Category: Television & Radio

Live, local, trivial

Some 36-38 years ago in Tucson NewMexiKen lived across the street from a small supermarket. At the rear of the store they parked a large, flatbed trailer with a wire cage on it. As they stocked the store’s shelves they’d toss the empty cardboard boxes into the cage. Once-in-awhile someone would come by, drop off a new trailer and haul the full one away.

One afternoon around three the boxes caught fire. It was a pretty spectacular bonfire for about five minutes and during that brief time a local news guy happened by (he must have had a scanner to hear the fire call). He took a few seconds of film. We laughed, but sure enough that night on the news there was film of cardboard boxes in flame. If I remember right, it was the lead story.

It wouldn’t happen that way anymore. Oh, TV news would still cover a cardboard box fire, but here’s what we’d see.

A news crew would show up, more than likely after the fire was out. They’d videotape a few seconds of fire engine lights flashing, a firehose leaking, and a soggy, charred mess of cardboard. They’d interview a guy in a tank top, who’d say it was the biggest box fire he’d ever seen.

Then, at 10PM, they wouldn’t just use the video like Channel 13 in Tucson did all those years ago. No, they’d send a reporter and van out to the now deserted store, hours after the fire. The reporter would stand in front of a now even soggier mess and introduce the seven hour old video.

Live, local, late breaking.

If you don’t believe me, I just saw a live shot of an empty trash container tipped over by flooding earlier today.

Radio station ratings

Ever been curious how the radio station you listen to does in the ratings? Radio & Records posts the ratings for every U.S. market on a continuing basis. The charts include the call letters (but not the frequency), the owner, the format and the rating for the past several quarters. Of course, NPR and other non-commercial stations aren’t included.

The rating shown by Radio & Records is — I think — the average number of people 12 or older who listened to a radio station for at least five minutes during one quarter hour at some point during the day. This is expressed as a percentage of the total possible audience for that market.

For example, KKOB-AM in Albuquerque received a 7.6 rating for Spring 2006. That means that — on the average — each day KKOB-AM had 49,719 listeners — 7.6% of the 654,200 individuals age 12 and older in Albuquerque. Of course, it could have been a different 49,719 each day, or 80,000 one day and 19,438 another day, or 40,000 in the morning and 9,719 the rest of the day, or 40,000 men and 9,719 women. Radio stations pay dearly for all that data and you won’t find it on the Internet.

Elmo Is an Evildoer

Joel Stein doesn’t like Elmo. Some excerpts:

“Elmo doesn’t grow. People show him something and he laughs. He doesn’t learn a lesson,” says Lee. “It’s the exact opposite of what old ‘Sesame Street’ used to do. Elmo has been learning the same lesson his whole life, which is that Elmo likes Elmo.”

I understand that “Sesame Street” has to compete in a Nickelodeon-Disney Channel-Wiggles-Pixar universe. In fact, the new episodes start with ” ‘Sesame Street’ is brought to you by the following — ” and then, instead of gently mocking consumerism by listing letters and numbers, they actually show real spots for McDonald’s, Beaches resorts, Pampers and EverydayKidz.com — the last of which apparently helps children spell only if they want to be rappers.

I desperately don’t want the show to go away, so I know they can’t afford to run the “Elmo accidentally drank bleach and died” episode. Instead, they need to simply take Elmo and his buddies and give them their own hourlong show for the idiot spawn. Then put Luis, Gordon and the cool Muppets on their own half-hour “Classic Sesame” for the kids who will one day actually contribute to our society.

Read it all.

Ken Jennings — He’s Back

No, not back on Jeopardy! He has a blog (well, of course). And a few days ago he suggested some updating for the venerable quiz show. Indeed, his spoof was taken literally by some. What do you think? Here’s an excerpt, but really go read the whole thing.

First up, the categories. Maybe when Art Fleming was alive, America just couldn’t get enough clues about “Botany” and “Ballet” and “The Renaissance,” but come on. Does every freaking category have to be some effete left-coast crap nobody’s heard of, like “Opera,” or, um, “U.S. History” or whatever? I mean, wake me up when you come up with something that middle America actually cares about. I think it would rule if, just one time, Alex had to read off a board like:

  • PlayStation
  • The Arby’s 5-for-$5.95 Value Menu
  • Reality TV
  • Men’s Magazines
  • Skanks from Reality TV Who Got Naked in Men’s Magazines
  • Potpourri

Yesterday Jennings noted, “Making goofy jokes about TV shows isn’t ‘bashing.’ I believe it’s the whole reason Al Gore invented the Internet.”

