There’s all kinds of food foolishness on twenty-first-century television, but the silliest show ever was broadcast in 1952 on CBS at 11:15 Tuesday and Thursday evenings. No food was eaten or cooked during The Continental, but it was a unique education in how to be an epicure. Renzo Cesana played a suave, Italian-accented bachelor who looked straight into the camera and yearningly addressed each member of his audience (presumably female) as if she were his date for the evening. Viewers never saw her; everything was from her point of view. He welcomed her to his apartment, removed her stole, and escorted her to a table set for two, where he proffered a single rose. By candlelight, he sipped champagne and whispered sweet nothings to the camera for fifteen minutes until fade-out, weaving the conversation around such dreamy subjects as his bucolic fiefdom (its exact location never specified), the pleasures of fine wine, and his connoisseurship of all things beautiful. He didn’t serve food or eat during the program. Of course not: It would have been impolite for the host to chew during what was essentially a fifteen-minute monologue. (We must assume that while he prattles on, his date has a mouthful of pasta, for she never replies.)
The Continental was just too weird for audiences and went off the air after only three months, but its fame as a pinnacle of preposterousness has lived on in television’s gastronomic folklore. Poor Renzo Cesana was forever after type-cast as a candlelight lothario for whom fine dining was prologue to seduction; in fact, he came to call his performance as the unctuous host “my Frankenstein’s monster,” and even into the 21st century, Christopher Walken was doing Renzo Cesana bits on Saturday Night Live.