Somerset Discussion Thread

[DRW50]

Apparently the woman playing the nun in this (and wearing glasses in an earlier character) short film is Carol Roux? This was put on Youtube in 2008.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCkQVdGkUpM

[danfling]

That does NOT resemble Carol Roux as all to me.

[toml1962]

People's faces do often change a lot over many years, but I too do not think this is the same person. The CR from AW & SOM is on Facebook and although that photo is clearly from years ago, the eyes of that CR and this other one are very differrent. That is one feature that rarely if ever changes.

Edited June 4, 2012 by toml1962

[toml1962]

http://s1257.photobucket.com/albums/ii508/Tom_Lowery/SOMERSET/1969-70%20Season/

A link to photos of Somerset's cast from the first six months.

[DRW50]

Thanks, that's nicely done.

[toml1962]

I have more there in other folders (did it based on the TV seasons - 70-71, 71-72, etc.). Also found a lot more in magazines. Will add as I can.

[toml1962]

Edited June 9, 2012 by toml1962

[toml1962]

All of these episodes exist:

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="width: 275px;" width="274"> <colgroup> <col /> <col /> <col /> </colgroup> <tbody> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="width: 64px; height: 19px;"> 1</td> <td style="width: 76px;"> 3/8/1971</td> <td style="width: 135px;"> UCLA</td> </tr> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="height: 19px;"> 2</td> <td> 3/16/1971</td> <td> UCLA</td> </tr> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="height: 19px;"> 3</td> <td> 3/24/1971</td> <td> UCLA</td> </tr> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="height: 19px;"> 4</td> <td> 4/1/1971</td> <td> UCLA</td> </tr> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="height: 19px;"> 5</td> <td> 4/9/1971</td> <td> UCLA</td> </tr> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="height: 19px;"> 6</td> <td> 3/12/1973</td> <td> UCLA</td> </tr> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="height: 19px;"> 7</td> <td> 3/20/1973</td> <td> UCLA</td> </tr> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="height: 19px;"> 8</td> <td> 3/28/1973</td> <td> UCLA</td> </tr> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="height: 19px;"> 9</td> <td> 4/5/1973</td> <td> UCLA</td> </tr> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="height: 19px;"> 10</td> <td> 4/13/1973</td> <td> UCLA</td> </tr> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="height: 19px;"> 11</td> <td> 4/22/1975</td> <td> Paley Center</td> </tr> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="height: 19px;"> 12</td> <td> 12/11/1975</td> <td> Paley Center</td> </tr> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="height: 19px;"> 13</td> <td> 1/30/1976</td> <td> Paley Center</td> </tr> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="height: 19px;"> 14</td> <td> 5/20/1976</td> <td> Paley Center</td> </tr> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="height: 19px;"> 15</td> <td> 6/8/1976</td> <td> Paley Center</td> </tr> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="height: 19px;"> 16</td> <td> 10/7/1976</td> <td> UCLA</td> </tr> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="height: 19px;"> 17</td> <td> 1976</td> <td> Paley Center</td> </tr> <tr height="19"> <td height="19" style="height: 19px;"> 18</td> <td> 1976</td> <td> Paley Center</td> </tr> </tbody></table>

Am willing to bet others exist in private collections.

Edited June 9, 2012 by toml1962

[vetsoapfan]

There are various episodes of many soaps floating around in the hands of private collectors. The studios and networks may not have cared about preserving the episodes, but die-hard fans sure did. Actors too. Jacquie Courtney said in one interview that she had had kinescope copies made of many of her most significant episodes as Alice Matthews Frame on AW. Now that she has passed away, I imagine her family has inherited them, but of course, that doesn't mean the public will ever have the chance to see or archive them. A private seller contacted me a few years ago, telling me that he had videotaped on Betamax, an entire year of TGL from 1976. The tapes had been for his mother, and after she died, he was willing to sell them. He wanted $2000.00 for (he said) about 260 episodes. There was no way I was going to pay that kind of money for unseen material, with no assurance of its quality, but he did swear up and down that the episodes existed. Whatever happened to them in the end, I have no idea. I'd love to get eps of the show from the mid 1970s, but not at that price!

[toml1962]

There is a bogus so-called seller out there who not only claims to have those GL episodes, but full years of SOM. Several people I know have actually given this female lots of money and rec'd nothing in return. Moreover, there is a website that lists her name and address and much more.

I would never pay ANYONE for any of those all at once. I might be inclined to pay a small amount for a demo dvd, showing clips of at least 30-50 episodes. THEN I might buy them slowly. Needless to say, when I myself asked this person to do as much, they never replied.

