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Originally Published July 11, 2000 |
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 Nachman loves Lawrence Welk reruns. Is he turning into his Grandma? |
He's most guilty about
watching trashy old TV
By GERALD NACHMAN
of TheColumnists.com
All of my guilty pleasures involve TV, in itself the guiltiest of all pleasures in the great American grazing land of sinful delights. Most of them also involve watching TV during the day, which is its own closed-blinds secret. Here then are the Twinkies, or perhaps Dagwood sandwiches, of pop culture that I occasionally feast on behind closed doors:
Live with Regis and Kathie Lee
In
the great tradition of boy-girl radio chat teams dating back
to Ed and Pegeen (Fitzgerald), Tex (McCrary) and Jinx (Falkenberg),
and Dorothy (Kilgallen) and Dick (Kolmar), Regis Philbin and
Kathie Lee Gifford nattered on wonderfully about their exciting
Manhattan nightlife doings, table-hopping at today's versions
of the Stork Club and the Copa, hobnobbing about Manhattan like
latter-day Earl Wilsons and Suzys. The shallower and cattier
it was, the more I like it; when the guests arrived, I hastily
departed, for the heart of the show was the peppy banter between
"Reeg" and Kathie; when she left the show, it withered
without her. Such matches are made in TV heaven.
Kathie Lee was herself a sort of guilty pleasure within a guilty
pleasure, and not for the obvious reasons. I also enjoyed her
sharp tongue, innuendos and little digs at Regis, and vice versa.
Philbin, for his part, has become the poster boy for aging sidekicks'
now that his ship finally came in. (Eat your heart out, Ed McMahon.)
TV Cooking Shows
I had planned to say that my fascination with food on TV began with Julia Child until I realized that this habit dates back long before her--to the days of yore when local TV dished out cooking shows as amiable time killers. I smacked my lips over the mustachioed Chef Cardini, a Chef Boy-ar-dee look alike, who opened the show sharpening his knives over the Italian theme song. I also regularly dined at The Normandy Candlelighter, the name of the show set in an actual North Beach namesake restaurant that may still be there. Here we were welcomed into the kitchen each week to watch an actual French chef whip up some fancy dish. (How exotic all that seemed in 1955!). More fondly, I recall the kindly Edith Green, a grandmotherly lady who let us oversee that day's featured recipe being prepared in her modest studio kitchen. In more recent times, I have broken bread with the over-the-top Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet, whose pace was slowed to a cantor by a heart attack, after which he returned a new and less goofy guy--a born-again Nouvelle Cuisiner who was too tame to keep me enticed; he counted calories on a chart, for God's sake! In his place, we got the galloping and wacky Martin Yan, whose gift of gab includes bad jokes, puns, and a general circus atmosphere, which is what I like about him. My minimal interest in Chinese food, alas, never gets me through an entire show. I do miss the Frugal (and scandalized) Gourmet, Jeff Smith, who seems to have retired under a cloud involving something like chili molesting; or maybe he's just no longer syndicated here. Julia Child, of course, was fun but far too classy to be considered a true guilty pleasure. Jacques Papin is also too serious to induce many guilt pangs, all of which changed when he brought along his clunky daughter, Claudine, who seems as all-thumbs in the kitchen as myself and inherited none of her father's Gallic (or even garlic) charm. She seemed thoroughly stumped by peeling potatoes, and her contribution to the show was limited to the occasional (and unconvincing) "Wow," "That looks nice," or "It smells good." A fellow cooking show regular told me, apocryphally, that he had heard Claudine's presence on the show was part of Papin's divorce decree. Dad clearly looks cranky whenever she offers a clueless comment. The title of the show was "Cooking with Claudine," but poor papa barely acknowledged her presence, and I always thought of it as "Cooking Against Claudine." In any case, it was a scrumptious pleasure. My video-going appetite is now partly sated by "BayTV"'s chirpy Joey Altman, an enthusiastic boyish chef who lacks only a gimmick, the mainstay of TV chefs; see "The Iron Chef," which is overloaded with gimmickry. Joey is neither frugal nor galloping, but the kid knows his way around a casserole.
The Love Connection
Here's a show you could watch any time of the day or night--it seemed to be on about 18 hours a day--and never tire of it. It's probably still in reruns somewhere-- hat isn't? There are sleazy spinoffs around now, but they're not as good as the original, with the ever-wry Chuck Woollery as host sneaking in little digs that the couples never seemed to hear. It was a hard show to turn off, because of the irresistible backbiting that went on when couples reported in after their date, which tended to reveal more hate than love connections. The guys were almost invariably dorky hunks and the girls giggly airheads, but now and then you would see a guy or a gal who seemed datable, but they never seemed to meet on the same show.
