Prime Time
Apparently my veiled threat at the end of the last column was perceived as idle—nobody down at the prestigious CREEM offices offered to defer part of their yacht, payments in order to underwrite my desire for subscription TV (cable hasn’t arrived in Detroit yet and won’t for at least another year) though, of course, it would all have been for the good of the magazine.
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Prime Time
Another Frigging List
Richard C. Walls
Apparently my veiled threat at the end of the last column was perceived as idle—nobody down at the prestigious CREEM offices offered to defer part of their yacht, payments in order to underwrite my desire for subscription TV (cable hasn’t arrived in Detroit yet and won’t for at least another year) though, of course, it would all have been for the good of the magazine. And idle it was, ’cause here’s another two months worth of meditations on things vaguely related to commercial television...
IT WAS INEVITABLE: ’Tis the season when every two-bit selfappointed arbiter of public taste is condensing the past year into a (usually) 10 best, worst, whatever list.. .and this particular two-bit arbiter figures it’s about time to jump on the bandwagon.
Presenting the first annual (what else?) Pillbeams, awarded for Significant Moments in television during 1981:
The Ketchup Is A Vegetable Award for the most repulsive political ad goes to the Republican Party for commercial showing a bunch of white folks galumphing on some greenery while a voice-over assures us that Americans are toughening up, being ready, willing, nay eager to greet the impending economic disaster. Hmmm. More effective would be to show a junkie shooting up with the voice-over “We Americans arp tightening our belts”—which may seem a little harsh, but if you want to show a visual corollary to Reaganomics, show something ravished, not some corny honkies jogging in a meadow.
The Pinky Lee Best Comedic Performance Award: This one’s controversial since so many people hate the guy, but I’m in charge here and Andy Kaufman gets it and that’s that. Not necessarily for Latka, but for Pt. Ill of his conceptual schtick-in-progress, the Fridays episode where the recalitrant Andy unveiled his new improved God-fearing self. Runner-Up: There is no-runner up.
The Tampering With Reality Award goes to famed producer Allan Carr who proudly told living legend Tom Snyder about how he installed state-of-the-art screening equipment in the White House so that President Reagan could “watch movies like Midnight Express and The Deer Hunter when he wants to relax.” Right. And when he really wants to get mellow they screen Taxi Driver...
The He Ain’t No Establishment Pig He’s A Gutsy Guy Award goes to TV critic Mike Duffy of the Detroit Free Press—when local DJ Ken Calvert of WRIF-FM covered an Iggy Pop concert for the equally local Channel 4, Duffy reported it this way: “Calvert delivered a bland, head-in-the-sand attack on punk and new wave rock as ‘unproductive, insincere, and distorted.’ What’s truly ‘unproductive, insincere, and distorted’ about rock music in Detroit these days is the rigid, unimaginative playlists of FM rock stations like WRIF.” ’Attaboy, Mikey, kick ass...
The Existential Bravado Award goes to Detroit “Auction Movie” host Fred Merle, hands down. Realizing that no one in the studio had the vaguest idea what the day’s movie was, the unflappable Merle said, “Why don’t we just start running it and maybe we can figure out what it is then.”
The Special Hobart Cavanaugh Memorial Moustache Award given for the best line spoken in an old movie on TV by a currently dead actor goes to the inimitable Gene Roth for this beauty from She Demons (’58): After hero Tod Griffith has sent his wisecracking sidekick (Victor Sen Young) and sluttish girlfriend (Irish McCalla) out of the room, assuring them he needs no help in dealing with Nazi bad guy Roth, Roth, reaching for a bullwhip, growls to Griffin, “Dat vas your fatal mistake, American svine!” Boy, those Nazis were really mean...
And lastly, a respectful snap of the Prime Time truss to Hill Street Blues, which I’m still not all that crazy about, but why be contrary... it’s probably about the best TV can do now in terms of continuing drama, and if the verities of urban blight seem to sometime arrive filtered thru a forgiving screen of archaic liberalism, then I have to admit that the acting is very good. Can’t argue with that.
AN UNABASHED RECOMMENDATION: Mark Shipper is the author of 50 More Magic Tricks You Can Do With String, a book that was influential on my young self a few years back and to which I feel somewhat indebted—I can remember seeing it in a bookstore and, with a sneering chuckle, thinking “what kinda asshole would buy a book like that?” Such incidents helped form the sarcastic side of my temperment, so necessary when writing about television. Shipper is also the author of four excellent, slim volumes of poetry, among them Boring Little Insights I Think Are Mine and Methodists Are Dancing In My Nostrils, the latter containing the immortal couplets, “Wine and cheese and Constantinople/remind me now of my nights with Opal/when I’d awake in the mom devoid of all hope. Ah/please be a sport and pass the L-Dopa.” It is to weep.
So I had high hopes when I received a copy of his latest book How To Be Ecstatically Happy 24 Hours A Day The Rest Of Your Life! By Kent Boston M.D. Edited by Mark Shipper (to be published in Feb. ’82 by an as yet undesignated publishing house) and I wasn’t disappointed. Ostensibly a satire on self-help books, it’s really a novel by someone who was obviously allowed to watch too much TV as a child... I won’t say anymore about the specifics (I’m too lazy to go into all that), only add that it’s a very funny book and you should rush out and buy it as soon as possible.
In fact, so smitten was I by this book that I was hoping to come up with some quotable praise that could serve as some future blurb... something like “.. .a real spellbinder.. .1 couldn’t put it down!” And to that end I devised the following paragraph:
“Suddenly my arms locked in position—the curare that Raoul had put in me cheeseburger was beginning to work! My dog, a real spellbinder when he wants to be, ran in circles and barked in dismay as beads of sweat broke out on his master’s forehead. Straining with every fiber of my being I tried to move my arms.. .the book I held was becoming unbearably heavy... but, alas, I couldn’t put it down!”
Pretty good, I thought, but try as I may I couldn’t work it into this month’s column. Maybe next time.
Finally, one might wonder if the fact that I received a free advance copy of this book, inscribed with a bit of hyperbolic praise for this column by Shipper, has in any way engendered the favorable tone of this notice, i.e., if cheap flattery can influence the usually unwavering objectivity that informs my critical acuity. Yes.
