It's the Labor Day Weekend and we all know what that means: Jerry. For the seventy-three thousandth time, Jerry Lewis will host The Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon "live" (not really) from the South Point Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Here's a quote from the official press release…
MDA National Chairman and Telethon star Jerry Lewis, joined by anchor Ed McMahon and co-hosts, Jann Carl, Tom Bergeron, Alison Sweeney, Tony Orlando, Billy Gilman, Norm Crosby, Bob Zany and the Muppets. This year's on-air talent includes Celine Dion, Montgomery Gentry, Christopher Meloni, Mariska Hargitay, Tony Danza, Ivanka Trump, John Madden, Vanessa L. Williams, Michael Urie, Ace Young, Bear in the Big Blue House, Commodores, George Wallace, John Tesh, Lance Burton, Louie Anderson, Maureen McGovern, Ronn Lucas, the casts of Grease and Legally Blonde and much, much, more.
Thousands of business and community leaders, along with some 250,000 volunteers nationwide will appear on the Telethon or work behind the scenes of the marathon 21½-hour show.
No offense meant to any of the names above, a couple of whom are friends of mine…but why are there so few superstars listed? I remember when the telethon was Frank and Sammy and…well now, it's Bear in the Big Blue House. (And conversely, where the hell is Charlie Callas?) What we're getting this year is pretty much whoever's playing Vegas plus a few of Jerry's longtime pals…and I doubt even Celine Dion is actually showing up. They probably arranged to just tape a number or two during one of her performances at Caesars Palace.
Jerry Lewis is highly revered by just about everyone in the field of comedy. Once upon a time that wasn't so but he's survived to become one of our few Living Legends. You'd think more Big Names would turn out for the cause.
By the way: Keep in mind that not every channel on the Love Network airs the entire telecast. On my satellite dish, I can bring it in on three different channels. I can watch it via WGN in Chicago, where it starts at 8 PM Sunday night (that's Pacific time since that's where I am) and runs until 1 PM on Monday when WGN stops airing Jerry and instead shows the Chicago Cubs playing the Los Angeles Dodgers. After the game, Jerry resumes and runs until 5 PM…so that's twenty-one hours minus the three or so that the ball game will require.
I can also pick up the telethon on WNUV, which is located in Baltimore. There — and again, these are L.A. times I'm giving you — it starts at 8 PM Sunday night and ends at 3:30 PM Monday afternoon. That's nineteen and a half hours.
Those of us in Los Angeles are the lucky ones. Here, it starts on KCAL Channel 9 at 6 PM Sunday night and runs until Monday at 5 PM. That means that we get twenty-three hours of a telethon that, according to the above, runs twenty-one and a half hours. I'm assuming this is simply a matter of repeating hours. In recent years, several large chunks of the telethon have been rerun within the body of the show. Even at 21.5 hours, there are probably many repeated segments in there and I'm assuming that number is just an arbitrary one. The telethon can really be almost any length. Anyone have any idea how many hours they really do?