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Imogene PROGRAM OF THE WEEK It is no particular pleasure to report that the Imogene Coca of the current season , is not the Imogene Coca of seasons gone by. The fragmentation of that one-time NBC blockbuster, Your Show of Shows, into Max Liebman “spectac¬ ulars,” Caesar’s Hour and The Imo¬ gene Coca Show, has been inspiring more than one tsk-tsk. And of the three former colleagues, it’s Imogene, alas, who seems most consistently to come a cropper. That the comedienne is one of the most talented of her breed is unde¬ niable. It is equally imdeniable, how¬ ever, that her talent is not the easi¬ est kind in the world to write for. She is a performer who must be given an idea, rather than a script; a direc¬ tion, rather than set lines. Thus far this season the ideas and the direction have generated only occasional sparks. Her difficulty is that, after five years, virtually everyone has seen her several times more than once and, to keep viewers’ enthusiasm kindled, her material must be fresh and different. She has long since run out of her original night-club acts, some of which were gems, and now she appears to have run out of writers who know what to do with her gam¬ in-like qualities. Certainly the answer doesn’t lie in casting her as a strictly non-tongue- in-cheek singing ingenue, assigning her long and dreary dancing chores in straight-faced production numbers, or watering down her wild-eyed bur¬ lesque by linking it to a “real”—and rather humdrum—offstage Imogene. Occasionally, as noted. Coca’s new show has struck a spark. Perhaps her best bit to date was the one which had her trying to get out of paying a 10-cent highway toll. She was excel¬ lent, too, in satirizing a singer’s swooning female fan, but, as too often happens, this particular sketch ran too long. Brevity is still the soul of wit. 22