For those interested, here is the link:

http://www.tvpast.org/forum/sales-deals/19896-bootleg-warning-poland.html#ixzz1wyFi23GB

Has used the names

N, Anna Nicole, Nicole, Lucy Martin, Jessica Nicel, Alice Tenny, Caroline Novak

Email addys include:

EMAILS: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

[email protected], [email protected] (for PayPal account), [email protected] (claims it's her sister's PayPal account & shows Jessica Nicel as the account owner)

Many more. DO NOT buy from people who claim to have tons of episodes without making them PROVE they do!

[vetsoapfan]

The person who contacted me with episodes of TGL from the mid 1970s was a male, or at least claimed s/he was, LOL.

I asked for a demo tape or sample DVD, making it clear I only wanted to evaluate the quality from various episodes and did not expect him to send me dozens of complete episodes for free. I asked him to copy 2-3 minutes of perhaps five different episodes, and send them to me on a videocassette or DVD, for which I would pay $20.00, including shipping. He became quite angry and accused me of not "trusting" him. Well...duh. of course I was not going going to trust a virtual stranger enough to send him two thousand bucks for material he wouldn't even let me evaluate first. I reiterated my offer of $20.00 for a preview tape, but he simply disappeared, which in itself says a lot.

[DRW50]

January 1972 TV Radio Talk

[DRW50]

kinds of discoveries in store for them. Love, for one. And each other for another. And a worrisome kind of brother-and-sister relationship with a built-in image problem, for a third.

Ron was a mere twenty-one and Susan was a trifling sixteen when each of them suddenly acquired a "new addition" to the family - an awfully attractive new addition! Love, of course, had its own way of happening.

"We didn't fall in love all of a sudden," says Ron.

"As a matter of fact," adds Susan, "when we first began working on the show, Ron wouldn't even pay attention to me. He seemed to be deliberately avoiding me and I couldn't figure out why."

"Well, it didn't have anything to do with Susan. It was just that I had never worked in television before, and just wasn't used to the idea of myself doing something that I guess I didn't feel I was good enough for. Both that, and the pressure of doing a new show every day, drove me into myself, I guess."

"And at the time," says Susan, "Ron was having a very destructive relationship with another girl. I was seeing someone else, too, who wasn't right for me." But working so closely together, as actors must on serials, eventually aided the natural, strong attraction between these two young, charming people. Slowly, without any kind of planning, they became a couple.

We were all sitting in the living room of Ron's large West Side (N.Y.) apartment. Although Susan has her own Manhattan apartment, she spends most of her time at Ron's place. Their relationship has grown very close. They eat together (Ron's a cook, and he's great!), study liens together for the next day's show, entertain mutual friends, and even pursue different hobbies, isolated from one another, but done in the same apartment. Except for the fact that they are in love and entertain very un-brotherly and un-sisterly feelings towards each other, they might almost be taken for brother and sister. They look alike and feel about things so much the same, and have already adapted to each other's lives and habits the way family members do.

Marriage? - well, that's one of the snags that Ron and Susan have to work out. Ron was hurt by the divorce of his parents he loved, and so was Susan. The result; neither one of them knows where he stands on marriage, only that, right now, both of them disapprove of what society has made of the institution. "Of course I could change my mind on getting married later on," says Ron. "I always reserve the right to do that."

Of the two of them, Ron had the stormier, more insecure childhood. And it is he who is the talk, the one who seems involved with himself, still trying to figure things, as if life were a terrific puzzle. It is Susan, on the other hand, who seems the calm one, content to let Ron do the talking. On the surface Ron appears far more insecure than Susan seems to be.

"That's just the way it looks," says Ron, hinting that the tables are really turned the other way around.

"I'm the one who's afraid that he's going to leave me," says Susan, "and Ron is always telling me how silly that is."

For Ron's part, there were identity crises aplenty to recall! Both of his parents had been (and still are) in show business. His mother, the singer, Denise Lor, that everyone knew from the Gary Moore Show, and his father, Jay Martin, a director, steeped him in the challenge and glamour of performing. They never asked him to be a performer, but the very atmosphere of the family suggested it. When he was just a boy, he sang on his mother's show.

But as Ron grew a little older, and he was faced with the dilemma of college and career, something inside him snapped. He attended Wesleyan University only one year, not knowing any more which way was up. "I was neurotic and paranoid," says Ron. "My father always pushed me. He wanted me to get into something secure, so that I could do what he did: raise a big family and support my children in style. It was that whole 1950's dream that left the people of this country so empty. It was the feeling that your life wasn't for you, but for other people."

After that year at Wesleyan, Ron didn't know where his head was at, and so he decided to explore a little. For a while, he took odd jobs, in a bank, as a construction worker - anything but show business.

