Turn-On

If LAUGH-IN, today, dates very badly (how many of us find jokes about figures from the LBJ and Nixon period funny today?), TURN-ON lacks the variety of the comic skits that makes parts of LAUGH-IN funny even now. It was only 30 minutes long, and it's running connection was briefly shot scenes of two or three men in a booth running the projector and special effects. It wasted some talented people, including two favorites of mine, Hamilton Camp and Chuck McCann. In fact, the "best" memory I have of this terrible show was of McCann, as a cop on the beat at a lover's lane in the country, looking through car windows with a flashlight, singing, "Hello Young Lovers" as he did so. That was the show's best moment.

When Tim was doing chat shows in the 70s, the discussion would always include a comment like, "You've been on a lot of TV series." Tim would then respond by listing every show he was on, and then the number of episodes before it was cancelled. And then he would say, "Turn-On. Cancelled after one show."

Legend has it the head of ABC programming actually decided to cancel it the moment it ended. At the time, ABC was still the distant third-place network. The hope was that George Schlatter could give ABC a counterpart to NBC's LAUGH-IN and CBS' SMOTHERS BROTHERS. Too bad the material was just not there. I was 12 when I watched this. None of my family was interested on it, so I watched it in my bedroom. I remember thinking it was odd. I don't recall laughing much at it.

I learned about this show a few days ago. Having read some of the amusing comments regarding this show on IMDb, I just had to go down to the Museum of Television & Radio in Beverly Hills to see what the fuss was about.

Oh wow. The trivia section here said that ABC canceled the show just minutes after the first episode began airing. Now that I saw that fateful first episode, they were doing 60s television a favor. Manic, disturbing, unnerving and psychotic are just some of the lighter adjectives that describe this show. By itself, the "rapid fire humor" was too rapid (the show cuts into too many skits into too little time) and not humorous enough (obvious double jokes, for one).

And yet the show was funny... for all the wrong reasons! While the jokes were hardly laughable (except perhaps the candy dispenser refusing to pop out The Pill; that was a real guff!), their execution certainly was. Mr. Conway tries, but he really doesn't belong here; "eye-candy" that isn't; a curious dog-cat-Muppet hybrid silently popping up with a bewildering stare after seeing a, um, "sex act"; oh, and let's not forget the "Body Politic". All of this is sardine-canned into thirty minutes to yield some of the most bizarre entertainment ever produced for television. Perhaps it should come with every sale of the Ludovico Machine. Indeed, the white background, extremely minimalist set designs and mind-frying Moog synthesizer music would make you think that Laugh-In was doing a little "in-out in-out" with Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange!

..a woman going to a Candy/Cigarette looking machine, putting in some money, and when the thing she was waiting for didn't come out, she started kicking, punching, and shaking the machine. Then they zoomed in on the machine, and a sign on it said "The Pill", and then the "Please stand by" sign came on. The whole family started to think it was another report on Vietnam interrupting the show, or maybe some other new on shooting at a college or something like that, but it was just the show had been canceled. I'm not sure what they put on for the rest of the hour, all I know is they TURNED OFF "Turn On" minutes after it started. It had to be the most short lived program I've ever seen.

Yes, this one definately aired on ABC...I remember watching that one episode broadcasting out of New York in 1969. I was only ten years old at the time, so I wouldn't have understood much, if any, of the sexual innuendo. Although I wasn't completely green, having managed to view part of Jane Fonda's Barbarella a few months earlier, after the kiddie classic The Christmas that Almost Wasn't.

From all the commercial hype leading up to the show I was expecting--no, hoping for--another "Laugh-In," which was the most talked-about series on TV during the 1968-69 season and Goldie Hawn the most talked-about new star. "Laugh-In" was my favorite show at that time, and figured two of the same was better than one.

Which was what nobody got. I remember this being one of the most lame excuses for a prime-time show I had ever seen. My older sisters and I weren't horrified by the content so much as bored and disappointed.

When it didn't come back the following week, I was surprised yet not surprised. I never saw a show disappear that quickly, no matter how bad. And yet I wouldn't mind seeing this again...if only to re-confirm what I thought then.