Those damned blue curtains

In 1967, the AFTV-22 news set consisted of a V-shaped desk and two chairs. Behind the newscaster was a not-quite-big-enough paper map of the world. Behind the sportscaster were four circles with simplistic game icons. That's Chuck Minx sitting at the news desk. (Don Dale photo)

Boring blue curtains that hung on tracks in front of three of the studio walls were about all we had to work with in Studio 1 (there was no Studio 2) at AFTV-22 -- and a cramped news set. Stored behind the curtains was a set of risers that might hold a small choir, a few flats on more tracks, and a plastic potted plant or two. In one area there was an overhead mirror for table-top shots; nobody could remember why it was up there. Anything else we needed had to be "appropriated."

We decided early on that the washed-out blue curtains -- so associated with local-live programs on AFTV-22 in the past -- would be used only as a last resort on any show we Young Turks produced. And Chuck Minx set about creating a new set for the news. The result was a meticulously hand-painted Mercator projection map of the world in white on medium gray -- with plenty of gray space in the overshoot margins -- behind the news desk. The new look opened up the way we could shoot the shows and was more like what our audience was familiar with back home. Overnight, Chuck's new design dramatically sharpened the look of AFTV-22 newscasts.

Those damned blue curtains still figured prominently in the station's half-hour Friday-night variety show, but we set to work on that, too. We decided, with Ray's approval, to put the show on hiatus for a few months and rethink it from top to bottom -- from the look of it to the name of it.

The show's former host had rotated back to the States, and Les Jackson was the obvious replacement. He was intelligent, clever, funny and an easy conversationalist. (In his off-camera time, he could also be acerbic and cynical -- and even more funny.) We wanted to open up the show to the world outside our studio, so Chuck, who was our film expert, agreed to lug the cumbersome Auricon sound camera around to shoot stories on interesting places and people in our corner of Germany. He'd also handle the show's live audio. I would work with Chuck on the film stories and direct the live show.

We still lacked a name and a design for home base, the set in the studio where Les would play ringmaster.

Our solutions give some insight into who we were (enlisted men) and how we thought (like civilians). After long conversations in the control room, the hallways, the offices and the studio, one of us (I don't think it was me) remembered the title of Joseph Heller's satirical World War II novel. The serendipity of our broadcast frequency clinched the deal: The new show would be called "Catch 22."

That led somehow to the decision to use parachute silk -- not in short supply on an Air Force base and metaphorical to us of ... something -- as the backdrop for the "Catch 22" home base. To dress up the parachute silk, we spattered it lightly with gray paint. We appropriated a few modern chairs from the base library next door. The set looked crisp and clean on camera in black-and-white.

Chuck found a primitive stop-action animation setup somewhere in storage and painstakingly created the show's filmed opening -- animation of an ash tray filling up and "Catch 22" spelled out one letter at a time. That bit of creativity turned out to be labor-intensive; it took days to execute. On air, it would run about 15 seconds.

But the biggest problem was ahead, and it's the issue that haunts TV producers still: content. With what, exactly, would we fill this new show?