Cavett Goes Public

Dick Cavett started out as a Nebraskan, but he went to Yale and reformed; then, trained as an actor, he moved to New York and wrote copy for comedians, including Groucho Marx and Jack Paar, before finding himself as a professional failure. He has become the Adlai Stevenson of television. Having flunked the Nielsen test, he has moved on to the public sector—namely, to public television, for which the President is seeking a federal appropriation of a billion dollars a year, presumably in the hope of making the vast wasteland a national park. The argument for subsidizing Cavett, I guess, is that this is the only way poor people will get to see him. (I wonder whether a single poor person has ever watched Upstairs, Downstairs: I know it’s big in the Princeton area, where I live.) In television, notoriously, ten cents and a succès d’estime will get you a cup of coffee. The purpose of public television is to make the coffee available to those who don’t have the dime.

Cavett, it will be recalled, hosted a morning talk show on ABC in the late Sixties, and was so well received by the critics that the network, then in its lofty, pre-Fred Silverman phase (Laurence Olivier was getting to be a regular in those days), saw fit to pitch him against Johnny Carson in the 11:30 p.m. slot.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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Dick Cavett started out as a Nebraskan, but he went to Yale and reformed; then, trained as an actor, he moved to New York and wrote copy for comedians, including Groucho Marx and Jack Paar, before finding himself as a professional failure. He has become the Adlai Stevenson of television. Having flunked the Nielsen test, he has moved on to the public sector—namely, to public television, for which the President is seeking a federal appropriation of a billion dollars a year, presumably in the hope of making the vast wasteland a national park. The argument for subsidizing Cavett, I guess, is that this is the only way poor people will get to see him. (I wonder whether a single poor person has ever watched Upstairs, Downstairs: I know it’s big in the Princeton area, where I live.) In television, notoriously, ten cents and a succès d’estime will get you a cup of coffee. The purpose of public television is to make the coffee available to those who don’t have the dime.

Cavett, it will be recalled, hosted a morning talk show on ABC in the late Sixties, and was so well received by the critics that the network, then in its lofty, pre-Fred Silverman phase (Laurence Olivier was getting to be a regular in those days), saw fit to pitch him against Johnny Carson in the 11:30 p.m. slot.