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.
