Depresses and Annoys Me..."

Depresses and Annoys Me..."

CAMELOT 177 fanatically interested in details. Clothing and furniture had to be au- thentic. But the rest could apparently be nonsense. The series, shot on a Hollywood lot, premiered in October 196o. "The last time I looked at Klondike, wrote Berton in his Canadian column a few weeks later, "I felt completely detached from it; the action might be taking place in Madagascar or on the moon, but not in the land I knew and wrote about." A fact of particular interest to Berton was that even at the height of the gold rush no guns were carried in the Klondike; it was extraordi- narily law-abiding. But in the Klondike series gunplay was incessant. "The idea that every story on TV must end with a fight or a gun battle depresses and annoys me...." With America on the move throughout the world, interest in foreign settings was increasing. Thus Hong Kong made a glittering October 196o debut as a one -hour ABC -TV series produced by Twentieth Cen- tury -Fox and sponsored by Kaiser Industries. There was early sponsor and network discontent over scripts, but things were soon under control: an actress called Mai Tai Sing was added to the cast as owner of the nightclub, The Golden Dragon, a scene of international intrigue and treachery. There was exotic dancing and murder in back rooms and alleys. Lloyd Bochner was the Hong Kong police inspector, and Rod Taylor was an American correspondent, presumably covering Red China from this vantage. Business was good but the industry was wary of the new administra- tion; budgets for news, special events, and documentaries were pushed up. CAMELOT The 1960 -61 season brought to the documentary field a sense of a begin- ning renascence. The documentary spurt, which owed some of its im- petus to the quiz scandals, had been further stimulated by disasters like the U -2 affair, which brought foreign policy under more earnest public scrutiny. The new critical atmosphere prompted NBC, for example, to undertake a documentary on the U-2 incident and to schedule it in the closing weeks of the Eisenhower administration -behavior that seemed uncharacteristic of NBC. But the feeling of renascence acquired more positive momentum from 2. Toronto Daily Star, January 3o, 1961; Berton, Fast Fast Fast Relief, p. 114. .

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