Public Affairs: DR-07

Jack - and Bill - are on a public affairs show. They're their to do LAPD PR against 'Doctor Johhny Fever' AKA Howard Hesseman, and another debater.

The real fun is when the floor is opened up to the audience.

Then, we get the whole gamut; from the 'angry guy' who warns his gun - to use against an 'invading army,' Lou 'J5 on LOST IN SPACE' Wagner, as 'Johnny Dietz, the kid who wants to smoke some grass, and drop acid, to my favourite; 'Mondo Mbamba' who's there to tell 'honky's' what they can put all that bull about democracy.'

I'm writing this the day after it was announced Harry Morgan - Ofcr Bill Gannon passed away - marking the end of our link to this wonderful(ly) wacky show.

I love this episode, it's one of the standouts in my mind.

In honour of Bill, Joe, and the rest of the Dragnet gang R.I.P., and thanks for the memories

While I love "Dragnet" and think it's a true classic, every so often they made an episode that just made me shudder with horror. "Public Affairs-DR-07" is clearly one of them. Instead of seeing Friday and Gannon stopping crimes or doing some investigating, here they are doing an on-air debate with a bunch of jerks--a battle of the hippies versus squares. And the problems are many with this bizarre show. It is so very, very talky. In addition, the people all seem like caricatures--not real people. On one side, they have the egg-head professor, hippie (Howard Hesseman) and obnoxious host and on the other, the two officers. And the audience is almost like one you'd see on "The Jerry Springer Show" or the old "Morton Downey Show". There are the gun enthusiasts, the angry Black Panther-like guy with an afro and a dashiki, the Mexican as well as the screaming idiots. It makes no sense why anyone would go on such a show that is so incredibly one-sided and stupid. Overall, a good episode to skip...or just to pretend never occurred in the first place. Yuck.

Dragnet fans tend to avoid 2 types of shows: 1) the ones when Gannon invites Joe home and 2) Joe working daywatch out of Public Affairs. This, the latter, allows Jack Webb to go off on his personal (and now, to be polite, quaint) right wing attack agendas. To his credit he makes no bones about where he stands on drugs, hippies and even here gets a plug in for the Vietnam War, normally a topic he steadfastly avoided. In this episode he conjures up a hippie version of 'Our Gang' that features every caricature of 1960's counter-culture Webb despised: the liberal college professor (in the form of Mark VII regular Stacy Harris--- Webb's best friend in his perosnal life), the black militant, the hippie stoner journalist (hey that's WKRP's Howard Hessman! He must've left Webb unimpressed since he never made any encore appearances). Webb's favorite weirdo teenager Mickey Sholdar is on hand to voice his support for marijuana. This now plays like a bad SNL skit. "It was Wednesday, August 4th... we were working daywatch out of Robbery Division..." except the boys get pulled for public affairs duty in order to appear on a TV show called "Speak Your Mind"... hosted by an emcee who wears judge's robes replete with a peace medallion and love beads (for the uninformed, think Mardi Gras accessories). Gasp in awe over the threads, about the police being continually referred to as "the fuzz" and consider the fact that this show was produced around the same time as the 1968 Democratic Convention riots in Chicago and shortly after both the MLK and RFK assassinations. One interesting vignette: there is a right wing anti-gun registration loudmouth audience member; Webb's retort flies directly in the face of the current NRA platform (to be fair, he could be just as tough on police corruption and police procedural violations as vile unwashed hippie scum). Weird yet dull episode... really only of interest to anyone trying to understand the no-gray area mind of Jack Webb.

I listen to a lot of Old Time Radio and watch a lot of Old Time TV, so one thing that's interesting to me is the roles played on Dragnet by Stacy Harris and Anthony Eisley. On radio, Stacy Harris was stalwart FBI agent Jim Taylor on the program "This Is Your FBI"—brave, determined, incorruptible and fearless. On TV, Anthony Eisley was Tracy Steele, hero private detective on the show "Hawaiian Eye", yet on Dragnet they always played bad guys or, at the least, heels.

In this one, I think the only show on which both were featured, they were were more heel than bad guy—Eisley, as a smarmy pinko TV host and Harris a smarmy pinko college professor.

I remember seeing this episode when I was a kid and thinking it was funny then, and I still think it's funny. Biggest laugh, when Mondo Mabamba calls Joe Friday "Mr. Charlie". I wonder if this was real ghetto slang or if the writers made it up for the show. That line about the police being "Just like them Nazzies only you don't dress as sharp" has been in my personal joke insult arsenal for 40 years, especially since I have a lot of police in my family. I also loved the housewife who came up to the stand to say she supported the police and thought they were doing a great job. I liked her angry reaction when she was hooted down by the biased audience.

I agree with most viewers that in the 3rd season of this version of Dragnet there was a little too much of the Public Affairs stuff, but this was probably the most amusing of that type of program. Especially telling was the portrayal of a particularly odious type of white lefty who preens and postures and parades around with his concern about "blacks and Mexicans and minorities" as a way of claiming a higher moral character than the rest of his fellow whities. Call it an early version of the Ken Burns disease.

Joe is asked to come to a show with the title "The Fuzz: Who Needs Them" "Johnny Fever" is a hippie on the "We don't need them" side. Friday & Gannon are defending the police. Joe, in his typical manner, burns the butt of the opposition with his biting one-liners. He is brilliant as he takes on race relations, police brutality, and even the Vietnam war. Police officers have a job that isn't easy. Just like we nurses, the police make decisions that are life or death. He makes a lot of intellectual points. I don't think this is a pointless episode. I think all of our citizens could benefit from what Joe Friday and Bill Gannon have to say on this subject. (And what IDIOTS the uninformed look like)