Turn-On

Turn-On
Genre	Sketch comedy
Created by	Ed Friendly George Schlatter
Starring	Tim Conway (guest host) Teresa Graves Hamilton Camp Mel Stewart Chuck McCann Bonnie Boland Maxine Greene Ken Greenwald Debbie Macomber Maura McGiveney Robert Staats
Country of origin	United States
Language(s)	English
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	1
Production
Executive producer(s)	Ed Friendly George Schlatter
Producer(s)	Digby Wolfe
Running time	30 min.
Broadcast
Original channel	ABC
Original run	5 February 1969 – 5 February 1969

Turn-On is an American television series from 1969. Only one episode was shown and it is considered one of the most infamous flops in TV history.

Turn-On's sole episode was shown on Wednesday, February 5, 1969, at 8:30 p.m. Eastern and 7:30 p.m. in other markets. Among the cast were Teresa Graves (who would later join the Laugh-In cast that autumn) and Chuck McCann (longtime kiddie show host, character actor, and voice artist). The writing staff included a young Albert Brooks. The guest host for the episode was Tim Conway, best known for his long run on The Carol Burnett Show.

Background

The show was created by Ed Friendly and George Schlatter, the producers of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, and picked up by ABC after NBC and CBS rejected it; a CBS official confessed, "It was so fast with the cuts and chops that some of our people actually got physically disturbed by it." Production executive Digby Wolfe described it as a "visual, comedic, sensory assault involving animation, videotape, stop-action film, electronic distortion, computer graphics—even people." The Bristol-Myers company bought advertising for a projected 13-week run^[1].

Premise

The show's premise was that it was produced by a computer, though this was not the case. Distinguishing characteristics of the show were its use of the Moog synthesizer and lack of sets, except for a white backdrop. The show consisted of various rapid-fire jokes and risqué skits but no laugh track. The program was also filmed instead of presented live or on videotape. Several of the jokes were presented with the screen divided into four squares resembling comic strip panels (a visual technique found in such contemporary films as The Thomas Crown Affair). The production credits of the episode appeared after each commercial break, instead of conventionally at the beginning or end (Monty Python's Flying Circus similarly played around with presenting the credits).

Skits aired on the program

• Two policemen say, "Let us spray," before spraying cans of mace at the camera.
• A firing squad prepares to shoot an attractive woman when the squad leader says, "Excuse me, miss, but in this case we are the ones with one final request." (As perhaps a sign of changing times, this skit was recycled in Schlatter's revival of Laugh-In in 1978, without complaints.)
• 'The Body Politic', shown three times during the episode, featured a buxom, reclining blonde (Maura McGiveney) saying things like "Mr. Nixon as President now becomes the titular head of the Republican Party."
• Conway wonders if Maura McGiveney is a "pot-smoking, jaded, wild-eyed, radical dropout." When she says she is, he replies, "I love you!"
• A sleazy TV pitchman (Robert Staats) promotes a breakfast cereal "soaked in mescaline." The same pitchman appears in a second spoof commercial selling women's shoes, though he is gradually revealed to be a foot fetishist.
• A diagram of a swastika is displayed as a narrator says, "You are now looking at the table at the Paris peace accords agreed to by General Ky."
• Several homosexual-themed messages scrolling across the screen, including "God Save the Queens", "Free Oscar Wilde" and "The Amsterdam Levee is a dike" (the series aired four months before the Stonewall riots which launched the modern homosexual movement).
• A pregnant woman singing "I Got Rhythm" (alluding to the rhythm method of birth control).
• A vending machine dispensing the birth control pill, with an anxious young woman putting coins into it and then feverishly shaking the broken machine.
• A figure of a draft-dodger holding a sign reading Sweden.
• Conway, dressed in a samurai outfit and speaking mock Japanese, is revealed to be university president/politician S.I. Hayakawa.
• A black man, face-to-face with a white man, says, "Mom always did like you best!" (an allusion to a popular catchphrase of The Smothers Brothers)
• One cop, played by Chuck McCann, asks a second, "You want to take some of this pornographic literature home with you tonight?" The colleague replies, "I don't even have a pornograph!" McCann then rips up a skin magazine and begins to chew the pieces.
• A commercial spoof shows Conway touting a masculine deodorant while lifting weights and working out. "When I'm all through, I smell like a lady," he concludes and is shown in drag.
• In another commercial parody, Conway is shown wearing a tuxedo, and massive eye mascara.
• A sequence (the show's longest) with the word sex flashing on and off in pulsating colors while Conway and Bonnie Boland leer at each other. Various stock photographs are displayed during the sequence, including one of Pope Paul VI.
• Conway as spokesman for "Citizens Action Committee of America," a group with the acronym CACA.
• The black programmer shown programming the computer supposedly generating the show says he dreamed he was a duck in Lester Maddox's bathtub. "I migrated," he says.
• A young woman in cap and gown is shown lobbing a hand grenade.
• Two men are standing at a globe. "Tell me," one says to the other, "where is the capital of South Vietnam?" The second man spins the globe and points, "Mostly over here, in Swiss bank accounts."
• A Catholic nun asks a priest, "Father, can I have the car tonight?" The priest replies, "Just as long as you don't get in the habit."
• Conway tells Graves, "I was so damned angry when I found out my kids were popping pills, I went out and got drunk."
• One message scrolled across the screen: ISRAEL UBER ALLES.
• A recurring series of skits with Conway as a marriage counselor in session with an African American husband and an Asian wife. The last state laws against interracial marriages were struck down only two years earlier. (In 1968, NBC debated whether to cut out of a Petula Clark variety special a shot of Clark merely touching guest Harry Belafonte on the arm.)
• Two men in Stetson hats defend the principle of Southern womanhood. One then says to the other, "Come on, big beauty," and they hold hands and walk out effeminately.
• A white Southern hotel guest phones the main desk about the Gideon Bible which states "'Moses married an Ethopian woman' ... in the Atlanta Hilton!?!"
• A puppet snake says, "Remember, folks, I could have given Eve the apple and the Pill!"

