Monthly Archives: February 2013

One of my best friends, Scott Shaw!, tells the famous story of his entry into the costume competition at the World Science-Fiction Convention in 1972. What he says happened actually happened. I know. I was there.  In fact, I kicked in a couple of bucks towards the peanut butter that made it all possible…

From Bill Mullins comes some research that shows that The Lohman and Barkley Show was on and off the air a lot earlier than I estimated…

The L.A. Times for Feb 8 1969 says "Locally, Channel 4 Sunday at 11:30 [this would be Feb 9, 1969] premieres the Lohman and Barkley Show, a weekly 90-minute bash featuring comedy, music, interviews and guest stars hosted by Al Lohman and Roger Barkley. Singer-puppeteer Shari Lewis guests."

They got a local Emmy in 1970, and again in 1971. In late summer 1970, they moved from Sunday night to Saturday night.

The last broadcast I can find in the L.A. Times TV listings is Tues Feb 23 1971, a rerun.

Douglas McEwan mentioned being in the studio with Lohman the night Nixon snagged the G.O.P. nomination. That was August 6, 1968. If they were indeed taping on that date then the show sat on the shelf for quite a while before NBC began airing them. Perhaps they were just doing a pilot in August and didn't commence weekly production until later. In an article Bill sent me, Lohman is quoted as saying, "We started it…as a sort of pilot project. Channel 4 [the NBC station in L.A.] gave us an open-end show following the Democratic and Republican conventions, and it turned into a comedy series."

(Douglas, by the way, has a new book out that I hear is quite outrageously funny. It's called Tallyho, Tallulah! and here's a link to get your mitts on a copy. He's a very clever writer, he is.)

Douglas remembered the show being an hour. I remembered it being 90 minutes and the above quote says 90 minutes. Further research says both answers are sorta wrong. They made 40 half-hour shows but formatted them in such a way that two could be combined to play as an hour show or three could look like a 90-minute one. The format was so loose and unpredictable that that was possible. I believe it played on Channel 4 as both an hour and a 90-minute show.

As I've written before, I believe this series had something to do with the eventual appearance of Saturday Night Live in that time slot. Notice above where it says they moved it from Sunday to Saturday. That meant that the Saturday Tonight Show (reruns of Mr. Carson) was bumped to Sunday nights. Not long after, as more and more stations relocated them to the less-preferable night, Johnny informed NBC that he wanted to dump the weekend reruns. That prompted NBC to start developing something new for Saturday nights at 11:30 and I can't believe they didn't look at the semi-impressive numbers attained by The Lohman and Barkley Show and find some encouragement.

In the meantime, several folks have written me to note that there is one clip from the series on YouTube — an interview with Gisele MacKenzie. I'm not going to embed it because it's not a good example of what the series was but if you want to take a look at it, here it is.

I asked here the other day about a local (L.A.) musician named Stan Worth who among other appearances, was the bandleader on a number of local talk shows. Douglas McEwan writes about one of them…

OK, here's something else about Stan Worth. In the late 1960s, Lohman & Barkley had a TV show on local KNBC on late night Saturdays, what would become SNL's time slot but only an hour long. A number of later-famous people were regular writer-performers on it: McLean Stevenson, Craig T. Nelson, Rudy De Luca, Barry Levinson. The show is so obscure that it appears on none of these people's IMDb resumes, not even Lohman's or Barkley's. I was a friend of Al and Rog's from my junior year of high school on, and eventually wrote for them (though not for this TV show), so I was often present for the tapings. (I recall being in the studio with them the night Nixon got the Republican nomination. I recall Al's "Son-of-a-BITCH!" when Nixon got the nod.) There was no audience, just me staying out of the way of the cameras. It was shot just down the hall from Laugh-In. So while I could not really say I knew Stan, I did meet him at tapings many times.

Anyway, The Stan Worth Trio was the house band on the show, and so, along with George of the Jungle (which Stan performed on the show), Stan wrote the theme song for the show, for which Al & Rog penned the lyrics.

During the run of the show, Stan was suddenly afflicted by a disease called, I think, Bell's Palsey, which paralyzed half of his face, and made his speech slurry. It lasted a few months, but they did talk about it on the air, as they had really no choice, since it was clear there was somethihng wrong with his face and his speech that hadn't been before. He did fully recover from it.

So that's all I know about Stan Worth.

Man, I miss Al Lohman. The tenth anniversary of his passing was this past October.

Yeah, I've written before here about that Lohman & Barkley TV show. The two of them were pleasant but not revolutionary in their radio work…basically two more of hundreds of guys out there doing Bob & Ray. But that short-lived TV series, which I think was seen only on the NBC owned-'n'-operated stations and not even all of them, was one of the funniest, cleverest television comedy shows I've ever seen. I would want to see it again before I said it was on the level of, say, Ernie Kovacs or Monty Python…but if it was as good as I recall, it was in that league.

I haven't seen it since its original airings, which I believe were around 1973 or 1974. In an earlier post here about the show, I said '74 but if Laugh-In was taping down the hall, that would suggest '73 or earlier since Laugh-In stopped taping forever early in '73.

