Nor nor did they even try.

I mean, nobody ever tuned in.

Father knows best to die laughing for that you had said Caesar, or however you laughed at in those days.

But there was a sweetness to, ah, those some of those family type shows of the fifties, and I think what they probably did was make many American teenagers teenagers dissatisfied with their actual mothers or fathers.

Mother wasn't as adorable as Donna Reed or as funny as Lucy, or is cute and dopey is Gracie Island or whatever.

Mom was bugged because the washing machine had broken again, or Daddy came home drunk or whatever the real life problems were.

And I think most Americans of my generation literally came to a moment when they actually said, quote, I wish life could be more like the movies, even when people died in the movies or were blown up by a bomb in World War Two or whatever.

There was a kind of a glamour and glory to it all.

That is not life is and again as regards the TV sitcoms that was never life.

It was a distraction from life.

It used the characters of life the mom, the dad, the baby, the teen ager.

But it just did cute, inconsequential things with them.

For the most part, I remember once hearing about a little girl who had seen a Gregory Peck in, uh, To Kill a Mockingbird, and I remember where I heard there's some discussion among young people that he was a good role model.

They wanted their daddies to be like them, and occasionally I would get mail from people who only saw the nice chicken eel funny side of me on television.

Young people who would say it was reset in effect, or sometimes very close to these words.

I wish you were my daddy O.

R.

I wish Daddy were like you, or I wish Mommy would marry somebody like you.

A lot of people throw themselves into what they see on television or in my generation on films, and some of that is disturbing.

I wrote a book a few months ago called Dumped About the dumbing of America, you might say and Robert Young to refer again to him after having been for many years a major film star and then having done Father Knows best when, later in the sixties he did.

Marcus Welby, M.

D.

Got thousands of letters every week from people seeking medical advice.

Dear Dr Welby.

My shoulder hurt.

I find that very depressing today.

You can deal with a much right wider range of subject matter, even deal responsibly.

I'm not.

Don't just mean to dirty jokes about your son.

In those days, you wouldn't have ever seen a drama about Alzheimer's disease or cancer or that sort of thing.

Child molestation.

I mean, the question even, never even came up.

It's not that there was censorship.

The writers themselves snuffed out any such thought.

At the moment, it emerged from their conscious subconscious, and the issue, as they say, never came out.

But, uh, I approve of the greater range of freedom.

Now, unfortunately, as Man always does with freedom, he abuses.

And so now we have all kinds of verbal filth and vulgarity and obscenity and classless mirotic giggling and people going, Whoa, just because somebody said a dirty word we've really, you know, eroded around the edges on a lot of front.

I don't think that the great TV audience and of course, we're not talking about one thing.

It was 419 little audiences, all Scotch taped together.

But however you look at it, I don't think that large audience was consciously looking for anything.

First of all, they saw a glamour in television that can never be recaptured subtly a wonder in your home There was a piece of furniture that talked and lit up and show dancers and birds flying in stuff that was an incredible achievement.

Now to today's seven year old, the television said.

Isn't it no more remarkable than his toothbrush?

It's just one of the things available to him.

If it burns out, he gets bug it.

When we were seeing it, come on.

I mean, those of us who were already in her twenties and thirties, we were astonished and rightly so.

It happens now in about 20 minutes.

At least.

It took us five years to lose the glamour.

Now man's on the moon.

No kidding, eh?

That's great.

Let's have lunch.

We're very jaded and sophisticated now, at least on the surface.

But I don't believe it to repeat that the audience then was demanding anything.

They were accepting everything.

When you look back at how terrible I mean itjust, terms of simple quality, the great bulk of television was.

Then you marvel that you could have an audience that by the millions would put up.

With that.

We can all repeat the instances of excellence, but they were very few in number.