In addition to listening to the Bob Keeshan interview today, I've also been amusing my ears with Shokus Internet Radio, which is the new online station being set up by my friend Stuart Shostak. I mentioned this the other day here but that was before I'd spent some time listening to some of the "test" shows he has playing in rotation, in advance of the station's official launch. Stu has a couple of goodies there, especially The Soundtrack Show, which oughta interest the kind of person who comes to this website.
I'm fairly new to the world of Internet Radio and I'm fascinated by it. There are channels that play rock or folk songs of showtunes or classical jazz...but there are also "niche" channels, like several that only play music heard at Disney theme parks or old Jack Benny radio shows or things like that. So I've been sitting here today, working on a script but with various Internet radio stations — mostly Stuart's but also a few others — on Live365, a network I'd never explored before. There's some very pleasant listening to be found there. You can tell that some of the stations are "programmed" by people who really know and are passionate about the material they present.
The only downside is one you'll all understand. Usually, I work with the TV on. So every time the phone rings today, instead of muting the sound on the Internet radio channel, I reach for my TiVo remote and hit "pause." Which doesn't do a damned thing.
Speaking of Kid Show Hosts, as we've been doing here...
A great way to waste hours on the Internet is to watch the oral history interviews of the Archive of American Television. This Academy-run project is interrogating significant folks in the world of broadcasting and from time to time, they put some of the videos up on Google News so we can all enjoy them instead of getting our work done.
There's a great one up now: Seven parts which comprise a 3-and-a-half hour interview with Bob "Captain Kangaroo" Keeshan. It was recorded in 1999, five years before he passed away. I'm about halfway through it and his perspective is quite interesting. I got to spend some time with Mr. Keeshan when we worked together on a show and I found him to be a thoughtful and serious gentleman with a genuine concern about the impact of television on kids. We had a few friendly debates about rather trivial aspects of the whole situation...and let me tell you: It ain't easy arguing with Captain Kangaroo. I mean, come on. Even out of costume, he's Captain Kangaroo. I was terrified of offending him and not just because I was afraid Mr. Moose would drop ping-pong balls on me if I did.
Despite that, I felt he paid great attention to what I said and gave it proper consideration. At one point, he said — and I wish I could remember the exact words but this is close — "I hope you understand that I respect your viewpoint. At times, I fear I have the tendency to come across to adults as if I'm treating them like children...when in my mind, the opposite is true. I always believe I'm talking to children like they're adults." The secret of his success may lie somewhere in that belief.
I don't know that historians of kids' TV have ever properly assessed his impact beyond the confines of that one little long-running show on CBS. I believe he did a lot to make broadcasters everywhere conscious that that they had a responsibility beyond the sale of Cocoa Krispies; that in entertaining younger audiences, they had to be constructive as opposed to exploitive. More importantly perhaps, he made parents aware that they had a right and a duty to expect that. Having been a kid when he went on the air, I was somewhat conscious of what changed in my daily programming, not always to my liking or (I now think) benefit. It was years later that I began to realize how much of that change was due to the industry's reaction — and in some cases, overreaction — to the success of Captain Kangaroo. I expect that in later parts of the online interview, he'll be talking about that. I certainly hope so.
Seymour Hersh (who's generally been right) says that the C.I.A. (which hasn't) has concluded that Iran is far from developing a nuclear weapon capability. Dick Cheney (who really hasn't been right) may not let that dissuade him from wanting to invade with all those extra troops that John McCain says we should send to Iraq and which we don't have in the first place.
Every time I've worked on a flop TV show — and I've had ample experience at that, thank you — there comes a moment when you know it's over. And then there comes a moment when you know it's really over. And then there comes a moment when you know it's really, really over.
The last of these stages is usually denoted by some person — the last guy you'd figure to do this, the guy who always thought we had a hit — going around, telling everyone, "I never thought this would work." It meant that things were going so badly that even he was trying to distance himself from the show...trying to make people think it was someone else who thought it was a great idea.
Odd how I was reminded of that this morning when I read that Henry Kissinger is saying that in his opinion, a military victory in Iraq is no longer possible.
Looks like it's really, really over. Which, alas, doesn't mean they're going to stop dying over there.
Here's a short flashback to the days when I wrote variety shows for people who didn't speak English very well. The Bay City Rollers Show was actually on NBC for quite a number of years, stuck away in an early Saturday morning time slot that only existed in some cities and didn't count in the ratings. It was a case of "We have to put something on at that hour so we might as well stick this thing there."
The show was actually a condensed version of a show called The Krofft Superstar Hour, which was produced for NBC's Saturday morning schedule in 1978. The whole A.M. line-up was a disaster that year. Even before all 13 hours we'd taped had aired, NBC was juggling around shows and replacing some of them. The 13 hours of The Krofft Superstar Hour were cut down to 13 half-hours of The Bay City Rollers Show and, like I said, it was on for quite some time. They reran those suckers for four years, I think.
It was actually a fun show to do if you could get past the fact that the most of the Rollers had such natural thick Scottish accents that American audiences could never have understood them. A dialogue coach named Jonathan Lucas worked wonders with the lads but by their own admission, they weren't equipped to host a show of this sort. It was kind of like: Forget about comedic delivery. Let's be happy if they just get the words out clean. This was the first of many shows I wrote where we had to settle for intelligibility
When I signed on to do the series, it was going to star ABBA and I never did find out how that deal fell apart. We wound up with the Rollers who were then in the process of disbanding the group but they reassembled for one last gig. They were all great guys individually but one of them was at war — personal and legal — with the others so there was a lot of tension on the set and every so often, rehearsals would stop while they all went in the back and threats of bodily harm were exchanged. During one taping, I was doing the audience warmup. Someone came over to me and whispered, "You'll have to stall" and told me that backstage, one of the Rollers had one of his bandmates in a headlock. Amazingly, ten minutes later they were all on stage, miming to their record of "Saturday Night."
This clip someone assembled contains the opening title and the closing credits, plus some bits in between that I don't think I wrote. The voiceover you'll hear is by our pal, Lennie Weinrib, whose memorial service was recently the subject of many bytes of weblog posting here.
Last evening, the new Comic Relief special aired "live" from Las Vegas on HBO and simultaneously on TBS. I'm not sure if it was live on HBO but it was on a delay of ten seconds (or thereabouts) on TBS so someone there could bleep out the dirty words. I feel sorry for the guy who had to do that. With some acts, it meant cutting out every fifth word or so. I didn't see Dane Cook's routine on TBS but it must have sounded like one of those 16mm movies we saw in high school...the ones with so many splices that the narrator was leaping from sentence to sentence without verbs or adjectives or sometimes even nouns.
Is there any point to bleeping something like this? I understand there are people who hear a naughty word and are shocked, outraged, offended, etc. Were any of those people watching the expurgated version? Were they enjoying it? Was there any reason to watch it there except that you aren't spending the money for HBO?
November 18, 2006
