"The wider public do have the power of citizen’s arrest... And, where it’s safe to do so... I would encourage that to be used" — on shoplifters!

"Because if you do just let people walk in, take stuff and walk out without proper challenge, including potentially a physical challenge, then again it will just escalate. While I want the faster and better police response, the police can’t be everywhere all the time."

Said Chris Philp, the policing minister, quoted by Giles Coren, in "Oi! Drop that strimmer or I’ll use my Taser/We part-time coppers who’ve answered the government’s call to arms have a lot more than shoplifters to worry about" (London Times).

Here's the requisite scene from "The Andy Griffith Show." I've got to get that out of the way first. Now, on to Coren's commentary on Philp's amazing advice:

"[O]n Oct. 4, 1969, everything changed... 20-year old Diane Linkletter jumped to her death from the window of her Los Angeles apartment after allegedly trying acid."

"Her grieving father, TV and radio host Art Linkletter, told the press, 'She was murdered by the people who manufacture and sell LSD.' The newspapers ran wild with Linkletter’s take: 'LSD KILLED DIANE.' Later, when news of her clean toxicology report made the rounds, Linkletter blamed the jump on an '“acid flashback.' President Richard Nixon — in the midst of launching his War on Drugs — invited Linkletter to the White House. Nixon knew that a story like this could galvanize the anti-drug movement more than any fact or figure could.... It was the perfect moment for a book like 'Go Ask Alice.'... The fact that the author was anonymous only heightened the buzz. 'Alice' could be anyone, even your daughter. The media ran with it — everyone from The New York Times to the Library Journal presented the book as a verified teenager’s diary. A million copies sold nearly overnight. Avon Books published the paperback and two years later, in 1973, ABC aired a TV adaptation of the book. That, too, was a supersonic hit, with nearly a third of all US households viewing it...."

From "1971 druggie diary ‘Go Ask Alice’ was made up by a suburban housewife" (NY Post).

People believe what they want to believe. Too good to check! I wanted to see how embarrassing the NYT coverage of this ridiculous book was. Here, from 1973: "Diary of a Schoolgirl En Route to Death." It's a review of the ABC TV movie. 

"On M*A*S*H you never heard the lyrics to the theme song. (But, doesn't everyone know them anyway?)"

Said Auntie Ann, reacting to my implication that the lyrics — heard in the movie — were omitted from the TV show because they were about suicide. Actually, I don't know whether taking the words out was a kind of censorship or whether — more likely — they were rejected because they didn't set up the story for an ongoing series of episodes. It wasn't like "The Beverly Hillbillies" or "Green Acres," where the song fills you in on how these characters got into this situation.

And I'd be surprised if even 50% of audience for the "M*A*S*H" TV show knew the lyrics from the movie version. That TV show became much bigger than the movie. The movie came out in 1970, and the TV show was on from 1972 until 1983, back in the days when people didn't have VCRs, so it wasn't easy to go back and check out a movie you'd missed. But even if it had been easy, I think people became very attached to Alan Alda in the main role and wouldn't have enjoyed seeing Donald Sutherland horn in on it. And the main character in the movie is the Elliot Gould character, Trapper John. [OR: He was equally important.] These barriers are hard to cross. I loved the movie, and I didn't want to see the actors that I knew replaced by the warmer, fuzzier TV personalities.

On the subject of TV themes played without the lyrics, do you know the words to the theme whistled on "The Andy Griffith Show"? Here's Andy singing them. [ADDED: The words are about fishing. Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if it turned out that theme was also about suicide?]

"Composite?"/"Compost heap's more like it."

We were watching "A Face in the Crowd" last night. TMC was making a night of Andy Griffith films, and I settled in to watch the Elia Kazan movie that I'd heard about but never seen. I've only watched the first half, partly because I usually watch movies in 2 parts — I have a 1-hour attention span — and partly because it started annoying me — too many absurd leaps forward in the story as our forgotten man "Lonesome" Rhodes becomes a media sensation by cutting through the bullshit and sexing up the ladies. That is, he rejects the bullshit of the sexless men who surround him and spins out his own sort of bullshit, e.g., promoting the inert pill "Vitajex" as some proto-Viagra.

