o o o What in the World?^® | Rainey and TV o o o o

Sometimes it is an advantage to be a little lazy. When television was operating in the red and just beginning to find its audience, the University Museum periodically devised TV shows in collaboration with the local stations. I remember the tedious and time-consuming job of preparing and rehearsing those shows with members of our staff. The studios, with their bank upon bank of lights were like turkish baths. All this made television an unhappy task which we all did under protest for the sake of public relations. Compelled by a certain laziness and a desire to avoid that labor of preparing programs, I hit upon the idea of WHAT IN THE WORLD, a progrm which would certainly require a minimum amount of preparation by the Museum, practically no rehearsal under those bright lights and, I hoped, some amusement for the victims.

There is one thing about broadcasting which must always be uppermost in the producer's mind and that is how do you deliver a reasonably amusing program week in, week out; year in, year out? But, as every advertising agency knows, repetition is essential in public relations. WHAT IN THE WORLD was designed to meet this requirement also. There are several hundreds of thousands of objects in the Museum storerooms which can keep us going for years. The only real task is to dig something out each week which will be of interest and amusement to the viewing public. The Museum's collections and the Museum's staff have certainly lived up to my best hopes in producing a consistant program of education and amusement. There is, however, one fundamenatal element in public entertainment which can only be supplied by the professional and we were lucky enough to find an imaginative producer-director in Robert Forrest of WCAU.

Three or four years ago WHAT IN THE WORLD began as a local broadcast and I am afraid it was about as amateur as any television program can be in the early stages. It doesn't seem possible now, but at that time it seemed a good idea to have the moderator extract from a pirate's chest on which he was sitting, some queer object and then to debate with the panel of experts just what that thing might be. We went right along for some weeks with this kind of set-up in the TV studio until the station decided there might be something in such a program if it received full professional treatment. Forrest arrived on the scene and devised a setting which was thoroughly in keeping with the basic idea. We soon found our ancient and primitive objects materializing out of smoke with an atmosphere of dramatic music and a turning world in the background. The panel of experts appeared with no background but the universe. Suddenly the program grew up. Within a few weeks it was going through CBS channels to some twenty stations in the United States. Also, with this professional treatment, the TV editors of the national magazines discovered WHAT IN THE WORLD and applauded its reasonable combination of education and entertainment. The Peabody prize gave it some standing even in the entertainment world. It was at this time that we professors had the astonishing experience of being reviewed in the magazine VARIETY in language which was quite unintelligible to us. I suppose we were even more surprised at the success of the program than the manager of the station.

I think all of us are also surprised that it continues to be a lot of fun for us. On a wholly extemporaneous basis, with almost no tedious rehearsal, no one is ever quite sure what is going to happen when we attempt to identify some ancient or primitive gadget from anywhere in the world. There are times when our visiting experts such as Jacques Lipchitz, the sculptor from Hastings-on-Hudson, become completely oblivious of the two or three million people in our audience and make observations which have even the old timers, regulars on the panel, exploding with suppressed laughter. I am sure the program reaches its best moments during these surprises when the performers forget the audience.

There are naturally hazards in these unrehearsed sessions before the public. I am sure I shall never forget the day that Carlton Coon, getting only an oblique glimpse of a medieval madonna and child, blurted out "Well, here's a woman with a child with adnoids," then his extreme embarrassment and apologies to the audience when he realized it was really the madonna. And such episodes as when the director of a famous art museum as our guest insisted that a wooden stool, used by the eskimos to hunt seals, was a colonial milking stool of the eighteenth century from New England. The listeners are always told by the offstage voice what each of these things is before the experts see them and they are in the delightful position of knowing while the experts flounder. It is perhaps surprising that none of our guests mind being exposed by a bad guess before the public. They all seem to enjoy the program and are always willing or anxious to appear again. Many of our fans who write to comment upon the performance say that one of the things they like about it is to discover that these museum people and professors are really human beings. Of course, we are a little surprised to learn that they did not think so in the first place.

