Something's Going On Here

Busy with the crisis in Birmingham last week, President Kennedy switched on a TV set to catch the news. Up came the face of a newscaster, saying: "The Administration today denied charges by a Texas Congressman that two Marine officers at the Guantanamo Naval Station shot and killed Vice President Lyndon Johnson during a tour of defense installations and secretly buried his body on the base."

This newsman was really full of hot items. He went on to reveal that "Senator Barry Goldwater, Governor George Romney and Governor William Scranton have all decided against buying floors in the Manhattan cooperative apartment building that already boasts Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Governor Rockefeller's first wife, Mary Todhunter Clark Rockefeller, Governor Rockefeller's second wife, Margaretta Fitler Murphy Rockefeller, Mr. Nixon's only wife Pat, his children, their dog, some of Governor Rockefeller's children, all of the second Mrs. Rockefeller's children, and the most discreet elevator operator on Fifth Avenue."

Kennedy laughed and stayed with the show to the end. It was the first experimental half an hour of What's Going On Here?, a program of political and social satire syndicated by Metropolitan Broadcasting. What's Going On Here? has taken its inspiration from the BBC's That Was the Week That Was, a brash, barbed, and sophomoric hour of slapslush and clumsy wit that has become the talk of Great Britain this season.

The collective product of some of the hottest young wits from both America and England (most notably, Director Jonathan Miller and Actor Peter Cook, who make up half the cast of Broadway's Beyond the Fringe; John Bird, of the lively "Establishment" production, and Roger Bowen, a graduate of the Second City company), some of What's Going On nonetheless proved dull. But there were numerous high moments, as when the physician head of the A.M.A. ("the Anti-Medicare Association") outlined his fees; the $500 immediate cure, the $200 long convalescence, and, "for people of limited means, a lingering death for $3.98."

From the White House down, general reaction to What's Going On Here? was so positive that Metropolitan Broadcasting's President Bennet Korn intends to keep it on the air. A danger is that viewers, accustomed to soaking up all the bottled pap that TV offers without thinking, may soon be taking for gospel such flawless modern history as this: "Premier Souvanna Diem came to power in 1958 when his halfbrother, Prince Song Phoami, was assassinated by his uncle, Prince Phim Dim, who mistook him for his son, Prince Stant Phoami."

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