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At times, This is Your Life feels like a nightmare in which Bob Barker breaks into your home to shout a condescending bedtime story made up of your worst memories while all of America watches.
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He embodies an America that will bomb your home, kill your neighbors, surprise you with an interview on a deeply personal, traumatic experience and then - rather than allow you to tell your own story - tell you what happened and how you felt about it. While the minister speaks in a normal, human voice, Edwards, who came up in radio, continually speak-shouts in a domineering, condescending tone. It’s not only that Edwards mostly refuses to let his subject speak, it’s that he continually takes the liberty of describing Tanimoto’s feelings and memories to Tanimoto, often speaking over him to do so. However, that need to make sense of the past at all costs, combined with the norms of 1950s television, makes Tanimoto’s episode seem painfully tone deaf when it’s not grossly offensive. In other words: The program had been conceived of as a means of making sense of the effects of war on ordinary people. He decided to tell the life story of one of those soldiers in a way that would make sense of his terrible present circumstances by weaving a narrative that began with happy childhood and concluded with the promise of a better future. Edwards got the idea for the program when asked to do something for paraplegic soldiers (presumably survivors, like Tanimoto, of World War II) in Birmingham General Hospital.
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My description so far fails to capture how truly repellent This is Your Life can be, but I do believe that the show was made with good intentions. Army reconnaissance planes flying overhead most of the time, so this was taken for granted, this air raid siren.” Every morning it went off, didn’t it? As I understand, there were U.S. The answer is no, but he feels like that’s not what he’s supposed to say. In a representative exchange, as Edwards describes the morning of the bombing, he reaches the moment when the Hiroshima air raid siren sounded (the show attempts to make the memory more vivid for a startled Tanimoto by playing the same sound in the studio) and asks, “Did you run for cover?” The idea is that the show’s research team has already learned everything there is to know about the subject, so when Edwards asks Tanimoto a question, there is clearly a correct answer and that answer is so strongly implied by the question’s phrasing that there is in fact no need to speak it. There are prizes, but all the questions are rhetorical and the answers rarely heard. Ralph Edwards was a prolific creator of game shows, and his signature program was Truth or Consequences, a wacky sort of prototype for shows like Nickelodeon’s Double Dare, which explains the tendency of This is Your Life to feel like a game show. They were going to Mount Sinai Hospital for reconstructive surgery, and Tanimoto believed that he was in the studio to be interviewed about these women and their suffering. At the time, Tanimoto was visiting the United States with 25 young women, fellow survivors of the atom bomb who had been badly disfigured. In the case of Tanimoto, this was not necessary. Many of This is Your Life’s guests were in the entertainment industry, so it was often necessary to construct elaborate subterfuges to get them to the studio without spoiling the surprise. The show seems to be most itself when exploiting the tragedies of its subjects’ lives, and so the purest This is Your Life episode of all must be the one that tells the story of Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Japanese Methodist minister and survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. During the handful of episodes I recently watched, I wept no fewer than three times. TIME once called This is Your Life “the most sickeningly sentimental show on the air,” which is, of course, why people loved it. The host’s storytelling was punctuated by the appearance of significant people from the subject’s past: teachers, childhood friends, former colleagues. The subject was allowed several seconds to react with apparently genuine surprise and/or horror before Edwards launched into the story of his or her life. Subjects were lured to the studio under false pretenses, then host Ralph Edwards presented them with a leather-bound book featuring the name of the show and the name of the subject (and the name of that episode’s commercial sponsor). Running from 1952 to 1961, This is Your Life was an emotionally intense experiment in early reality TV. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.Ī 1950s television show did the unthinkable: surprise a victim of the Hiroshima bombing by introducing him to one of the bombers on live TV.