Mass market monopoly

Did you know that the 32 commercial radio stations that earned a share in recent audience rankings for the Albuquerque market are owned by just six companies and one Albuquerque church?

  • Clear Channel of San Antonio operates nine AM or FM stations.
  • Citadel Broadcasting of Las Vegas, Nevada, eight.
  • American General Media of Bakersfield and Univision of Los Angeles five each.
  • Entravision Communications of Santa Monica, California, and Vanguard Media of Albuquerque two each.
  • Calvary Chapel of Albuquerque one.

Once upon a time, not very long ago (1981), a broadcaster could own and operate just one AM and one FM station in the same market — and only seven of each nationwide. Clear Channel now owns more than 1,200 radio stations.

Deadwood

Deadwood fans — alas, currently not NewMexiKen as I continue without HBO — may appreciate this post from Give Me the Booger. I know they will appreciate the photos of the stars, in and out of character, especially W. Earl Brown/Dan Dority, who may always be in character.

TV gone to the dogs

A friend needed to board her dog for a few days. When she called to make the arrangements they asked if she wanted the suite with television. She thought not, but began to wonder what the dogs would watch.

NewMexiKen wondered too. Surely re-runs of Rin Tin Tin and Lassie. Probably Scooby-Doo.

But most likely, dogs playing poker.

Which Reminds me of a Story…

Functional Ambivalent pokes a little fun at NewMexiKen —

Best blog buddy NewMexiKen is celebrating actual rain after months or years or maybe decades of little or none in his home town of Albquerque, New Mexico. Which, I feel obligated to point out, is in the middle of a desert. Still the normally sensible NewMexiKen seems shocked and disturbed that it doesn’t rain there.

but goes on to tell a funny story about L.A. TV weathermen. (Whose ranks once included Pat Sajak.)

The Sins of American Sportscasting

American TV sportscasting is full of factoids, full of graphics, full of breakaways from the midst of play for prerecorded human-interest backgrounders, full of color analysts overexplaining what happened a couple of minutes ago even as new, more urgent things are happening in front of our eyes, full of overpacked broadcast booths with three-man teams, sideline reporters, spotters, graphics people and telestrators, all breathlessly jostling for air time. Goals are scored in hockey games, and instead of showing the players celebrating, hyperactive producers cut away to show coaches, random crowd shots, the empty net, the goalie whose expression is hidden behind his mask. A single football play cannot pass without two instant replays; lineups cannot be given without film clips of the players saying their own names. At any given moment in a baseball game, what you’ll hear is the studied casualness of the down-home, nothing-really-exciting-going-on-here play-calling tradition that O’Brien personifies.

All these strands together add up to the crisis in American sportscasting that is made evident at every World Cup, when English-speaking fans flee in enormous numbers to listen to commentary in a language they don’t even understand. It’s not just soccer, of course — for many U.S. sports fans, it has long been impossible to listen to the type of football telecasts epitomized by Al Michaels, John Madden and the overproduced Monday Night Football franchise. John Davidson’s interruptions wherever there is an American hockey telecast has driven those few fans who care about them to the Internet for local radio connections. And so on down the line. The common denominator in the way American TV covers any sport is the absence of the simple, urgent description of what is happening on the field, the court or the ice — the single most visceral thing for any fan watching any sport he or she cares about.

That is the very experience the Spanish-language World Cup telecasts give English-language viewers: the sense of urgency, of excitement, of drama. There are no departures to explain what the rules are, no fancy graphics to present statistical factoids, no interruptions to show personal profiles. In Spanish, the narrative is the thing, and even though anglophones may not be able to follow that narrative perfectly, its primacy is so compelling as to be prefereable to the ESPN/ABC model.

Jeff Z. Klein World Cup ’06, from a longer commentary on World Cup coverage

Amen! Given the choice, NewMexiKen would choose to watch most sports on TV with just the players, crowd and public address sound.

The YouTube Hall of Fame

After a decade of watching the Internet change everyone’s lives (including mine), it never ceases to amaze me. The Internet gave me a job and a career. I pay my bills online, follow stocks, buy DVDs and books, argue about the Celtics with complete strangers on a message board, send streaming video of my kid back home to my parents, get almost all my sports information, keep in touch with dozens and dozens of family members, friends, acquaintances and co-workers every week. There’s always some new way to kill time. But YouTube ranks among the greatest Internet developments ever, right up there with iTunes, Napster, free porn and e-mails with “Vegas?” in the subject heading.

