Linda Ellerbee reminded me (via comments; don’t you love the net?) that the video piece I posted the other day was from the final Overnight show. I had forgotten that. I have a few more memories, helpfully augmented by Google and Wikipedia.
The music is Lou Christie’s version of “Beyond the Blue Horizon”, a minor hit for him, his last, in 1974. He was covering, of all people, Jeannette MacDonald, who sang it in the 1930 movie Monte Carlo. I was never a fan of Christie, but he was part of the soundtrack of growing up in the sixties.
Ellerbee’s co-host at the end was Bill Schechner, whom I knew (and by “knew” I mean “saw on TV”) from his work on KQED’s Newsroom, another news show that died before its time (though it lasted somewhat longer than Overnight). KQED, the San Francisco PBS affiliate, has long since joined the PBS wasteland in programming little but drivel. Odd how the trajectories of public television and radio have been so divergent.
In retrospect, Overnight reminds me of Charles Kuralt’s contemporary Sunday Morning. The obvious connection is the closing video, I suppose, but more than that the two shows shared a kind of humanely intelligent attitude toward us viewers.
And so it goes. Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?