Full House

Robert Saudek got $2,000,000 and a simple assignment: to produce a show that will help raise the cultural level of U.S. television. The money came last summer from the Ford Foundation, after 41-year-old Bob Saudek had been picked as director of the foundation's TV Workshop because of his impressive record as a three-time Peabody Award winner while he was ABC's vice president in charge of public affairs.

At first Saudek planned to do a series of 30-minute shows dramatizing books, e.g., Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us.

But because he was afraid "we would get lost in the welter of half-hour shows," he decided to spend the millions on producing a go-minute show every week for 26 weeks. The series, as he laid it out, was to include everything that "might leave some deposit of enlightenment as well as entertainment," and so it got the catchall name Omnibus (Sun. 4:30 p.m. E.S.T. CBS-TV).

Viewers of Omnibus have seen a slow-motion film of a Texas jackrabbit crossing a field. They have seen Saroyan playlets and French ballet. They have heard Helen Hayes read fairy tales, and watched such history-made-easy scripts as Maxwell Anderson's The Trial of Anne Boleyn. In general, the show's filmed offerings have been better than its live productions. Critics gave high marks to Novelist James Agee's five-part scenario dealing with Abraham Lincoln's early years, and to the program's unusual films such as the Danish Palle Alone, which told of a small boy who dreams he is the only person left on earth and ecstatically drives streetcars and fire engines through the empty streets of Copenhagen. In the Manchester Guardian's Correspondent Alistair Cooke, Omnibus found an agreeable new TV personality to tie these diverse items together.

The show originally won a spectacular Nielson rating: but has since slipped behind ABC's rival Super Circus, a children's program with no discernible cultural level. But Omnibus has scored remarkably well with advertisers. Last week Scott Paper Co. joined four other sponsors (Willys-Overland Motors, Greyhound Corp., Remington Rand and American Car & Foundry Co.) to make the show completely selfsupporting. This means that Robert Saudek can now use most of the $2,000,000 to produce another culture-flavored series for the approval of the nation's viewers.

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