Anyway, I wrote down something that reminded me of Obama. No, not his special appeal for women. It was this passage of dialogue:

Marcia Jeffries: You always drink like that?
Lonesome Rhodes: Not always. Back in Riddle they was pretty strict. Didn't allow us to touch hard liquor till we was 10 or 11.
Marcia Jeffries: Now is there really a town called Riddle?
Lonesome Rhodes: Well, tell you the flat truth, it's just a sort of a whatchacallit, a...
Marcia Jeffries: ... Composite?
Lonesome Rhodes: Compost heap's more like it. 

Composite!  Marcia Jeffries, the woman who discovers him for her radio show called "A Face in the Crowd" offers him the word "composite" to dignify his bullshit, and he does a little word play that rejects euphemism.

Obama's use of "composites" is well-discussed in the David Maraniss biography:

"I'm ugly! I'm ugly! I'm ugly!"

A Big Night of Heartache Marty at MOVIECLIPS.com

Ernest Borgnine, RIP. He was 95.

ADDED: The clip above is from the 1955 movie "Marty." He won an Oscar. I remember him much more from the 1960s TV show, "McHale's Navy":



Andy Griffith died on July 3rd, so this makes 2 great 60s TV stars who have died within the week. Both were really old. If deaths come in 3s, it's hard to think who's still around who could be in a triad with those 2, who gave us so many laughs and so much fun back in the 1960s.

Andy Griffith has died.

He was 86.



ADDED: I love that Constitution clip, but maybe you think I should have found a clip that featured Andy more than whoever it was he was interacting with (such as Don Knotts in this case). But wasn't it true that Andy was always being low-key like that and letting the other actor bounce off him like crazy?

"A more perfect... you... nyun!"

(Via EDH, in the previous thread.)

Ron Howard does a really cool pro-Obama thing.

See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die

"Beware the long arm of Butt-Head."

A Code Pink lady tries to make a "citizen's arrest" of Karl Rove:



That sent me looking for the great old "Citizen's Arrest" episode of the Andy Griffith show, but I got distracted by the less-remembered, but hilarious "Citizen's Arrest" episode of "Beavis and Butt-Head":



And, yes, the Code Pink woman commits a crime in that video. And a tort.

Is "Seinfeld" ruined? (My advice to Jerry.)

David Bernstein has started a conversation over at Volokh Conspiracy about whether Michael Richards' racist rant makes his Kramer character unwatchable.

I happened to try an old episode of the show the other day. The TiVo had dragged in the "real and... spectacular" episode, which begins with a lot of Jerry and Elaine. I wasn't really thinking about the Michael Richards incident. I was just passing the time, fooling with the TiVo. But when Kramer came in, after a few seconds, I turned it off. You know, there's usually a Kramerless beginning, and then, at some point, Kramer makes his entrance. Traditionally, you'd get a real lift at that point. The whole arc of the show is now screwed up!

But I'd love to see one more episode of the show where we discover that Kramer is a racist. We were always learning just one more odd fact about Kramer -- his first name, some hobby, some arcane field of knowledge, some impressive skill. And we were always tantalized by the unknown: What does the inside of his apartment look like? How does he support himself? Why don't we ever encounter the oft-referenced Bob Sacamano? And -- as one of the commenters on Bernstein's thread says -- the idea of the show was always that the four characters were not good people. We may have loved them, but it was not because they were purely lovable. So it would actually seamlessly fit with the show to have an epilogue episode where we learn that Kramer is evil.

Come on, Jerry. You like to push the envelope. Do a reunion show where we discover Kramer is a racist!

(Does anyone remember the old parody -- I think it was in the National Lampoon -- about "The Andy Griffith Show" where a black person comes to town and we learn that the lovely Mayberry folk are all racists?) [IN THE COMMENTS: Someone reminds me that it was in RAW, the comics journal, and drawn by Drew Friedman. I did have the Friedmanesque pictures in my head when I wrote this post. I must have the old copy of Raw around somewhere, as I never threw those things out.]

(And on the question whether a racist sitcom character could be lovable: That's a conversation we had back in the 70s when "All in the Family" came out. Is the answer different today?)

Thanks, TV Land!

