Monday, April 18, 2005

Barely Edible Delights

For those of you who've been looking for a good website devoted to airline food...here you go.

• Posted at 5:37 PM · LINK

Black Tie Event

My favorite current stand-up comedian, Lewis Black, was the featured entertainer at the 61st Annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner where he drew the kind of spot that is every comic's dream: Following Dick Cheney paying tribute to a dead Pope. Talk about your great warm-ups. He was also required to wear a tux and to avoid the use of naughty words or inflammatory rhetoric. In his regular act, Black has been known to describe Cheney as "pure evil" but I guess you don't want to use that material when the guy's seated on the dais about five feet from you.

You may or may not be able to view video of the event over at the C-Span website, where things don't seem to be working too well. What you'll want to do is go there and do a search for "61st annual." Then if the site's functional and you have Real Player installed, the whole 80 minute event just might load. Mr. Black goes on around 36 minutes into it and you'll probably want to Fast Forward to him.

It's an odd performance and Black spends much of it discussing how it's a bad place for a comedian to work. The audience is not well-miked so I think he got more laughs than the video would seem to indicate, but it's still far from him at his best. I just mention it because if you think Lewis Black looks uncomfortable on The Daily Show, you oughta see him trying to amuse the Washington elite. I try to watch these every year and I don't recall any comic doing all that well with this crowd.

• Posted at 3:00 AM · LINK

GSN News

This is for those of you watching GSN's late night/early A.M. broadcasts of old Goodson-Todman game shows. They've gone through all the episodes of The Name's the Same. Tomorrow morning, they air the first of four episodes of What's Going On?, a short-lived program that Mark Goodson used to cite as the worst show his company ever did. It's nowhere near that. As a matter of fact, it was probably a better show than The Name's the Same and it was certainly better than Choose Up Sides, which will take its place on the GSN schedule after the four episodes air.

Goodson's negative view of the show may stem from all the production problems involved. The show used live remote cameras, which were a big (but not bug-free) feature of television in 1954. The producer of What's Going On? was Allan Sherman, who was later known for brilliant song parodies but who was then a producer for Goodson-Todman. It is said that when things weren't going well, as was apparently the case with this show, Mr. Sherman was difficult to deal with. (What's Going On? was cancelled after five shows aired. Only four episodes still exist.)

While I've got you here: Thursday morning, GSN should be running the 3/11/56 episode of What's My Line?, which as originally broadcast featured two Mystery Guests — Dinah Shore and famed clown Emmett Kelly. The segment with Ms. Shore is apparently lost so the episode has awkward continuity and GSN will probably have to pad out the half-hour with ten or eleven commercials for the Rascal Scooter. More significantly, that episode represented Fred Allen's final appearance. He died six days later, on Saturday, March 17. The following night, a rather glum episode of What's My Line? was broadcast, and GSN will presumably run that on Friday morning.

• Posted at 1:32 AM · LINK