Ed Sullivan

He was such an unlikely impresario, that hunched Nixonian figure with the charisma of an undertaker and no discernible showbiz talent of his own. How odd that Ed Sullivan stood at the very center of American pop culture for 23 years. How odder still that so many of us still miss him more than two decades after he went off the air, still wish we could tune in to CBS Sundays at 8 and hear his awkward promise of a "rilly big shew."The thing was, Ed Sullivan often delivered just that, as John Leonard reminds us in an excerpt from his new book in American Heritage magazine.

Forever Plaid, the latest musical from Annapolis Summer Garden Theatre, is not a tribute to Scotland but a salute to 1950s pop music. While some in the audience will recall family Sundays with The Ed Sullivan Show, others will rediscover the pre-Beatles age when gentle guy groups like the Four Aces and Four Freshmen climbed to the top of the charts. Debuting in 1990 off-Broadway, Stuart Ross' Forever Plaid weaves '50s and '60s pop music into a story of four high school friends who sang at local celebratory events and dreamed of making it big. On their way to their first big gig on Feb. 9, 1964, their car was broadsided by a bus filled with Catholic schoolgirls on their way to see the Beatles' debut on the Sullivan show.

What better way to celebrate a really big holiday than with a really big shew?Bob Newhart takes time out from his CBS series, "Bob," to emcee the two-hour special, "Holiday Greetings From 'The Ed Sullivan Show' " tonight. Mr. Newhart is no stranger to "The Ed Sullivan Show," having appeared on it numerous times."Holiday Greetings" is the third in a series of retrospectives of the memorable CBS variety series, which aired from 1948 to 1971. The first two drew large audiences. The latest special mixes new performances with old clips.

Detroit -- Mick Jagger is, I think, 14 years older than I am, yet he is a symbol of enduring youth and I'm trying to figure out why AARP keeps sending me those Medicare supplement brochures. Doesn't seem fair. I was a little kid when the Rolling Stones went on The Ed Sullivan Show and were asked to tone down their racy hit "Let's Spend the Night Together" for a 1960s national television audience, but they're still rocking and I'm barely still walking. Maybe they made a deal with the devil - perhaps a little sympathy in exchange for a slower aging process, though Keith Richards must have been out of the room at the time.

Ah, the memories. Sitting down with the family on Sunday evening while Ed Sullivan trotted out the latest "innn-CREDible, simmm-ply FABulous" entertainment. Even if Ed wasn't a staple of your childhood (like, if you weren't even born yet!), tonight you can get a feel for what it was like with the encore airing of the great 1991 "Very Best of . . ." show.* "Diagnosis Murder" (8 p.m.-9 p.m., WJZ, Channel 13) -- In the conclusion of the repeat that began last week, Dr. Sloan (Dick Van Dyke) is targeted for death after coming up with the evidence that has cleared a plastic surgeon's widow (Dyan Cannon)

"It's postwar entertainment history, and it intertwines with the whole evolution of television, the birth of that box that we all take for granted."So declares Andrew Solt, speaking of "The Very Best of the Ed Sullivan Show" -- two video releases ("Unforgettable Performances," for which Carol Burnett is host, and "The Greatest Entertainers," with Burt Reynolds) that have recently hit the stores.Mr. Solt can be excused for laying the hyperbole on a bit thick. After all, he's the producer of the videos and owner of the 1,000-hour "Ed Sullivan" library: 23 years of plate spinners and double-jointed acrobats, American TV debuts by the likes of the Beatles and Bob Hope, musical and dramatic numbers from a host of Broadway performers (Richard Burton and Julie Andrews doing "Camelot," Henry Fonda and James Cagney doing "Mister Roberts")

Don't despair if you're already disappointed with the new television season. There are plenty of series and offerings just released on DVD to thrill the discerning couch potato. One of the WB's most acclaimed and popular series is Smallville, which chronicles the teen-age years of the Man of Steel in Smallville, Kan. As the young Superman-to-be Clark Kent, former model Tom Welling beautifully captures the hero's nobility, shyness and frustrations; Kristen Kreuk is ideal as Lana Lang, the girl of his dreams; and Michael Rosenbaum embodies the role of Clark's nemesis, Lex Luthor.

MUSICBach, Handel share stageIf J. S. Bach had written his "Christmas Oratorio" with an English instead of a German text, Handel's "Messiah" would have some real competition in the Christmas choral sweepstakes of the English-speaking world. The Baltimore Choral Arts Society and its music director, Tom Hall, perform the choral masterpieces of the 18th century with real distinction, and one looks forward to the performance of the first three sections of Bach's great work tomorrow afternoon at 3 in Kraushaar Auditorium on the Goucher College campus.

NEW YORK -- On a cold February afternoon in 1964, Linda Plotnikoff, a lovesick 12-year-old from Sheepshead Bay, got her first glimpse of the mop-topped men of her dreams. She had been standing for hours outside the Plaza Hotel, clutching a record album and eagerly waiting for the opportunity to be transformed into a shaking, sobbing mess.And then, suddenly, in a window high in the hotel, the curtains parted. The Beatles were looking down at the crowd! Pandemonium in the streets! Dozens of police officers had to restrain the hundreds of John-Paul-George-and-Ringo-crazed teen-age girls who tried to rush the doors of the hotel to get to their idols.

