Imagine two talented people, standing in front of a primitive television camera, under scorching hot studio lights and miming the lyrics of some other performer's tunes on the air.
Television put words in their mouths right OFF THE RECORD.
That was the name of an early, musical variety show that WTTG-TV in Washington DC produced for air on the innovative, but indigent DUMONT TELEVISION NETWORK.
The novel, if naive, show featured two well known and respected, local personalities, Art Lamb and Aletha Agee lip-synching to the most popular performers and their biggest recordings on the musical charts.
The show was austere in it's production values, but like NBC's hit , 1950's, musical series, YOUR HIT PARADE, OFF THE RECORD did visual representations of the storyline featured in each song.Decades later, following a similar method, music videos on MTV changed the way adolescents consume popular music.
Here, from the DCMEMORIES, YOU TUBE SITE,in glorious, DUMONT B&W, are two clips that constitute one episode of OFF THE RECORD.Enjoy!!!!!
PART 1
PART 2
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