Eventually show business didn't seem so much a choice that had been made by other people. Almost naturally, he began to sing and perform in front of groups. In a few years time, after much starvation, he found himself in the unique position of being a singing non-actor who was hired for a totally straight acting role on a regular afternoon TV series. "It was a little bit of a shock and it took me a while to get over it. Now I'm used to the idea."

Susan, on the other hand, had been a model child and a model student. Everything appeared ideal. Until the age of twelve, she grew up among the serene surroundings of Westport, Connecticut, in a family graced with three girls. Susan was so pretty and talented that when the family moved to New York, she was sent to a professional children's school, and did modeling and took dancing lessons. Without that rarified atmosphere of talented performing children, Susan was always being praised for her great intelligence and splendid attitude. This was a happy little girl - or so everything thought.

It was a facade. Her parents divorce, which came when she was eight or nine, hurt her more than she ever showed.

Interestingly enough, both Ron and Susan have been extremely close to the parent of the opposite sex. With Susan, it was with her father, Angus, who remarried, after he divorced Susan's mother. With Ron, it was his mother, Denise Lor, who has also remarried.

Ron says that his mother's example as a performer and a human being has meant much to him as an example. "She quit television in 1960 when she was popular," says Ron. "Her problem was typical of a lot of people in show business. She was working and she didn't know why she was working. She had never really been ambitious, and all of a sudden she was giving up a personal life for a career. So one day she quit and decided to go back to being a housewife. Five years later, in 1965, she knew finally what she wanted and returned to performing. It was tough...but she made it. Now she's always working."

It was partly from his mother's example that Ron could see the dangers of working only for fame, and not for happiness. What Ron really wants, at least what he thinks he wants right now, is to have his own singing group. (It's a love for this special part of show business the vocal arts, which probably comes from his mother.) He spends most of his spare time practicing, utilizing complex recording equipment that he keeps in a room of his apartment, keeping track of improvement in his technique. Right now, Ron is excited about a record he is cutting for an RCA label (as yet, he doesn't know the title of the album). Musicals turn Ron on. Last year he appeared in a free-style musical based on Romeo and Juliet, called Sensations, which still excites him when he thinks about it. He'd like to do it again.

Ron and Susan are indeed youngsters, in chronological age, but their attitudes are not those of youngsters. They've come to so many important decisions that some people never come to.

Some of Ron and Susan's decisions, of course, may only be temporary. For example, on the question of marriage, both of them admit that they may be more fearful than necessary of the institution because of the hurts inflicted on them by their parents' marital struggles. And one can so easily understand their position. In Ron's case there was the shock of not only a divorce, but of suddenly learning, as an adolescent, that his father had been married once prior to his marriage to Ron's mother, Denise Lor, and there had also been children in that previous marriage. Ron's father married for a third time, and acquired a third set of children. "For a while," says Ron, "I couldn't meet the children of his first wife, but I get along with them all now. I'm not bothered by any of it. I'm too into my own life."

But what that whole experience (plus the experience of just living in America today) has made Ron feel is that "marriage is a public thing and it shouldn't be. It's a very private thing between two people and it doesn't matter who knows about it. It's better just to live together."

Susan's experiences also make her feel that people should live together without benefit of official ceremony. "When my father and I were talking about it," says Susan, "I told him that I thought it's better for a couple not to go through with a wedding. He wasn't shocked. He understood."

Neither Ron nor Susan, however, remains rigid on the question of marriage when the idea of children comes up. "I believe," says Ron, "a couple should get married if children are born. It would just be too hard on the offspring otherwise."

"But I'm not interested in having children for a long time," says Susan. "I want to be free to go on with my acting."

"And I'm not sure that I even want to bring children into this world," says Ron. "I'm not sure that I can be a good enough parent," and with that remark Susan concurs, although she does admit that no one can ever know until one tries it. "But it is true that maybe our backgrounds make us feel the way we do. Maybe we'll change our minds in a year or two. Who can say?"

All of the preceding will naturally come as a shock to many. But the fact of the matter is, the sweet brother and sister pair, David and Jill, are in love in real life, and not only that, but have modern dilemmas that neither David nor Jill seem ready for. ("Quite honestly," says Ron, "those two are too sweet for my taste!")

Will fans ever be able to see those two in the same way again?

- Bob La Guardia

[danfling]

That article was written by Robert LaGuardia, who later wrote the book Soap World.

I wonder how it came about that Ron Martin was cast on the show since he was a twenty-one-year-old non-acting singer at the time?

These two never got married. Susan later replaced Kate Capshaw in the role of Jinx Avery Mallory on The Edge of Night (also written by Henry Slesar). I think that she came from California to act in the role after Ms. Capshaw was cast in the lead of A Little Sex.

[DRW50]

March 1973 TV Star Parade