Remember the dream sequence with which CBS ended the "Newhart" series in 1990?It involved the inspired idea of Bob Newhart awaking in bed to find himself with Suzanne Pleshette, who played his wife in an earlier series, "The Bob Newhart Show," which ran on CBS from 1972 to 1978. Newhart tells Pleshette that he just had this terrible "dream," and goes on to give a synopsis of the then-current "Newhart" series."That does it," she says. "No more Japanese food before you go to bed."Well, that bedroom scene is back as the launching pad for "The Bob Newhart 19th Anniversary Special," airing Saturday night at 8 on WBAL-TV (Channel 11)

Think of Chris Wedge as a suburban superhero from his rival Pixar's The Incredibles. On a recent weekday morning, Wedge, 47, sounds like any other sleepy, harried family man in White Plains, N.Y., getting a slow start on the workday because of an overnight snowfall. He's trying to conduct a phone interview while his 8-year-old son fiddles with the fax machine. (He and his wife also have a 20-year-old daughter, off at college.) But Wedge has an alternate identity as one of the most successful filmmakers on the planet.

AS AMERICANS, we do not censor. But as parents, we should. Why should our children endure the fast-paced, sexually overt, dancing bellybuttons of today's pop culture? Should an art form presented to children include images of violence against women? Why promote the oxymoronic notion of the empowered video babe? How do we counter, for our daughters, the seductress figure who chants about a jerky boy treating her badly? The entertainment industry has occasionally acquiesced to moral concern.

Don't despair if you're already disappointed with the new television season. There are plenty of series and offerings just released on DVD to thrill the discerning couch potato. One of the WB's most acclaimed and popular series is Smallville, which chronicles the teen-age years of the Man of Steel in Smallville, Kan. As the young Superman-to-be Clark Kent, former model Tom Welling beautifully captures the hero's nobility, shyness and frustrations; Kristen Kreuk is ideal as Lana Lang, the girl of his dreams; and Michael Rosenbaum embodies the role of Clark's nemesis, Lex Luthor.

The Beatles were one of the few superstar music acts that never appeared on American Bandstand. But that won't keep the group from playing on American Dreams, the NBC drama that uses the classic dance show to tell stories about a Philadelphia family in the 1960s. American Dreams creator and executive producer Jonathan Prince says a clip of the Beatles' historic first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 will be in a January episode. Footage of big-name '60s music acts has helped make American Dreams a Sunday night hit. Up to now, the series has drawn performances from the Bandstand archives owned by Dick Clark, an executive producer of American Dreams.

Today, few people outside the impassioned cult that keeps him alive in their minds know who Lord Buckley was. He was a magnificent stand-up comedian who died 42 years ago. I remember vividly a couple of performances in some Greenwich Village venue in the late 1950s, when I was in college. The audiences were almost adulatory. Buckley's work, his very presence, projected the sense that life's most immortal truths lie in the inextricable weaving together of love and irony -- affection for all humanity married to laughter.

THIS ISN'T precisely a six-months-after column, though my reflections are inspired by the CBS 9/11 documentary that 39 million Americans watched Sunday night. By now, if you haven't seen it, you've likely read about the film by two French brothers. Originally envisioned as the boy-to-man saga of one rookie firefighter, the film became the insider documentary of the infamous day that exploded into 9/11. What struck me as I watched wasn't so much the film itself - powerful as it was - but the fact and fallout of our watching it. My family, that is, and all the other families who gathered for two hours to remember what happened to us. My husband, son and I had made an appointment with each other to watch the documentary.

The Beatles were one of the few superstar music acts that never appeared on American Bandstand. But that won't keep the group from playing on American Dreams, the NBC drama that uses the classic dance show to tell stories about a Philadelphia family in the 1960s. American Dreams creator and executive producer Jonathan Prince says a clip of the Beatles' historic first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 will be in a January episode. Footage of big-name '60s music acts has helped make American Dreams a Sunday night hit. Up to now, the series has drawn performances from the Bandstand archives owned by Dick Clark, an executive producer of American Dreams.

LOS ANGELES -- Michael Landon's last movie, a reunion of the gang from "M*A*S*H" and Francis Ford Coppola directing live television dramas were among the major programming moves announced by CBS yesterday.* "Us" is the two-hour movie pilot for a new series that Landon had been working on for CBS before his recent death. It will air during the fall premiere week of Sept. 16, Jeff Sagansky, the president of CBS Entertainment said yesterday at a press conference here.In the film, Landon plays an innocent man convicted of murder, who is released from prison after 18 years.

What is there to dislike about Forever Plaid? Only one thing: the title. It's not much help if you want to know what the show is about. So let's clear it up: The musical - running at Toby's Dinner Theatre concurrently with Annie - is a charming and sentimental salute to the pop music of the 1950s and early '60s, centering on a vocal group called The Plaids. These four singers, the audience learns, had spent years playing small-time dates. One night, armed with a new act, they were driving to an important gig that they hoped would push them into stardom.

The death of George Harrison at the age of 58, another milestone in the mortality of the baby boomer generation, brings to an end an improbable life of music, movies, stardom and solitude. When he was born in 1943, the sons of Liverpool bus conductors did not grow up to be huge international stars. In England, such status was reserved for the offspring of royalty and other members of the narrowly defined upper class. Along with Paul McCartney, whom he met on the bus to school, John Lennon and Ringo Starr, the Beatles changed that, becoming the first members of the working class in England to rise to world acclaim.