Great Dane

I just found (and am currently watching) a special called Victor Borge: 100 Years of Music & Laughter on one of my local public broadcasting stations. It's narrated by Rita Rudner and I have no idea what she has to do with Victor Borge, either…nor can I explain where the 100 years come from since Mr. Borge only made it to age 91 and he wasn't even that funny for the first dozen or so of his years.

But it's a really good special which doesn't, like most Borge compilations around, merely recycle the same ten routines that he recycled endlessly the last few decades of his life. The PBS station is offering a deal for donations. They'll send you thirteen (13!) Victor Borge DVDs and one CD for $150, which ain't a bad deal at all…although I'd be very surprised if that package didn't contain at least a dozen versions of the Phonetic Punctuation piece and the Inflationary Language speech.

Anyway, I dunno if the deal's being offered on other stations — I'm watching KOCE at the moment — but if you love Borge, you might want to keep an eye out for it. And do watch for this special because even if it repeats some of those same bits — including, yes, Phonetic Punctuation and Inflationary Language — it's got a lot of material not available elsewhere. (For those in Southern California: KOCE is running it again this Saturday evening and the following Saturday…and KCET is running it this Saturday. And I notice KOCE is going to be running the Frost-Nixon interview on Watergate — the real one — on Wednesday evening, January 6 at 9 PM. It's not in the TiVo listings for that night but their website says it's on and websites are never wrong.)