What I watched: An episode of the early children’s show Kukla, Fran and Ollie. The series starred the titular Fran Allison, with all other roles being played by series creator and puppeteer Burr Tillstrom. “Who’s On The Cable” aired on Monday, October 2, 1950 at 7:00 PM on NBC. Video is available on the official KFO YouTube channel.
What happened: Colonel Crackle announces tonight’s occasion to us: because of the coaxial cable being hooked up to more cities, the show is now being broadcast live to cities that were previously using Kinescope recordings. He gets on the phone to make sure that the broadcast is happening in various cities, including St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Omaha. The plan is to do a pageant to salute all the areas that are tuning in for the first time.
First up is a general tribute to the Southern states by the show’s female cast. Beulah and Madame Oglepuss get into the spirit with some big wigs. Colonel names off some of the Southern stations that are now live, including Birmingham, Jackson, and Charlotte. Fletcher Rabbit and Cecil Bill do a tribute to Omaha and Indianapolis. Fletcher has taken the phrase “Indian” too seriously and has put on a Native American headdress. They do their best rendition of a pow-wow. Oh no, Fletcher Rabbit is cancelled now.
Kukla is stressed out because the show is behind schedule. Fran has put on a bonnet that she describes as an “old plantation type.” Everyone’s getting problematic tonight. She sings about “That old Southern comfort.” Another city being linked up tonight is Davenport, from Fran’s home state of Iowa, but she doesn’t have a song ready for the occasion. Not a lot of songs about Iowa, to be fair. Fletcher pops up to remind Colonel Crackle to plug RCA Victor records, and shows off the latest device to Cecil Bill. Fran reads a poem about Davenport, which is mostly traffic directions.
Continuing on the Southern theme, Ollie presents a “tableau” which is him in a dress monologuing to a cotton plant. Beulah sings a brief song about the Carolinas. But there’s still a problem. Colonel Crackle’s phone calls still can’t find reports of the show being broadcast in the new markets. Fran and Ollie do a song encouraging people to send a message, to the tune of “Oh Susannah.” They sign off, hoping their show will reach someone. Me too.
What I thought: I was just writing about the regional unevenness of early TV when discussing Miss Television, and here it is again. This episode of Kukla, Fran, and Ollie commemorates a mostly-forgotten moment in television history, when the installation of coaxial cables allowed for the networks to send live feed across the east coast and into the mid-west. As this episode expresses, it’s not that clear how quickly the regional stations actually got “on the cable” — one source I’ve found online shows an Atlanta station commemorating the occasion on October 4. But the technology was now in place. This was part of a still-ongoing expansion. The first “networks” had stretched only from New York to New Jersey, and the west coast and southwest were still to come.
I’m not sure about all of the technical details — relay stations carrying over-the-air microwaves were still involved — but this dispatched with the need to mail Kinescopes of every series to stations that were now “on the cable.” There were immediate practical benefits to this arrangement. Before, seasonal or time-sensitive programs had needed to be taped in advance, as we’ve seen with KFO‘s Fourth of July episode. Viewers in Florida or Nebraska could now keep up with news coming out of the Northeast in real time.
The change doesn’t seem to have drawn much notice, only receiving a short article in The New York Times and getting brief mentions in histories of television. This was an era of great technological innovation in TV: CBS was applying for permission to broadcast in colour, and other companies were trialing early pay-per-view and cable technology, although it would take much longer for these inventions to be widely implemented. But the ability to broadcast live to a larger audience would have profound implications, amalgamating regional cultures into a larger American identity. For instance, in 1950 Major League Baseball was essentially concentrated in the northeastern region that had previously been served by the network. With wider live television, it would expand into the south and west, knowing that fans in the new markets wouldn’t be watching the World Series on tape days later.
Kukla, Fran, and Ollie mostly uses the occasional for silly skits and musical numbers, of course. Instead of a universal American culture, “Who’s On The Cable” represents the new markets as regional cultures which can now be welcomed to the small screen: bonnets and cowbell for the South, teepees for the Midwest. Colonel Crackle’s frantic attempt to figure out who can actually watch the show may have mirrored the uncertainty felt throughout the nascent television industry about the expansion of their reach.
Burr Tillstrom and Fran Allison were themselves beneficiaries of the national expansion of the networks, going from a regional Chicago show to a corner stone of NBC. But for the most part, as television grew it was much more New York and LA influencing the rest of America (and really the world) and not vice versa.
Coming up next: We have a brief gap in KFO episodes (maybe due to all the technical chaos), but The Cisco Kid is still here.
The Eternal Couch Potato 