Old Standby

For the past year, radio's Tex McCrary has been looking at television with a speculative eye. An A.A.F. lieutenant colonel (he jumped with paratroops into France) and ex-newsman (chief editorial writer of the New York tabloid Mirror), McCrary was confident that he could survive TV's headaches. He was also shrewd enough to know that he had a TV asset in his pretty brunette wife Jinx Falkenburg, onetime model and cinemactress, who shares his over-the-breakfast-table radio show.

McCrary figured that the TV audience was ready for something different from the vaudeville routines offered by the Hooperating leaders (Milton Berle, Arthur Godfrey, Ed Sullivan). "TV eats up material so fast," he reasoned, "that the only dependable source is the day-to-day flow of news." Mixing the techniques of newsreel, theater and movies, McCrary developed an ambitious show called Preview, a "magazine of the air," which Philip Morris sponsored. Last month, Preview went on the air (Mon. 8 p.m., CBS-TV).

The opening show ran $5,200 over its budget and was a wretched failure. McCrary knocked over an easel loaded with placards which never did get put back in proper order; gremlins got into the balopticon (magic lantern), and the audio-control system went haywire. A less tenacious man than McCrary might have been crushed by the reviews (Variety: ". . . fantastically bad"; New York Times: ". . . involved hocus-pocus").

But in the weeks that followed, Preview steadied down into a sense-making 30 minutes, with the emphasis switched from news to guest stars. Last week, Preview took an editorial look at the phrasemaking of Winston Churchill. Then it turned quickly to such eye-catching items as the Katherine Dunham dancers, Singer Eugenie Baird, Cinemactor Kirk Douglas. It was a crisp, entertaining, fast-paced show, and its climbing Hooperating put it right up in the first ten. But it was no longer a news-reporting "magazine of the air." More & more, McCrary's Preview was beginning to look like that old TV standby--vaudeville.

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