Counterprogramming Beatlemania 60 years ago
The Beatles made their first appearance on U.S. television on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. But what if you wanted to watch something else?
It’s been 60 years now since the Beatles made their famous performance on the CBS variety program “The Ed Sullivan Show.” For many people, February 9, 1964 marked a turning point in many people’s lives as it was their first exposure to the Beatles, even though they were already quite successful. But media worked differently in 1964 and the path to becoming famous was a lot different than it is now.
The Beatles’ appearance on the show drew a reported 73 million viewers (some sources report it as 23 million households). Regardless, this was a widely watched event and the only show on TV that draws that kind of ratings are Super Bowls.
I looked in the LA Times TV listings that ran in the paper on February 9, 1964. Since that was a Sunday, the listings appeared in a separate magazine and a daily television listing wasn’t printed. The magazine had an earlier deadline than the rest of the paper, so the listing for the Ed Sullivan show had the wrong guests listed. The guest list in the LA Times was: Liza Minelli, The Beatles, Aretha Franklin, Tessie O’Shea, and Jack Jones. There was no Liza and no Aretha on the show1, which would have been quite the bill. Tessie O’Shea did appear.
I’ve seen this Ed Sullivan Show episode at the Paley Center in Beverly Hills2 and those weren’t the guests except for the Beatles. The Beatles did perform as did the cast of the Broadway musical “Oliver!” (which featured future Monkee Davy Jones). There was a magician named Fred Kepa who appeared on tape. Also Frank Gorshin3 had two separate bits where he did impressions.
My parents, as I recall, were regular viewers of Ed Sullivan. Were they watching the Beatles on this night? I don’t know for sure because I wasn’t born yet. At the time, my parents were raising three boys aged 5, 3, and 1. Presumably they were in bed by 8 pm, although I imagine that was not the easiest of jobs with children those ages.
Another thing about my parents was that they didn’t like the Beatles. They did not care for pretty much any music composed after 1956, which was the year they were married. They didn’t like Elvis, they didn’t like Chuck Berry, and you can keep going down the line.
But would they have watched something else on television that night instead of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan? What were the choices?
As this was 1964, their choices were limited. The programming on the other two networks was not exactly great.
In 1964, prime time television on Sundays started at 7:30 pm instead of 7 pm as it does now. NBC showed “Disney’s Wonderful World” starting at 7:30 and ran a hour one drama. It was part one of a three part British production called “The Scarecrow of Rodney Marsh” starring Patrick McGoohan in the lead role. I’ve read plot synopses of this and I still can’t tell exactly what it was about. But you can try here.
I do know that when this was rerun in the early 1970s, a very young me was very creeped out by the show and had nightmares about it. Why? Because do you want to watch a kids show where Patrick McGoohan walks around looking like this? I refuse to look for any further clips of it on YouTube for fear that I will end up in intensive therapy.
NBC ran the Disney program until 8:30. Then from 8:30-9:00, NBC aired an episode of “Grindl,” which was a situation comedy starring Imogene Coca as an employee of a temp agency (her name was just Grindl) who got into wacky jobs every week. NBC hoped that the show would keep people watching NBC after Disney ended at 8:30 and until “Bonanza” started at 9:00 pm. Apparently, not enough people did because the show was canceled after one full season. And this was in an era when. you had to stand up and MANUALLY CHANGE THE CHANNEL ON THE SET.
Despite no one liking it much, Grindl made 32 episodes.
I couldn’t find a full episode, just the brief opening title sequence.
ABC was definitely the poor relation of the three networks in 1964 with very few hits shows compared to CBS and NBC. ABC’s big hit that season was “The Fugitive.” But in February of 1964, ABC offered shows like the ones airing against the Beatles. The first one, from 7:30-8:30 was “The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters” which starred a very young Kurt Russell along with Dan O’Herlihy and Charles Bronson.
Here was its opening and closing title sequences:
The series was a collection of stories about a young man, Jaimie, who was travelling west on the Oregon Trail. Despite it being shown in a family friendly viewing window and having a 13-year old as its lead, it was not aimed a children. The showed featured a lot of drinking and women who may have been engaged in less than whoelsome occupations. The series was based on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name by Robert Lewis Taylor. This series lasted one year and THIRTY-FOUR episodes.
ABC followed this show with a 90-minute drama called “Arrest & Trial” which was something of a predecessor to “Law & Order.” The show starred Ben Gazzara as the intellectual cop who solved the case in the first half and then Chuck Connors played John Egan, a defense attorney, who tried to get his client acquitted in the second half of the show. This show lasted one year, but could only produce a paltry 30 episodes.
In the episode below, Roddy McDowell plays the criminal of the week who is charged with killing a man who repossesed his typewriter. You don’t need to watch much to see that McDowell’s character is not being framed for murder. Connors looks like he’s going to get an acquittal, but McDowell, playing a tortured writer (and a psychopath), confesses to the crime in open court before the jury can deliver its not guilty verdict, which they write in big letters on a folded up piece of paper instead of an official court document.
None of these shows look like anything my parents would have been interested in (or mostly just my mom as she was pretty much the chief decision maker on what was on TV since my father mostly didn’t care too much). There were also independent stations in Los Angeles at the time, Channels 5, 9, 11, and 13, all of which were showing old movies, travelogues, syndicated series (“Mike Hammer” was on Channel 13 on February 9, 1964), and in the case of Channel 11, a one hour documentary on the life of abolitionist John Brown.
I am old enough that I actually remember watching original episodes of the Ed Sullivan show, which went off the air in 1971 when I was five. This may show that I waste too much valuable memory space for long events on stuff like that, but that’s just me.
If I were travelling back in time to 1964, I would guess my parents were watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, not enjoying it, and just waiting for the show to end to watch something else. And they probably thought the Beatles were a passing fad as was the predominant theme of newspaper coverage in the United States.
We live in a world know where there is very little that is “appointment television,” but in 1964, pretty much everything was appointment television. If your butt wasn’t in front of the set when your show was on, well, you missed it. You might not even see a summer rerun (most shows had summer replacement shows at the time.)
It was a time when you had to decide between watching the Beatles or watching Grindl. And I really wonder who picked Grindl.
Most sources say Aretha Franklin was never on the Ed Sullivan Show and was unceremoniously bumped from the show because CBS censors didn’t like how she dressed. https://www.edsullivan.com/censorship-on-the-ed-sullivan-stage-pushing-boundaries/#:~:text=Aretha%20Franklin%2C%20gives%20a%20famous,revealing%2C%20to%20which%20she%20complied.
Don’t try to go there anymore as it closed in 2020. There is a similar location still around in New York.
This was a few years before he became better known as The Riddler.
No Topo Gigio? I remember him on the Ed Sullivan show.
LA had lots of TV choices, even if most were poor.
Frank Gorshin was a great impressionist. Are there still impressionists?
The Beatles really changed the world. It is hard to overstate what they did as it would be impossible now for one band to have the impact they did.