Infomercials
My forbidden passion for this art form goes back to the old Vegematic guy (was there really a "Vegematic" or is that just a generic term for anything that slices and dices other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, Steven Segal, and Bruce Lee), and to the original Charles Antell Formula No. 9 guy, who preached the wonders of lanolin made from sheep oils. I can't recall what Formula No. 9 did -- restored hair? colored hair? replenished the natural bodily oils that keeps hair full and manly, like the fast-talking Antell guy himself? Either way, he was a spellbinding spieler and the godfather of today's infomercial loud-mouths, my favorite being the dumpy little Australian guy with the red suspenders who hawks everything from car wax to steamer cookware. He is always joined by a gaga blonde ersatz homemaker who claps with glee at his every statement and goes into orgasmic cries when he finally reproduces (voila!) a shining car or a succulent steak. The call-and-response from the hired congregants is a major part of the fun as the crowd seems to be saying, re the lady in "When Harry Met Sally,": "I'll have whatever she's having." I have never actually purchased a pocket fisherman or a backyard grill from Ron Popiel (another giant of the genre), but I do own a George Foreman grill given me last Christmas that makes good on the champ's claims and frys up a mess o' great burgers and tuna melts. I just knew George wouldn't steer me wrong. I once parted with $300 for an exercycle that I have used perhaps a total of 20 minutes (all in the first week) but that nonetheless still graces my dining room, also a sandwich toaster than I can't seem to locate. The only infomercials I can't watch are those for acne and other beauty aids, since my acne has cleared up nicely and I was never a fan of Dionne Warwick or Cher, but I do enjoy the female bonding that these famous former beauties can indulge in thanks to a skin cream. It's nice to know there is a second career for aging pop singers other than peddling their old hits, an evergreen infomercial you can dance to with Dick Clark. I give QVC and the Home Shopping Network a pass, because they're simply cleaned up infomercials without the tacky veneer essential for my guilty pleasure pangs.
Glenn Hartzheim's Car Commercials:
Glenn's half-hour midnight Bay Area sales pitches might be considered an infomercial, but for us infomercial purists he's more of a hard-sell kind of guy (sans production values), although actually he seems very soft sell when seated happily behind his desk, babbling on nonstop, without a script, about the great deals only an hour away ("So c'mon down..."). He's sort of a father figure, maybe because he's been around so long; I used to feel the same way about Ellis Brooks of Chevrolet fame. If I were looking for a Dodge and not a Chrysler PT Crusier, I would not hesitate to tool down to Capitol Dodge just off 280 on the Capitol Expressway (or as Glenn so engagingly pronounces it, "Cap'tol 'Spressway"). In his curiously mesmerizing nasal voice, he convinces me that, yes, his sales force does care about you and me and will figure out financing for the country's worst deadbeat, and that I can trust the sales people to leave me alone. I can't explain my fascination for Hartzheim, but he's a pure form of TV pop art that only Andy Warhol could fathom.
Lawrence Welk Reruns
I am undoubtedly turning into my grandmother, whose favorite show was Welk's "Champagne Time" ("Champagne Hour"? "The Lawrence Welk Show"?; anyway, the theme song was "Bubbles in the Wine"). Her pet performers were Myron Floren ("He can put his shoes under my bed anytime," said Granny, shocking me), Bobby & Sissy (the waxen dance team who glided so smoothly they seemed to be skating over ice, and, of course, the Lennon Sisters, who were a guilty pleasure all in themselves; I have spent long hours pondering my favorite Lennon only to finally decide that they would only be worth meeting as a foursome; one Lennon sister seems such a forlorn prospect. What makes this the perfect guilty please is that Welk took the show utterly seriously, which is also why it worked as a show (if not quite as music), and projected an image of avuncular affability despite underground reports that he was a tyrant behind the scenes, a sort of latter-day Arthur Godfrey whose TV family was treated like performing seals. Stan Freberg says the only performer who ever complained about one of his record parodies was Welk. None of that matters, of course, when you watch the show. I became a Welk devotee after writing the inevitable wiseass piece on him only to received a delighted letter from Welk thanking me "for all the-um luffly things" I had to say about the-um-a Lawrence Welk-a family-um.
Here
are a few more that I haven't the cyberspace to get into now:
Shirley Temple movies (was there ever a lousy one?); golf on
TV, but now that golf has become respectable, due to Tiger Woods,
it's much less guilt-inducing than it used to be; old newsreels,
or really anything in black and white, ideally with narration
by Lowell Thomas or Ed Herlihy. I could watch a 1943 newsreel
on just about anything, and actually have done so. Why are they
so much more transfixing than anything in drab post-1950 color?
This isn't nostalgia; I loved newsreels at the time. Maybe it's
the march music that accompanies them. March music-- ah, yes,
there's another guilty pleasure, but for another day.
©2000 by Gerald Nachman. Caricature of Nachman is ©2000
by Jim Hummel.
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