Documentary explores John Lennon’s hard-to-imagine embrace of daytime television

John Lennon and Yoko Ono with Mike Douglas on “The Mike Douglas Show.”

Actually, the revolution was televised.

All respect to Gil Scott-Heron and his 1970 musical warning, but two years later the uprising was right there, for a whole week, on daytime TV. Radical agitators Bobby Seale and Jerry Rubin. Progressive activist Ralph Nader and iconoclastic comic George Carlin. Artists and advocates talking about macrobiotics and women’s liberation, biofeedback and racial prejudice.

And all courtesy of perhaps the oddest couple in showbiz: John Lennon and Mike Douglas.

“Daytime Revolution,” a new documentary from Erik Nelson, captures highlights of that 1972 happening. Douglas, a former big-band singer and perpetually inoffensive entertainer, was then the host of a daily talk show, “The Mike Douglas Show” — a huge hit with Middle America. His gimmick was that each week featured a different co-host, who would help pick the guests and participate in all the usual bits — a Q&A with the audience, a cooking demo. Sometimes a celebrity couple like Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara would co-host.

Or, starting on Feb. 14, 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono on “The Mike Douglas Show.”

“Daytime Revolution,” opening today, mixes cherry-picked clips from their five shows and present-day interviews with a few of the surviving guests (the liveliest is Nobuko Miyamoto, then part of a terrific Asian-American folk group, Yellow Pearl). Additional clips from TV news broadcasts provide a crash course for viewers who didn’t live through those times, or may have forgotten just how tumultuous — Vietnam, George Wallace, Nixon’s re-election campaign — they really were.

Lennon and Ono weren’t just in the middle of things then, either. They were at the head of most of the marches.

By the early ’70s, the couple had pretty much permanently re-located to Manhattan, initially in the still-far-from-gentrified Soho. Welcomed (and, sometimes, exploited) by American radicals, Lennon joined a variety of causes. He played benefits for the Willowbrook State School and imprisoned activist John Sinclair. He released his most forcefully political album, Some Time in New York City, featuring protest songs about misogyny, Attica and the British occupation of Northern Ireland.

It was enough to gain the infuriated attention of Nixon’s White House, which began a years-long — although ultimately unsuccessful — attempt to deport him.

What’s fascinating, however, seeing the TV clips, is how far-from-radical much of it now seems. Lennon is consistently, unapologetically honest, whatever the subject. Yet his good manners remain intact. He still refers respectfully to The Beatles’ late manager as “Mr. Epstein”; asked about Paul McCartney’s critically panned new album with Wings, Wild Life, he politely resists the opportunity to pile on.

Looking comfy in a sweater vest, he makes his political points calmly. The “left-wing” subjects he and Ono want to explore — organic food, voter registration drives — wouldn’t raise an eyebrow today.

His host starts to tense up only once, when guest Jerry Rubin arrives. Drawing back as if he’s suddenly caught a whiff of something pungent — and perhaps he has — Douglas is clearly on his guard with his wild-haired, tie-dyed guest. But he’s right to be. Rubin, always half-a-charlatan and half-a-hanger-on, fidgets and fusses and spouts sarcastic jokes that don’t connect. Then he insists on joining Lennon, Ono and their backing band of the moment, Elephant’s Memory, onstage, mostly just to stand around.

But otherwise Douglas is at ease, and seems to put Lennon and Ono at their ease.

Lennon needed a little calming down, too. Asked for his wish list of TV guests, he had immediately named Chuck Berry — the rock ‘n’ roll legend who had inspired him as a kid and whose songs he’d played in concert, but whom he’d never met. When he heard the musician had accepted, the ex-Beatle — one of the most famous men in the world — reverted to awestruck fan. (Bumping into Berry backstage the day of the broadcast, Lennon could only blurt out “Chuck Berry — my idol!”)

John Lennon with Chuck Berry on “The Mike Douglas Show.”

Once on the show, the famously prickly Chuck Berry remained … well, Chuck Berry. Although perfectly polite, he has little interest in joining the rest of the guests for a cooking demonstration (and firmly refuses to let Lennon put an apron on him). And his duet with Lennon on “Memphis, Tennessee” is cool and congenial — until Ono adds her trademark caterwauling to the mix, and Berry looks like someone just dropped an ice cube down his slacks.

With more than five hours of material to draw on, it’s interesting — and sometimes frustrating — to think about what has been left out. There is very little of Carlin, for example, and nothing of some other guests we can only sometimes glimpse. And just the musical numbers that weren’t included could comprise their own movie. (Some can be found online, including a duet on “Johnny B. Goode,” with Berry amiably advising Lennon beforehand, “Johnny — be good.”)

But “Daytime Revolution” is still a fascinating time capsule.

This is how wide-open much of TV still was back in the ’70s (if you need any further proof, take a look at the sort of people the now 50-year-old “Saturday Night Live” used to book as guests). This is how “fixable” our problems once seemed (really, just register to vote, switch to brown rice, try a little biofeedback and your life will get better!). This is what respect for the opinions of others — and a willingness to have our own opinions challenged — looked like.

And this is why we will always continue to miss John Lennon — who would have, should have, turned 84 today.