ART LINKLETTER: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of Art Linkletter, is in today's Independent, you can link to it here. I must confess I never watched Art as a kid, and his record 'We Love You Call Collect' was the object of some derision among my peers. I think even as a kid I perceived something right-wing, something of the Babbitt about him. The analogy to Terry Wogan is good as far as it goes, though Arthur Godfrey may have been more like Wogan; there's a bland sort of appeal to Art that is uniquely American, even Michael Aspel couldn't quite get there--it's pleasant, unthreatening, it's Walter Cronkite's lighter side. Apparently, his daughter had no traces of LSD in her system when she committed suicide, which is not to say she may not have had bad experiences with the drug, but there was also the sense that in blaming drugs, one could absolve oneself of any responsibility...a terrible situation for any parent, and I found Linkletter's reaction to the adult children who'd been on his show as kids actually moving.