Reaction

Conway has stated that Turn-On was canceled midway through its lone episode, so that the party the cast and crew held for its premiere (as the show aired across the United States) also marked its cancellation.^[2][3] The show was actually not officially cancelled for several days, but it is true that two ABC affiliates, Denver's KBTV and Cleveland's WEWS, failed to return to the program after the first commercial break. The general manager of WEWS sent ABC network management an angry telegram: "If you naughty little boys have to write dirty words on the walls, please don't use our walls." Other stations in time zones behind Eastern and Central which had some forewarning, such as KATU in Portland, Oregon, never showed the program at all, while many others made the decision not to show it again as soon as the episode was over.

Many viewers and critics^[who?] considered Turn-On too extreme for America's tastes at the time. The show featured rapid-fire gags with sexual innuendos, pastiche film clip sequences in questionable taste, and bizarre non sequiturs that baffled viewers. Many assumed the show's title was itself an implicit reference to Timothy Leary's pro-drug maxim, "Turn on, tune in, drop out". In fact, rumors spread among people who never actually saw the show that it contained full frontal nudity, something that no over-the-air commercial TV network in the United States has ever done. A post-mortem in TV Guide quoted a source who lamented Turn-On's lack of a regular host or interlocutor: "(T)here wasn't any sort of identification with the audience -- just a bunch of strangers up there insulting everything you believe in."

Bart Andrews, in his 1980 book The Worst TV Shows Ever, stated that Turn-On was actually quite close to the original concept for Laugh-In. "It wasn't that it was a bad show, it was that it was an awkward show," concluded author Harlan Ellison, a fan of counter-cultural comedy and a TV critic for the Los Angeles Free Press in 1969.

The following week's TV Guide published a listing for the scheduled February 12 episode, which would have starred Robert Culp and then-wife France Nuyen as hosts. However, at 8:30PM on February 12, the ABC Wednesday Night Movie (The Oscar, itself a notorious flop), started 30 minutes ahead of schedule.^[1] Taking no chances, the network eventually replaced Turn On with the wholesome musical variety of The King Family Show.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "Bob MacKenzie...On Television..", Oakland Tribune, February 11, 1969, pB-24
2. ^ Conway, Tim. PIONEERS OF TELEVISION: Tim Conway on "Turn-On" (#104). [Web]. Public Broadcasting Service. http://www.iptv.org/video/detail.cfm/1429/pitv_20080111_tim_conway_turn_on. Retrieved 2009-02-23. 
3. ^ Rosenthal, Phil (26 November 2006). "O.J. blunder hardly a first for television". Chicago Tribune. http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/columnists/chi-0611260025nov26,1,1599356.column?ctrack=1&cset=true. Retrieved 2007-04-15. "Tim Conway ... has joked the cancellation of the 1969 ABC comedy program came during the cast's post-debut party." 

External links

• Turn-On at the Internet Movie Database
• Turn-On at TV.com