TV Reviews : Borge’s ‘Then & Now’ Is Mostly Now on PBS

The show does have its flashbacks but don’t expect biography from “Victor Borge: Then & Now,” airing Sunday as a pledge-drive special on KCET-TV Channel 28 (at 8 p.m.) and KOCE-TV Channel 50 (at 6:30 p.m.). You can expect it from the Great Dane himself: “I gave my first recital at eight--well, actually, it was about five minutes after eight.”

References in Borge’s own routines aside, the program is almost exclusively “now.” That is, it was taped during live performances in Detroit last April, and even the clips from earlier television shows apparently were also screened at those concerts.

Not that that is a limitation, although the brief clips from Borge’s younger days whet an interest that goes unsatisfied here. The 83-year-old pianist-comedian is in fine form, as ever a master of timing and touch in his stand-up business as much as at the keyboard.

The 80-minute program is divided into four roughly symmetrical parts, with gentle, subsequently taped prods to pledge from Borge for the intermissions. Each part has its basis in straight comedy, with a clip or two and a bit of music.

Borge’s routines range from classics such as “Phonetic Punctuation” to a literally back-to-back duo performance of the “Minute” Waltz with Leonid Hambro. The ebullient confusion Borge spreads as he gets tangled in syntactic thickets, both verbal and musical, remains consistently amusing.

Music seems to be playing an increasingly shrinking role in his comedy, which relies more than ever on a bemused nostalgia. Sentimental reverie is also the prime element of his forays into straight music, here confined live to Debussy’s “Claire de lune” and a medley of Danish folk songs, plus a taped romp with violinist Itzhak Perlman through a Mozart Rondo arranged by Kreisler. Borge’s playing is endlessly affectionate yet uncloyed, supported by incisive musicality.

The best of the clips offered are the earliest ones, only vaguely identified. Surely there are funnier bits than Mike Wallace’s empty ‘60s interview with Borge in the role of Franz Liszt available, although a “Moonlight” Sonata skit from “Sesame Street” holds up well.

If this show gives only frustrating glimpses of what Borge was “then,” it does usefully and hilariously remind us of what we have in him now.