CLARK: How TV's gotten cleaner

It's an understatement to say that what we watch on television has come a long way since the 1960s — for better or for worse.

It's in color, for one thing. And, yes, I'm just old enough to remember when people thought they were the bee's knees to own a big, bulky TV with long antennas coming out of the top and a black-and-white image glowing forth from the screen.

Come on, it wasn't THAT long ago.

It's also crazy different contentwise. Rob and Laura Petrie couldn't even be in the same bed on "The Dick Van Dyke Show." Neither could Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. Apparently, Ricky could "Love Lucy," but only from across the gray carpeted river of chastity between their twin beds.

Did the morality police really think viewers believed the married couples slept that way? Just how did they make Little Ricky, anyway?

Now, couples not only are seen in the same bed on TV, they're in there quite clothes-free and quite, er, together. Sex isn't hidden anymore, it's in your face.

Violence has blasted a new frontier on television, too, with not just blood spewing all over the screen, but plenty of gore getting added in for good messy-measure. Remember when the good guys shot the bad guys and they didn't even bleed? James West and Artemus Gordon would not have tolerated blood splatter on their spiffy suits in the "Wild Wild West."

So, where's all this going? To the Cooking Channel, of course.

You thought this was going to be some parental-control diatribe about sex and violence on television and how it's polluting the minds of all our precious babies, right?

Wrong. Oh, surely it's polluting baby minds somewhere, but that's not what this is about.

No, this is about the pollution of a different kind: That's right: raw, salmonella chicken hands.

Yes, we're back to this. And why? Because of "The Galloping Gourmet," that's why.

Apparently, celebrity chefs of yore were not shining examples of sanitary cooking habits.

Certainly not Graham Kerr, the above-mentioned gourmet who galloped across our TVs in the late 1960s and early '70s.

Shame, shame, raw salmonella chicken hand promoter. Shame.

This came to my Food Network-addicted attention recently because the new adjunct station, Cooking Channel, has been showing episodes of the old "Galloping Gourmet" series starring Kerr, as well as episodes of "The French Chef," with Julia Child.

They're awfully funny to see now. I don't really recall watching Julia Child much as a kid, but I definitely remember watching Master Kerr. In fact, it turns out my addiction to watching other people cook on TV has been a long-standing — if long-dormant — one.

I loved "Galloping Gourmet." Of course, you didn't have a lot of afternoon television choices back in the day, so watching a handsome young guy make funny with his debonair British accent while mixing a roux or trussing a hen was darn entertaining.

I'd forgotten how entertaining until I tripped over it on the new food-oriented cable station.

There Kerr was again, young and handsome and foppish in that English way. I was wallowing in the silliness of how he made his way around the faux-kitchen set, how he would add ingredients without bothering to tell the viewers what they were (that would never happen on today's celebrity cooking shows) when, there it was ... the raw chicken of doom.

Not only did Kerr not wash his hands after handling and stuffing the bird with paté and black truffles, he ... he ... gird yourselves ...

He licked his fingers.

Thump.

After awakening from a series of short fainting spells, I hit rewind, just to make sure I wasn't seeing things. I wasn't. There it was, the wanton licking of raw salmonella chicken hand fingers.

Heaven help us, it's a wonder the guy's still alive. (He is, by the way. I Wikipedia'd him. He's only 76 years old, by the way).

This likely would cause all types of consternation and news-release apologies today on Food Network or Cooking Channel, where the chefs always make a point of washing their hands and saying that they're doing so after handling raw proteins.

Of course, they don't do a good job of it, as far as I'm concerned, but at least they're trying to be all safe and sane about it.

So that's another way television has changed since the 1960s.

For all the brouhaha over sex and violence, we have one glowing example of how television has taken a higher and, yes, cleaner, road as it's evolved: kitchen hygiene.

Don't you feel better now about naked bottoms and all that blood and gore?

Reach Scene editor Pat Clark at pclark@modbee.com.