On Valentine’s Day 1972, daytime TV viewers across America — senior retirees, college kids between classes, “housewives” and kids coming home from school — were treated to something entirely novel on their TV.

The pleasantly bland “Mike Douglas Show,” hosted by a second-tier big band crooner and broadcast nationally from a basement studio in Philadelphia, featured two co-hosts from “The Movement,” the counterculture and the global avant garde.

Ex-Beatle John Lennon and his artist-wife Yoko Ono not only appeared on the program, they booked guests and co-hosted as radical activists Bobby Seale and Jerry Rubin were introduced to America’s living rooms. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader talked about “organizing” younger voters, folk protest singers performed, a macrobiotic diet expert and a pioneer in biofeedback therapy sat in, along with a slightly different sort of showbiz lineup of guests.

“Daytime Revolution” is a documentary that remembers one of those “They’d never do that TODAY” moments in American pop culture history, when the Revolution WOULD be televised just long enough to drive Richard Nixon to “declare war” on the Lennons even as Republican dirty tricksters were about to ensure his corrupt administration’s premature demise.

Filmmaker Erik Nelson interviews a few survivors of those telecasts, producer E.V. DiVassa Jr. and a couple of John and Yoko’s alternate thinking guests, for a film that’s most novel for playing long segments of these five days of shows, showing just how unthreateningly “radical” the discourse could be if famous and popular people talked a chat show host into letting “a happening” happen.

DiVassa sorts out who invited whom to the show, which frequently featured guest co-hosts, the sort of feathers that got ruffled in the production, and notes that an equally-young future Republican media strategist, Roger Ailes, was also on the staff.

The TV news coverage of the weeks leading up to and following the show note how divided the country was, after Attica, with the Vietnam War still raging, George Wallace running for president and threatening (pre-assassination attempt) to be the disruptor that fall and Nixon aligning himself with causes such as sometimes violent racist white protests about school integration and “forced busing.”

But after covering and crooning the McCartney-Lennon tune “Michelle” to open the festivities, Douglas brought the “Give Peace a Chance” “bed-in” couple in and asked, “What would you like to talk about this week?”

“Peace,” John offered, “and love,” Yoko added. “Racism.” “War.”

And damned if “The Mike Douglas Show” didn’t do exactly that, in eight or 9 minute segments between “and now for a word from our sponsors.”

Bobby Seale talked about his evolving politics and Jerry Rubin joked about radicals from “the Movement” endorsing Nixon because he’d gone to China “and spread the cause of communism” in the process.

Douglas, showing an open-mindedness rare in TV interviewers then or now, asks questions both important and humdrum, and then he sits and listens. It’s a tour de force of good TV manners in a talk show host.

Yoko brought out a blank canvas that everybody on the show that week and many attending in the audience would sign and paint on for five days, with “Unfinished Painting” to be auctioned off at the end of the week.

One of the disappointing omissions from this film is nobody tracked down what happened to that painting. Another is that Yoko herself didn’t sit for an interview, or speak by phone with the filmmaker.

DiVassa breaks-down moments of tape, showing the guests “getting comfortable,” talking about the pitfalls of fame. Starstruck “waiters never listen to your order” in restaurants, meaning Yoko and John never got what they ordered.

Ono pushed a few ideas for “audience participation” in this unique mixture of peace rally, church service and chat show with singing.

Comic George Carlin brought his “new” and edgier youth culture act, and talked about why he’d changed. Vegas singer Vivian Reed sang, and in a modern day interview, hits notes no 76 year old should be able to reach. John got to meet and perform with “my hero,” Chuck Berry, a ragged cover of “Memphis, Tennessee” with Chuck out of tune and Yoko caterwauling mid-verse and playing the bongos.

Lennon and Ono and their Elephant’s Memory Band performed a tune or two, including “Imagine.”

And Douglas and his staff and studio audience, as proxies of “middle America,” were exposed to different ideas and political figures characterized by a hidebound, conservative national media as “radicals,” as if that alone would silence them.

They weren’t.

Nelson’s documentary lets the footage from ’72 do the heavy lifting, with the interviewees he spoke to bringing context, back-story and a little personal color about the day “Yoko Ono called” to invite them in.

The film is thus mostly a surface gloss with a bit of context, relying on the performers and thinkers from way back when to create all the interest here. But “Daytime Revolution” is a nice editing job of presenting that landmark week of slightly weird TV to viewers 52 years later.

Rating: unrated

Cast: John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Vivian Reed, Chuck Berry, E.V. DiVassa Jr, Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin, George Carlin and Ralph Nader

Credits: Directed by Erik Nelson. A Kino Lorber/Shout! Studios release.

Running time: 1:48