No commercial company has so far been found to sponsor this program as an advertising medium. We hear the usual comment that it is much too high hat for the ordinary public but we have long since been convinced that this is only a fixed idea and not really true. A very large percentage of the cards and letters from the public are certainly not written by the professors or the intellectuals. They come rather from people of all kinds and one of the usual comments is that the writer has just discovered archaeology through WHAT IN THE WORLD. This is undoubtedly the greatest satisfaction to all of us a the University Museum and none of us have any doubts about its being worth while to do even if we did not all enjoy doing it ourselves.

About two years ago we had, as a guest, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Director of the British Academy in London. He was very good and, like all our guests, enjoyed doing the show. With his enthusiasm he encouraged the British Broadcasting Corporation to introduce a similar program in England now called ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, OR MINERAL. Apparently it is going very well there and in Denmark, where Dr. Helge Larsen of the Danish National Museum also introduced it after being our guest here in Philadelphia. With the BBC we have now worked out a scheme to exchange objects by air express so that the BBC panel will attempt to identify things which the American panel has just done, the compliment being returned to Philadelphia the next week with a collection of things from England. This exchange will first take place on October 28 in the London show and on October 31 in Philadelphia. Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh are to be guests in the studio in London for the performance of the 28th. Sir Mortimer has just written, urging me to fly over for the show and to be presented to the Royal guests which is, unforntunately, not quite feasible at the moment. In any case it does somehow convince those of us who do WHAT IN THE WORLD that it has grown up with the television industry and has come quite a long way since the days of the pirate chest.

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Mrs. Inez Gottlieb
WCAU-TV
Philadelphia, PA

Dear Inez:

I have an idea for a TV program in substitution for "What in the World?" which I want you to think over. Here it is.

To capitalize on a certain amount of reputatioin we would use the same group: Carl Coon, Ted Kidder and myself, with a visiting expert. We would have our program on every week or every two weeks, hopefully in color. Each program would be a discreet unit, taped for distribution to other stations or for educational TV.

The idea would be to take in each session, an ancient or primitive people - let's say the Minoans. As moderator, I would open up with a sketch of who, where and when; then turn to someone like Carl and ask him what he thought was unusual, distinctive, or the mainspring of the society. Then we would move to various unique, distinctive, extraordinary qualities of these particular Minoan people, with me being careful to see that it was a discussion and not a lecture. For visual material we would use a screen with color slides and color films of the site; the murals, painted objects, etc., which would fit into our discussion as in "What in the World?", but better organized.

Then the punch lines would be controversial ideas about what happened to the civilization, how it arose, why it died and so forth. And finally, a direct tie in with our own culture and period, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural ideas borrowed from Minoans, women's costumes, modern plumbing, the gay life and so forth. Each show would be a "vignette" of a people or a civilization with an attempt to show its meaning in terms of our own complicated times. And the overall theme would be that human experience is all of a piece and that few things are truly new in this world. Moreover, I think that the viewer could get a vivid impression of an ancient or primitive people or civilization without feeling that he had been listening to a lecture.

The subjects are endless, because we could use the Polynesians, the Ashanti or the Iroquois, as well as the Minoans, Mycenaeans, Greeks, Sumerians, etc. Moreover, if something like this would work, we might transfer our panel to Teotihuacan, the Etowah mound, and Iroquois community, or even to a series of sites in the Mediterranean. Also, this could be planned so that we could do five or ten recordings in one heat. Of course, in each case we would have the expert on the people discussed, as the third member of the panel.

You ought to have good ideas on how to produce this and someone at WCAU ought to think up a good title which implies: "Discovering the Past," "Time and Man," "Out of the Past," or something like that. I have the feeling that right now people want something more educational than the quiz program, but at the same time it should be entertaining, and I think with this format we could do both. Carl would be a natural for this kind of program and I feel sure we could find some expert in each field whom we could stop from lecturing. What we would need is some practice in presenting this kind of program in a relaxed, informal, non-pedantic manner. But most of the people who have been on "What in the World?" thoroughly understand this and that is why I really think it has a chance of success.

Let me know what you think of this.

Regards, Froelich Rainey

photos + text: Museum Archives

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