why when they told them to-- If they would turn off the air conditioning in an isolation booth and make them sweat, and they would have to pull out a handkerchief, and they tell them to pat your brow rather than wipe it because it's more dramatic that way.

They were the professional wrestling of television at that point in time.

Well, our show that you're watching right now is all real.

Nothing is rigged.

Yes, we're not AI.

[laughs] No, exactly.

People are going to see that, but I think what's so cool about watching Steve Everly's TV Classics, it's not just watching the classic show, you're getting your insights and your stories.

You've met Jerry Mathers, correct?

I have.

You've met a lot of these game show hosts You're a game show expert around the country, you're going to share some of these insights.

Yes, we're going to show an interview I did with Jerry Mathers that was done a couple of years ago, and it was right before Tony Dow, of course, Wally Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver, right before he passed away.

Jerry tells in about six minutes some of the things that a lot of people don't know about what went on during the Leave it to Beaver years and about his relationship that was very close to Tony Dow right up until the end.

They maintained that through the years.

Also, we're going to show an interview that we did with the great Betty White, that she was really one of my favorite people because if you ever met Betty, she was the same when you met her in person, that person that you saw on the air.

She was beloved, and deservedly so.

Just a wonderful human being.

Through so many decades, and so many people remember her from different shows.

Oh, yes.

Yet, she would tell you, she had two different variety half-hour shows and she had two sitcoms in the 1950s, and she said, "All of them failed, and I couldn't get arrested to do a primetime show for 15 ye.. until suddenly her plum role in The Mary Tyler Moore Show came along, and suddenly she's Sue Ann Nivens, and everybody just loved her, and she wins two Emmys.

I just watched her on The Proposal this last weekend where she played the grandmother, and her timing and her-- It was incredible.

She was the same way in person.

We've run out of time, but the great thing is, people can watch you every Saturday night at six o'clock here on Channel 11, right before Lawrence Welk.

Thanks, Peter, and I hope they do watch, and I hope they have as much fun as I do doing the show.

Thank you so much for joining us and everything.

I want to thank Steve Beverly for joining us, and remember, you can watch Steve Beverly's TV Classics Saturday nights at 6:00 right here on Channel 11, right before Lawrence Welk.

I'm Peter Noll You can stream today's progr.. on the PBS [?]

and as well as on the West Tennessee PBS YouTube channel, and our website, westtnpbs.org.

You can keep the conversation going, just follow West Tennessee PBS on social media.

Thank you for joining us, and have a fun day.

[music] Tennessee is Talking is a presentation of West Tennessee PBS with the goal of bringing people together, sharing ideas, thoughts, and different perspectives, learning from each other, and sharing a civil and respectful discussion.

Tennessee is Talking, the show that brings West Tennessee together.

[music] The program you've been watching was made possible through the generous financial support of West Tennessee PBS viewers like you.

Please visit westtnpbs.org and make a donation today, so that we can continue to make local programs like this possible.

Thank you.

[music] It's all about home.