Hey Kids,
In the waning years of the weekly Variety Show format Mr. Nimoy appeared as a guest star on the short-lived Captain and Tenille Show. For you youngsters out there, a Variety Show was a weekly entertainment broadcast which usually featured comedy skits and musical numbers. The closest thing we have today is Saturday Night Live. The Captain and Tenille were best known for their hit song “Love Will Keep us Together” (Never one of my favorites) and the producers at ABC figured this was enough to qualify them for their own variety show. The result is, well…I’d still take this any day over Miley Cyrus! Nimoy appeared in several skits here, the best (in a very nice blue suit) as “Alistair Bannister”, the host of “Masterjoke Theater”* where he performs the running joke that every guest host would do; ending the skit with a pie in the face. He also does a Shatner-Style ballad/poem with the couple. I give him credit for being able to laugh at himself, and any TV appearance he made was welcome by me! Here’s his skits:
You can buy the whole series here. (It’s episode 5)
*Masterjoke Theater was C&T’s version of the much loved Masterpiece Theater with Alistair Cooke.
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Wow. Thanks so much for tracking that down and for sharing it with us!
It was very brave of him to read his poetry on national TV; I can’t imagine many actors who’d be that brave.
And yes, Mr. Nimoy, when it comes to you, any of us will “horse around.” 😀
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Therese, this is a gem..thank you for posting this!
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I’ve downloaded this, love it. I have to watch the poem bit with the sound off though – I’m not sure if he’s “brave” or oblivious, but I do find it a bit toe curling! The comedy sketches are great:-)
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I presume you mean toe curling in NOT a good way! Yeah, I know, I know…
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The 70’s were a very different time, hard to explain if you weren’t there for them. (I was 18 in 1976.) This was actually quite reasonable poetry for the era; it sounds painful when seen through the lens of the current climate, but we were all so much less hard and cynical then, and not just because we were younger. The cultural climate was … *sigh* I’m not sure I have the words. Things were REALLY different then.
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I do know what you mean. And in 1976 I was 23! It was different, and less cynical, as you say. But, this was the man who did Bilbo Baggins!! I still maintain he had a very low embarrassment threshold.
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