THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS COMEDY HOUR
getTV, 11:00 p.m. ET
Another treasure from the vaults of Tom and Dick Smothers. This Season 2 episode is from February 1968, and features the U.S. television debut of a little Australian rock group known as The Bee Gees. They sing their plaintive, slow song “Words” (“It’s only words / and words are all I have / to take your love away”), in a show that also features someone else whose TV debut was courtesy of the Smothers Brothers: Comedian Moms Mabley, making her second Comedy Hour appearance, and prime-time U.S. unveiling, after decades on the black vaudeville circuit. Oh, and Arthur Godfrey, the former radio star and TV pioneer, is here, too. In the early, early days of television, he had two different variety shows in the Top 10: Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, a precursor to America’s Got Talent that premiered on TV in 1948, and Arthur Godfrey and His Friends, which ran from 1950 to 1959. And now, back to our regularly scheduled TV century…