His reward came from his audiences, those who could not wait for their weekly taste of "uh-one and uh-two" accompanied by a succession of Champagne Ladies, accordionists and talented instrumentalists. It was safe-and-sane TV entertainment, painfully predictable and stable and wholesome.įor that, he went virtually without praise from within the TV industry itself.
Welk's criteria for success was to keep it sweet and simple: play the proven standards the people want to hear, in the simplest of arrangements, and in less than three minutes just in case someone did not like a particular song. As recently as 1988 Welk could be heard cueing his band with his "uh-one and uh-two" signature countdown on weekly rebroadcasts of his television shows on PBS outlets throughout the country. Welk and his bubbling music-makers were a television staple for 36 years, making their debut in an era when Arthur Godfrey, Groucho Marx, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Kukla, Fran and Ollie and Jackie Gleason's Honeymooners were at the top of the Nielsens.
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