On Sunday, the Washington Post ran a nice obituary for Don Knotts, which included this:

His favorite episodes [of "The Andy Griffith Show"], he said, were "The Pickle Story," where Aunt Bee makes pickles no one can eat, and "Barney and the Choir," where no one can stop him from singing.

I was moved to program the TiVo to record some old episodes to see good old Don Knotts again. Based on the schedule, the episodes of the show that TiVo picked up were "The Rehabilitation of Otis" and "The Lucky Letter" -- both on the TV Land network. But the episodes they actually ran were "The Pickle Story" and "Barney and the Choir." That's awfully nice of them!

''This is only the second show that's a comedy about the South -- this and 'Andy Griffith' -- that doesn't make fun of Southerners."

Who watches "King of the Hill"? According to this NYT piece: "men between the ages of 18 and 49, and almost a quarter of those men own pickup trucks." The theory of the article is that "King of the Hill" offers Democrats insight into how to appeal to young Southern/rural voters -- sort of like the way "South Park" gives Republicans insight into how to appeal to young, non-socially-conservative voters:

[The Democratic Governor of North Carolina, Mike Easley,] says he thinks that understanding the show's viewers might resolve some of the mysteries confronting his party about the vast swaths of red on the electoral map.... When the governor, a former prosecutor, prepares to make his case on a partisan issue, he likes to imagine that he's explaining his position to Hank -- an exercise that might be useful for his colleagues in Washington too. For instance, Easley told me that Hank would never support a budget like the one North Carolina's Senate recently passed, which would drop some 65,000 mostly elderly citizens from the Medicaid rolls; Hank, after all, has pitched in to support his own father, a brutish war veteran, and he would never condone a community's walking away from its ailing parents. Similarly, Hank may be a lover of the environment -- he was furious when kids trashed the local campground -- but he resents self-righteous environmentalists like the ones who forced Arlen to install those annoying low-flow toilets. Voters like Hank, if they had heard about it on the evening news, would have supported Easley's ''Clean Smokestacks'' law, which forced North Carolina's coal-powered electric plants to burn cleaner, but only because industry was a partner in the final bill, rather than its target.

Well, then, Easley's use of "King of the Hill" is to figure out how to sell the Democrat's usual policies to people like this, not to critique any of his party's settled assumptions. Is that the way "South Park" is used by conservatives? It seems to me "South Park" criticizes all sorts of adult follies, and any Republicans watching that show for insight into how to appeal to its young audience ought to be learning that they need to become more libertarian and less socially conservative. "South Park" has plenty of advice for Democrats too -- but it's advice about changing yourselves, not just how to improve your rhetoric.

The Democratic interest in "King of the Hill" is that it portrays voters in a region where the Democrats have a big problem. So then, tell me, what does "King of the Hill" have to say about how Democrats should actually change their policies? I haven't watched enough of "King of the Hill" to be able to answer that question, so help me out in the comments if you can.

In the meantime, here's a post from Half-Bakered that says the NYT got the show all wrong:

[The show is] about renewal of traditional values in the face of the transformative. Every time Hank encounters the kind of "transformation" that Democrats and bureaucrats and the PC peddle, he defeats them -- often using their own internal problems and philosophies against them...

Hank is a rock-ribbed Republican, I tell ya whut. Dale Gribble, his neighbor, is a Libertarian. Boomhauer is a Republican, but doesn't much care, I'm sure. Only Bill will likely vote Democrat sometime, but only because he's a softie who falls for a good line; if he admitted it to his friends, they'd blast him.

Bai [the NYT writer] also somehow manages to quote or mention pretty much only Democrats in the piece. Go read it; it's a hoot. He's either clueless or delusional.

Or as Hank would put it, "That boy ain't right."

(Via Signifying Nothing via Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: Lot's of good discussion in the comments. Makes me decide to TiVo "King of the Hill."

Also, here's the NYT review of the book "South Park Conservatives." The reviewer, Liesl Schillinger, an arts editor from The New Yorker, doesn't seem to know much about "South Park." She seems to think it represents "a new generation of Americans who refuse to accept public censure for their scornful attitudes toward gay men and lesbians, Native Americans, environmentalism and abortion rights." I say "seems" because she seems to attribute this characterization to the author of of the book. Actually, I'm really not sure what Schillinger is babbling about here. She doesn't seem to have put much effort into understanding the things she's criticizing, and the very short review is padded with irrelevant blather about "Monty Python."

