Review

Nasser Interview: To its gallery of foreign statesmen sitting for candid TV interviews, e.g., Russia's Nikita Khrushchev, China's Chou Enlai, CBS this week added President Gamal Abdel Nasser of the new United Arab Republic. Well-tailored and suave, speaking in near-perfect English (though he kept saying "freezed" for "froze"), Nasser discussed his plans to visit Moscow this month, and announced a Russian "loan" of 25 factories that will be set up in Egypt. Under hard-hitting questioning by CBS Cairo Correspondent Frank Kearns, Nasser composedly kept returning to a pat explanation for Egypt's antagonism toward the U.S. and its allies: "We are defending ourselves" against "hostile action." For CBS, the filmed interview was a clean beat, made sweeter by the fact that when the show went on the air, ABC Interviewer Mike Wallace had a crew still waiting to grill him in Cairo. Last spring, when Khrushchev faced the CBS cameras, the network drew criticism for letting his remarks go on the air without an immediate rebuttal. This time, CBS cautiously topped its interview with able News Analyst Howard K. Smith's report on answers to Nasser's charges against the West.

Arthur Godfrey Time: The great man swirled upstage last week to open his new CBS-TV show (weekdays, 11 a.m. E.S.T.) with a mock striptease. The occasion seemed to call for a drastic gesture. Beset by a giveaway program on rival NBC (The Price Is Right), Arthur Godfrey was fighting back with a giveaway of his own--in which winners would get anything "reasonable" they asked for--plus a new format that scraps his old 60-minute simulcast for an hour of radio followed by a half-hour of straight TV. After a decade, it was his first concession that TV is a visual medium.

But, like Godfrey's dance, the changes promised more than they delivered. The star left off his familiar earphones, strolled around the studio instead of staying behind his old desk. But Godfrey remained Godfrey: still spouting whatever came into his redhead ("He came down with the crud"), still blinking at the audience like a dyspeptic owl, still relying on eager young entertainers as his guests. As he dipped for contestants' postcards into a huge revolving drum, he made no secret of his disgust with his new giveaway "crap game" ("This is the silliest thing"), grudgingly granted wishes of winners (Easter outfits, a washing machine) until he reached the request: "My dream is to own a mink coat, size 12." Then for a brief moment Godfrey smoldered. "Mink coat!" he scoffed. "I'll get ya fieldmouse." But before the first week of his "new" program was over, Godfrey was acting just as bored as ever.

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