When Chat Shows Were King

With some money that my Mum gave me for my birthday I decided to invest in some entertainment. After some debate I plumped for The Dick Cavett Show:
Comic Legends. It’s 4 discs and 14 hours of legendary comics.

The box has such treats as hour long interviews with Groucho Marx, Bob Hope and Mel Brooks. It also includes pre-Cosby Show Bill Cosby, Lucille Ball, Jack Benny and Woody Allen.

Where else would you get to see Woody Allen take questions form the audience before rolling up his sleeves and doing push-ups? "I can’t take my shirt off. I have a pornographic tattoo on my chest. It can’t be seen on any major network."

Truman Capote appears unable to get a word in as Groucho talks incessantly. Cosby discusses race relations. Mel Brooks and film critic Rex Reed get into a lively debate with a film censor over the censor’s role in movies. Jerry Lewis discusses his fall out with Dean Martin. At the time of the show Lewis mentions his next picture, ‘The Day the Clown Cried’ a film that was infamously never released. Coincidentally in the next episode Capote talks about ‘Answered Prayers’ the novel he never finished, "Either I’ll kill it or it will kill me".

This is the kind of stuff you don’t get anywhere these days, probing questions, proper discussion and legendary performers entertaining the audience not merely fielding questions.

Cavett is a great interviewer too, a top comedian in his own right, he’s respected by all his guests, so they’re happy to open up to him.

Here’s an appreciation of Cavett by Clive James from Slate magazine.

Below is ten minutes of Cavett and Woody.

Following on from that, when I got in from last night’s gig I watched ‘The Year in Chat’ on BBC Four. This was a compilation of interviews from UK chat shows in 1973.

It was mainly made up of clips of Parkinson and Russell Harty. It featured a lot of legendary figures and some fascinating and entertaining chat.

Oliver Reed shows that he could be a charming raconteur offering anecdotes about George Bernard Shaw and impressions of Orson Welles and Michael Winner. Another famed drinker, Richard Harris provided some insights into the craft of Marlon Brando, that included an uncanny portrayal of Brando as Marc Antony.

Parkinson attempts to discover why Eartha Kitt performed in apartheid era South Africa, a line of questioning that the singer hotly objected to. Russell Harty and Malcolm McDowell get into an argument over the violence in A Clockwork Orange and Sir Matt Busby tells Parky how he ‘wanted to die’ while lying in hospital after the Munich air crash.

Some of the line of questioning was far funnier though, as Parkinson asks Liberace in all seriousness, "Why have you never married?"

Mathematician Jacob Bronowski discusses the coming to power of Hitler and the dropping of the atomic bomb as the two single worst events in the 20th Century. Jonny Speight, Kirk Douglas and Ingrid Bergman were also some of the many clips included.

Kenneth Williams was featured going on a rant to Parky about the TUC and the numerous strikes that were taking place in Britain at that time. Although the argument gets heated, at one stage Parky tells Williams he is talking ‘crap’, it never gets out of hand and Williams always manages to milk every available comedic moment.

Just like Cavett this is the kind of stuff that you don’t see on television nowadays. Not even Michael Parkinson is Parkinson anymore.

Below Dick and Woody is that heated argument between Parkinson and Kenneth Williams.

And just as a bonus after that there’s Jonathan Ross when he fronted a relevant chat show The Last Resort, speaking with Terry Gilliam around 1987.