Schillinger sniffs:

[T]his book isn't intended for readers of The Times and The Economist and watchers of CNN. It's for the people who are sick and tired of mainstream media and are fans of the blogs and right-wing commentators [the author Brian C. Anderson] cites so abundantly.

Blogs!

Oh, yeah, they're horrible. Horrible! They just take idiotic unfair slams at the good people who write for mainstream media. Why they'd even slam an arts editor who works at The New Yorker! The New Yorker! Where we know what we're talking about. We know "South Park" is anti-gay... uh, right? Isn't it?

ANOTHER UPDATE: I TiVo'd and watched an episode of "King of the Hill." The episode -- "The Petriot Act" -- involved taking care of a pet for a soldier who'd gone overseas. Hank feels the call of duty to take care of a dog, as a friend of his is doing, but he signs a contract that turns out to require him to take care of a cat, which turns out to be annoying and sick, and because he's agreed to use a particular, expensive vet, costs him the money he'd saved for the family vacation. He does his duty, without being particularly grumpy or cheerful about it, and in the end the family settles for a dinner out in a modest restaurant, all they have money left for. This is a very straightforward tale about living up to one's obligations. There is a scene where Hank stands up to the vet who is overcharging him, which is the sort of thing it seems Easley was grabbing onto. Hank gets mad when another man is not being fair and honest, so I suppose that shows that Hank-types can be activated by stories about people who cheat and take advantage. The whole "King of the Hill" concept, based on that episode, seemed to be about being solidly responsible and upstanding.

Make Room for Daddy.

There's no Danny Thomas ("Danny Williams") on TiVo's list of TV's Greatest Dads! Throwing Things doesn't acknowledge the glaring omission of that classic TV dad, but found lots of other omissions -- like "Uncle Bill, who deserves a credit for "taking in those three kids like he did and keeping his 'relationship' with Mr. French behind closed doors as not to scar them."

Wasn't "Make Room for Daddy" the original dad show? It started in 1953 and ran until 1964 and was a top show the whole time. TiVo puts Andy Taylor second on its list (after Cliff Huxtable), but did you know that the pilot for "The Andy Griffith Show" was an episode of "Make Room for Daddy" ("'Danny Meets Andy Griffith'")?

Well, all I can say is that if they ever do a TV's Greatest Uncles list: don't forget Uncle Tonoose.

IN THE COMMENTS: A reader asks, "How about Ozzie and Harriet? That was from way before Make room for Daddy. I can remember when it was a radio program." Good point! Especially since the TiVo list includes Ozzy Osbourne.

"Ozzie and Harriet" goes back to 1941 in radio form and to 1952 as a TV show, one year before Danny Thomas. Funny, I just heard an Ozzie Nelson band song on the 1940s Decade channel on the radio the other day. Ozzie also made the first TV music video, with Ricky, who went from kid to teen idol, singing "Travelin' Man."

Ozzie was the original hapless, bumbling TV dad. Many people over the years have joked about how he didn't seem to have a job. Harriet played the smart housewife, another classic TV sitcom type. By contrast, "Leave It to Beaver" seems to have been designed to copy O&N (down to the two sons, with the younger one the troublemaker), but getting the proper sex roles enforced. (Ward Cleaver does make the TiVo list, at #5.)

I think a big part of my love for "Make Room for Daddy" was that, unlke Ozzie and Ward, Danny had a daughter. I was so jealous of Angelica Cartwright! Why wasn't I on TV? That question nagged me throughout childhood. Sometimes, I imagined my life was a TV show. I really enjoyed the way the television audience saw everything from my point of view!

Anyway, like Ozzie Nelson, Danny Thomas was on the radio -- even named the "best newcomer in radio" in 1945. He's also notable for being a Lebanese-American, and for refusing to yield to pressure to get his big nose rhinoplastied. The nose proved useful for many jokes. He did change his name, though -- from Muzyad Yahkoob.

Here's a Danny Thomas bio. It's very impressive. Click on the link to see a picture of him doing something no TV dad of today would do.