‘Omnibus’ Back for a Ride on ABC Network

This is the age of Michael Jackson’s moonwalk, Rambo’s snarl and bulletins that Bruce Springsteen is on tour. But ABC News is returning to the higher-toned past with hopes that the past has a future.

It has a new version of “Omnibus,” the cultural feature series of the ’50. Beverly Sills, opera star and outgoing director of the New York City Opera, hosts this one-hour venture, airing tonight at 10 on Channels 7, 3, 10, 42.

“There was an interesting TV Guide article about ‘Omnibus’ 35 years ago,” mused Susan Lester, senior producer of the new model. “It said, ‘TV takes its biggest gamble yet on a television show about the arts.’

“I guess it’s still a gamble.”

True. Prime-time shows on the arts usually get ratings so low divers must be sent to find them. And with cable and other competition now nipping at the networks, pressure is on to avoid such low-Nielsen expeditions.

But this “Omnibus,” airing the night after the end of the May ratings sweeps, may have an outside chance for regular play in January, when ABC News gets a second hour of weekly prime time to work with.

It’s a matter of economics as well as prestige. A prime-time hour of series entertainment can cost upwards of $1 million. A news program can work out to a quarter of that, with no residuals paid for reruns, either.

Tonight’s special has four segments on various aspects of the arts, including “The Last Emperor” Oscar-winners Bernardo Bertolucci and Vittorio Storaro explaining the use of mood-creating color and light in films.

Also afoot: Samples of the poetry that Ira Gershwin put to the music of his better-known brother, George. The honors are done by Rosemary Clooney and Michael Feinstein, the latter once an employee of the late lyricist.

With the Moscow summit conference at hand, there also is a scene from Broadway’s Tony-nominated play, “A Walk in the Woods,” dealing with two arms negotiators, one American, the other a Soviet. Correspondent Sam Donaldson also offers his thoughts on the drama of the real summit.

Donaldson is not known as a patron of the arts, producer Lester conceded. “But he is a clever observer of the passing parade and the theater of the passing parade.”

Furthermore, she said, if the play’s author, Lee Blessing, “can enlighten us with something from ‘A Walk in the Woods’ instead of another sound bite from another Soviet emissary about the summit, why not?”

Save for Donaldson’s presence, all this is not far from the original concept of the first “Omnibus.” With the urbane, literate Alistair Cooke as host, the series had a Sunday run of nearly seven years on all three networks, most of it on CBS and most of it live.

Interestingly, while CBS in 1953 gave “Omnibus” its first home, the original financing for the show came from the Ford Foundation’s Radio-TV Workshop, whose director, Robert Saudek, produced the series.

The foundation, Lester said, acted because “it was concerned that this wonderful new medium, with such commercial potential, would not live out its other mandate to give excellent programming--particularly the arts--to the viewer.”

When the new version got an OK from ABC brass, Lester, previously on ABC’s since-axed “Our World” and before that “20/20,” inspected old black-and-white kinescopes and tapes of the original.

“They’re startingly sophisticated,” she said. “I would say that as a group, they probably are better than any group of television shows on 35 years later.”

What greatly impressed her, she said, was how “they would go effortlessly from drama to nonfiction, from music to art.”

Cooke, Lester said, “would walk through this cavernous studio and say, ‘OK, let’s talk about theater for a moment. I happen to have over in the other side of the studio William Saroyan.”

The playwright-novelist would discuss his new play. The audience would see a scene from it. Then Cooke would introduce perhaps composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, who would discuss jazz, with real musicians playing it.

“The point was that you were constantly entertained and educated on a most pleasant level at all times,” Lester said. And there was no correspondent on the show, save the host, Cooke.

The ABC version always planned to use “Omnibus” as its title, but first had to get permission from Saudek, who owns the title. Lester laughed when asked why she didn’t use a hip, now-TV title instead.

“New is not necessarily better,” she said.

The producer, who in college was a music major but switched to journalism, has an off-camera role in tonight’s “Omnibus” as a musician as well as senior producer.

A part-time jazz pianist who occasionally plays at the Ginger Man, a saloon near ABC News offices here, she thought the show’s Gershwin segment needed incidental music to accompany a brief montage of Gershwin photographs.

“So,” Lester said, “as a great deal for myself--not necessarily for the viewer--I went into a recording studio where I played a little bit of ‘Someone to Watch Over Me.’ ”