I’m a loyal watcher of the old “Mission: Impossible” TV series. Right now, you can catch one episode a week on METV. Monday mornings at 3 a.m. I expect that whenever the next Tom Cruise “MI” movie comes out, it’ll run more often. That’s what usually happens.

What I love is how it’s a time capsule of making TV in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The same character actors show up season after season. Sid Haig played eight different people. Arthur Batanides played six. John Vernon, four. They’d play a priest in one episode, disappear for a year, and then reappear as a gangster. It was easier to have that kind of career before DVDs and streaming.

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Paul Carrack has a new album out, which makes me very happy. The record is called “One on One” and at 70, Paul will be touring from January 2022 into April – but so far, not in the USA.  Back home in England, Paul is known and loved for his soulful sound. The BBC even made a 2012 documentary about him called “The Man with the Golden Voice.” That he’s not well-known in America is even stranger when you realize you’ve heard Paul Carrack’s voice on American radio for decades. You just never suspected all those songs from different bands had the same guy on lead vocal. Let’s start with Carrack’s hit with the band Ace. In 1975, “How Long” went to #3 in America.

I’ve written before about my side gig as a weekend Smooth Jazz DJ. We played “How Long” all the time. No way is it jazz, but you can’t deny it’s smooth. After Ace, Carrack joined Squeeze for what is probably his best-known vocal. “Tempted” was written by Squeeze’s core duo, Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford, but mostly sung by the band’s new keyboardist. This isn’t the version of the video that was on MTV, but it’s the one that’s on YouTube, so here we go…

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I’m working my way through all the episodes of “The Muppet Show” on Disney+ and I noticed that when a Muppet picks up a musical instrument, they almost always play left-handed. Kermit plucks banjo strings with his left flipper in “The Muppet Movie.” In The Electric Mayhem, Janice and Floyd hold their guitars like lefties, although Floyd’s sax grip looks like a rightie. (It’s tough to tell with drums and impossible with keyboards.) Scooter plays guitar to the left. Marvin Suggs plays the Muppahone with the mallet in his left hand. Even The County Trio – Muppets that look like, and are puppeted by, Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and Jerry Nelson – all play like southpaws.

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Last night, I was re-watching the first of Disney’s Dexter Riley trilogy, 1969’s “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.” If you haven’t seen it – or even if you have – Kurt Russell plays Dexter, a college kid who accidentally gets a punch-card mainframe shocked into his brain and uses all that new mental ability to … win a college game show. Dexter had accidents two more times in later movies – becoming invisible in 1972’s “Now You See Him, Now You Don’t” and eating super-vitamin cereal in 1975’s “The Strongest Man in the World.”

In the middle of “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes,” I spotted a familiar face and heard a familiar voice. Olan Soule was playing a reporter, but you might know him as John Masters, choir director on “The Andy Griffith Show” – or as the timid professor or bank teller or clerk in a million shows. Here he is, using that face to sell the sexiest of products, prune juice.

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We’re all used to old TV shows getting cut up in reruns. The Carol Burnett Show got it worse than most. Not even the lawyers foresaw DVDs, let alone streaming, so no one figured out how to pay for all the songs in each episode.

Carol came from Broadway, so she’d often include big dancing and singing numbers. It could be The Jackson 5. It could be operatic soprano Beverly Sills. Syndicators cut down the hour-long “The Carol Burnett Show” into the music-free thirty-minute “Carol Burnett and Friends.” Carol would come out at the end with her autograph book, wearing a Bob Mackie-designed Sgt. Pepper costume. Bobbie Gentry, Phyllis Diller, and Gwen Verdon were there too … but no one would mention it. The whole five-minute song-and-dance medley was gone and “good night” was the only bit left.

Good news for us. You can now find (mostly) uncut episodes of “The Carol Burnett Show” on Amazon Prime and The Roku Channel and even officially licensed on YouTube. Give it a watch and come back…

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