With that as part of the introduction, Bill Simmons describes and links to dozens of his favorite videos on YouTube.

Go waste enjoy a couple of hours.

The power of American Idol

The new number one tune in the land is Taylor Hicks’s “Do I Make You Proud.” Hicks won Idol season five.

Four other Idol competitors have made it to the top spot:

“A Moment Like This,” Kelly Clarkson (Oct. 5, 2002)
“This Is the Night,” Clay Aiken (June 28, 2003)
“I Believe,” Fantasia (July 10, 2004)
“Inside Your Heaven,” Carrie Underwood (July 2, 2005)

And four of the five Idol number ones (all but Clarkson) entered the Hot 100 as number one. (Eleven other tunes have done so in the nearly 50 years the list has existed.)

He must have been early

Jane Russell

Meredith Baxter and Michael Gross, the wife and husband on the TV sitcom Family Ties, are both 59 today. Alex, their son on the show, was played by Michael J. Fox, who was 45 on June 9th.

Jane Russell is 85 today. She was 36D when she made The Outlaw for Howard Hughes. He discovered her at his dentist, where she was a receptionist.

Juliette Lewis is 33 today. She was 18 when she played the daughter in Cape Fear, and received a best supporting actress Oscar nomination.

Laugh Liberally

Dan Neil’s look at A Prairie Home Companion includes this:

Because the movie is set behind the scenes of the show, I thought it might be useful to go backstage during the June 2 taping at the Hollywood Bowl to see the real thing. From the wings I could see the audience settling into their high-priced box seats and, sure enough, they were a bunch of cheese-eating hybrid drivers, all right. Beards and Birkenstocks, trim waists and natural fibers. Every one of them looked like they belonged on the Whole Foods board of directors.

The Man Who Made Deadwood

An excellent interview with Deadwood producer David Milch by Allen Barra. It includes this:

Don’t you think it had more to do with the idea that that language was used in the context of a Western? That people weren’t used to hearing those words used in a setting that Gary Cooper and John Wayne once inhabited? I mean, for older viewers at least, the saloon talk sounds a heck of a lot saltier than anything Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty said.

That probably has a lot to do with it, but if you’re going to talk about language, I wish more people had noticed the overall language, the rhythms of period speech that we tried so hard to re-create, and the richness of the imagery. Profanity, I’ve come to believe, was the lingua franca of the time and place, which is to say that anyone, no matter what his or her background, could connect with almost anyone else on the frontier through the use of profanity. But there’s so much more to the dialogue than just the profanity. The language of the characters in the show is never generic, and everyone’s is different. They come from different backgrounds, different parts of the country, and they all express themselves a little differently.

That’s one of the things people like about the show, that after they’ve watched for a while, they can instantly identify each character by the quirkiness of his or her speech. These are people, you know, who all grew up long before the age of electronic media, when regional speech patterns began to lose their distinctiveness. Many of them might have been illiterate, but they knew the King James Bible and Shakespeare, and that’s what shaped the way they thought and the way they expressed themselves.

More evidence that the World Cup isn’t a premier event in the U.S. (at least not in New Mexico)

Because of FCC-mandated children’s programming from 9-11 a.m., Saturday’s Ghana-Czech Republic and Italy-United States matches were aired by Albuquerque’s KOAT-TV on a tape-delay basis.

Today’s matches (Croatia-Japan, Brazil-Australia and France-South Korea) will be shown tape-delay for the same reason, KOAT sports director Bob Brown said.

KOAT on Saturday issued the following statement: “The soccer games are being tape-delayed because we are required by the FCC to air a set number of children’s programs in a consistent time period. That time period is 9 to 11 a.m. on Saturday, 9 to 10 a.m. on Sunday. Because of that, we will bring you the games tape-delayed to meet the FCC requirements.”

Today’s matches will be aired live on KLUZ-TV, a Spanish-language station, as were Saturday’s.

Albuquerque Journal

NewMexiKen watched the U.S.-Italy match on a one-hour delayed basis, knowing that the results were a computer screen away.

One understands, of course, that this same KOAT would have pre-empted the kids programming in a heart-beat for a live report on a two-acre fire someplace.

(NewMexiKen cannot find that this delay is a practice for west coast stations, where World Cup matches begin yet an hour earlier.)