The Week in Review

Nothing quite came off on schedule last week. Especially the atom bomb tests in what the announcers persisted in calling "Doomtown, Nevada." Faithful televiewers turned out at 8 a.m. for six successive mornings only to be met each time with fresh postponements. But this failure to make a rendezvous with fission only brought out the essential pluck of the network newscasters. CBS's Charles Collingwood tried hard to keep his end up by filling in with a telecast from Las Vegas where, amid the clatter of one-armed bandits, he solemnly asked the proprietor of The Sands Hotel if he was used to A-blasts (he was). NBC's Dave Garroway was reported by his mates on the Today show as having dug his own trench out in Yucca Flat. Meanwhile, the desperate networks kept rerunning film of the target area until the tall, thin pole with the bulge at the top that was the housing for the bomb was as naggingly familiar as a Lucky Strike commercial.

After all the nuclear suspense, most viewers were happy to relax with a pair of agreeable surprises. On NBC's This is Your Life, General Mark Clark began with a soldierly aloofness to the drum-beating enthusiasm of Emcee Ralph Edwards. But as Edwards produced onstage a succession of relatives, Army privates, British comrades-at-arms and ex-West Pointers, the general choked up as humanly as any other mortal. Vividly attractive Mrs. Clark recalled that they had first met on a blind date and that "he was a complete bust." The general affectionately reminded her of how she had sat on a bee, added thoughtfully that then "we got to know each other better."

On CBS's Person to Person, Ed Murrow served up another entertaining mixture of eggheads and rough diamonds. Violinist Yehudi Menuhin and his mannered British wife, Diana, were full of intellectual pleasantries and happy memories of nights at Windsor Castle playing command performances for the royal family; next came earthy Rocky Graziano, his pretty wife and two shy children. An ex-delinquent, ex-world champion and, presently, a TV actor, Rocky had a fistful of forceful, if ungrammatical, opinions on teen-agers ("they oughta be good"), TV performing ("my director says he'll fire me if I ever turn into an actor"), and the U.S. ("I'd a kilt my father if he hadn't caught the boat over here").

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