PBS Companion

From Sesame Street to Wall Street Week, from the stodgy 1950s to the bustle of the '80s and '90s, this compact volume examines 15 significant programs and two key local affiliates (San Francisco's KQED and Washington, D.C.'s WETA) from the history of U.S. public TV. Stewart (a longtime PBS exec) ably retails anecdotes and explanations about the makings of stations, shows and their ""stars,"" among them Julia Child; Alistair Cooke, courtly host of Masterpiece Theatre; Wall Street Week maven Louis Rukeyser; and Alan Watts, who helped to popularize Zen Buddhism in America with a show on KQED. This batch of informal essays (which first appeared in Current Newspaper) is neither a reference work to current programming, nor anything like a comprehensive history of PBS or of noncommercial TV. Yet it's just the ticket for readers who might enjoy learning that the 71-year-old Fred Rogers (of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood) is a strict vegetarian who gets up at 5 a.m. to go swimming; that Evelyn Waugh, whose novel Brideshead Revisited inspired a wildly successful PBS series, refused a $125,000 offer to turn his book into an MGM film because he wanted total control over the script; or that educational TV's first big star was USC professor Frank Baxter, a charismatic commentator on Shakespeare's plays. (After winning two 1953 Emmys, Baxter turned down a guest spot on I Love Lucy, declaring, ""I love lucidity."") Stewart addresses the rise of Sesame Street, The American Experience, Nova, Julia Child's French Chef, Frontline and Upstairs, Downstairs, among other shows. Het is especially good on TV's early days, typified by saloon pianist/raconteur Max Morath's venturesome survey of American popular music, The Ragtime Era. The chronicle can (like PBS itself) grow bland, and it neither promises nor delivers critical analyses of PBS's current state--Stewart concludes by quoting a Frontline producer who calls his own program ""the last best place on television."" Nevertheless, this set of essays will afford watchers of PBS an enjoyable peek inside their favorite shows. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Sept.)