“Rice Show Rivals Welk,” 1968

I’ll admit that I only read this clipping because I couldn’t get the headline to make any sense:

I’ve mentioned the Rice TV show in the past (here) but until I ran across this I had no idea that it went on for so long. That sent me scampering to see if I could find anything else about it and indeed I could. Here’s a Rice press release about the upcoming 1967 season–which was a doozy (although maybe not as good as the Lawrence Welk Show, which has aged in a very congenial manner):

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9 Responses to “Rice Show Rivals Welk,” 1968

  1. I can’t even imagine this. Seriously. People apparently cared about learning things by TV back then.

    • Melissa Kean says:

      I know! No distractions about who will get voted off the island this week.

    • almadenmike says:

      It would be interesting to see the ratings/audience for this program, if such data was taken.

      I suspect that this was simply an easy-to-produce “public service” program (with Rice in full control of the content, featuring topics its professors thought would be interesting but, I suspect, without any audience feedback guiding those selections. It would be informative if there were any other notes/correspondence about Rice’s and the station’s planning for these shows.

      This was also back in the days when TV stations had to demonstrate that they aired such shows (and children/education as well, IIRC) in order to keep their broadcast license.

  2. Sandy Havens says:

    I remember hosting a tv show Rice Today (I think) for a season shortly after I came back to Rice on the faculty in 1964. It aired very early Sunday mornings. The only episodes I remember were interviews with Profs John Freeman and Solomon Bochner. Haven’t thought about that in years.

  3. Marty Merritt (Hanszen '84/85) says:

    Yeah, I grew up in the Houston broadcasting area and I don’t remember that at all. But back then I was more interested in cartoons and Flipper and Lost in Space.

  4. Pingback: “Our world has changed much and yet very little since the angels sang over Bethlehem,”, 1961 | Rice History Corner

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