Fast-Growing Television Audiences Here Enjoying Varied Entertainment This Fall
Good news to the approximately 800 owners of television sets in Norwood proper and the scores of others who are joining the fast-growing video fraternity each week is the announcement that Television, this Fall is entering: its biggest year, with programs providing the best and most varied shows and the most complete coverage of sports events being beamed here on three channels.
Along with the greatest expansion of programs the industry has yet seen, manufacturers are providing the buying public with sets at prices which everyone can afford. There is general agreement, both in and outside the television industry, that now Is the best time to buy television receiving sets.
Consider the sports coverage for this fall for instance There’s the World Series, of course, and football games at the rate of two or three a week. Included will be all of Harvard’s home games, most of Notre Dame’s contests, the traditional Army-Navy game, and others.
Professional football games will be telecast almost every Sunday through December 11. Even before the football season is ended, the Bruins hockey games will be on TV. All 35 home games will be televised this year.
Besides this thorough sports coverage, television plans to bring the opera to the video screen. Three operas have been selected so far by NBC Television for its hour-long operas to be presented in English, and tentatively scheduled for January.
The three are ‘‘Down in the Valley,” by Kurt Weill, “De Flatermaus,” by Johannes Strauss, and “Tales of Hoffman,” by Offenbach. Other operas will be selected from the great works of the past and from the operas of modern composers.
Several radio favorites are making their debuts on television Among them is the CBS'”The Silver Theatre,” with Conrad Nagel as host and master of ceremonies, which as a radio program has for years been one of America’s favorites.
The television favorites continue, too. “The Fred Waring Show” is returning after a summer vacation and Milton Berle’s highest-rated television show on the air, “Texaco Star Theatre,” continues to fill a regular weekly spot.
The new shows bring a variety of entertainment including such enjoyable extremes as programs by Ed Wynn and Burton Holmes. The “Ed Wynn show” starting tonight will star “America’s Perfect Fool” himself, and glamorous Gertrude Niesen Holmes, first man to make and show travel movies, makes his television debut in a weekly 15-minute program.
Another “favorite” — if the star of such macabre performances as he can be called a “favorite” — whose talents are being devoted to television is Boris Karloff. His weekly psychological dramas come “live” from New York.
An unusual show which is attracting wide interest is a new Phillips H. Lord show, “The Black Robe,” in which the entire cast, with one exception, are non-professionals. Picked up on the street by members of the Lord office because they have interesting faces, the non-professionals are seen and heard as they tell their unusual stories to a “judge.” The man in the black robe is the only professional actor.
Another innovator is a telecast, “Auction-Aire,” in which viewers I in Boston and four other cities are invited to bid in auctions of objects I displayed to them on their television screens.
New programs in the sports field include a Friday night commentary in which the outstanding plays from the preceding week’s games are shown, and a Tuesday night news-reel of outstanding incidents, personalities and plays in the sporting world for the preceding week.
Norwood television set owners as well as video fans in the Westwood-Walpole and Canton area are not only receiving TV on WBZ’s Channel 4 and WNAC’s Channel 7. but on Channel 11 from WJAR at Providence as well.
In Norwood, there are an estimated 800 Television owners at the present time with a total of 1500 sets in the immediate trading area.
(All articles originally published in the Norwood Messenger)