People later credited David Letterman with "deconstructing" the talk show form but that series really did it…and did it before he did. Among its premises was that Lohman and Barkley were self-admitted bad interviewers of their guests. I don't think they asked a real question during the entire run of the show. They'd fumble about and get things wrong and just make a shambles out of every interview. Something went horribly wrong in every one of them, including the time they accidentally killed their first guest, Pat Paulsen, and left his dead body on the stage there as they brought out subsequent guests.

One time, they had Steve Allen on…and it was obvious Steverino had only been minimally briefed on what was going to happen. Allen had often on his shows spoken of his best friend from high school, whose name was Niles Lishness. I don't guarantee that spelling but that was the fellow's name and it turned up often in sketches and bits on The Steve Allen Show. Lohman and Barkley, with considerable fanfare, announced that at considerable expense, they had tracked down Steve's old friend and flown him out to Hollywood for a thrilling on-air reunion. Then they brought him out, he didn't recognize Steve…

…and it was quickly determined that they'd brought out the wrong Niles Lishness.

Lohman and Barkley played absolutely deadpan straight, apologizing for the error…and Steve Allen, who hadn't seen the punchline coming, got hysterical as only Steve Allen could. Finally, when Steve stopped laughing, Al and Roger said that they had a gift for Steve to apologize for the dreadful error they'd made. They'd commissioned a top artist to create a portrait of Steve's spouse and they brought it out and unveiled "…this painting of your lovely wife, Audrey Meadows." Allen collapsed again in laughter at the painting of his sister-in-law and it was one of the funniest things I ever saw on television.

There were loads of spots like that and boy, I wish I could see those shows again. The last time I mentioned it here, someone wrote to tell me they'd heard all those tapes had been wiped and there were no copies of any episodes in existence. The Paley Center (I checked) doesn't have any. If they were a third as good as I remember, a real treasure has been lost.

Here's a story from yesterday's CBS Sunday Whatever program: A recollection of the great hotels of the Catskills and a look at a current off-Broadway show that is keeping some of their spirit alive. Thanks to Anthony Tollin and several others for letting me know about this…but Anthony was the first.

You'll see a comedian in there named Stewie Stone. If Stewie Stone doesn't hold some sort of longevity record for stand-up comedians, he will soon. He's been at this forever and he's still performing.

In 1978, I was the head writer on a Bobby Vinton special for CBS. The network flew me and two other writers back to meet with Bobby and see him perform at the Mill Run Playhouse in Niles, Illinois. His opening act was Stewie Stone…and Stewie had been doing it for years by then. He was one of those guys — and there have never been many of them — who expertly mastered the art of being an opening act: He kept the audience entertained for a solid twenty minutes and then finished his set right on time without having in any way upstaged the star to follow. That is only meant as a compliment.

Headliners who tour or play casinos now rarely have opening acts. In some cases, the headliner is on some sort of deal where the cost of the opening act will come out of his take so he figures, "Why spend that money?" In others, they've just found that the opening act doesn't matter insofar as ticket sales are concerned. The folks who might spend $250 a seat to see Rod Stewart are not going to say, "Hey, let's go! Rod has Stewie Stone on the bill." Nowadays, if your name can sell tickets, you're the headliner.

So now here's a flashback to the days of the Borscht Belt…

We may soon see the end of the ban on using certain electronic devices upon takeoff of aircraft…and using others at all during a flight. Why? Because there doesn't seem to be any evidence that can interfere in any way with the plane's safety.

In case you can't go a week without seeing an awards show, you can watch the Writers Guild Awards tonight…but only on the 'net. Starting around 6 PM, they'll be live-streamed at this site.

I have only been to one Writers Guild Award show in my life and I only went because Gore Vidal was the guest speaker. As it turned out, Vidal was disappointingly brief and had absolutely nothing of interest to say. I did however find myself seated next to a fascinating gent named Alan Alda. I'd go again if I could be sure I'd be next to him. He was especially entertaining right after they announced the category in which he didn't win but felt he should have.

But a lot of folks love this show, which has grown larger and more star-studded since the one I attended. You might want to peek in…and while you're at it, remember how in the last strike, we settled for a contract that pays us almost nothing when our work is streamed on the Internet.

Ken Levine turns his blog over to the 21st President of these United States. Turns out he's even funnier than Ken is.

William M. Gaines, the founding publisher of MAD, explains the history of Alfred E. Neuman…

Rod Dreher on Cardinal Mahony's magnanimous gesture of forgiveness. Who is he forgiving? Why, people who are irate at his handling of clergy sex abuse cases, of course. Imagine being upset to learn than some of the highest officials of your church have been covering up that kind of thing. Poor, misguided souls.

I don't pretend to know everything about Catholicism. At times, I feel like I don't know anything about it. Those are the times when I encounter folks who insist they are good, solid Catholics and that their religion and whoever's Pope at the moment are infallible and true…but they practice birth control, cheer on the Death Penalty, etc. It looks like a movement where the flock ain't listening to the shepherd — which is fine with me. I'm all for independent thinking. I just think it must be wrenching and frustrating to pledge your life to a faith, then to have your heart tell you it's wrong about this or that…and then to have it embarrass you like it has.

In the meantime, Cardinal Mahony will be heading for Rome shortly to help elect the new Pope. That'll be after Mahony finishes his next round of depositions about enabling pedophilia and child rape…and probably forgiving more people who are outraged about the cover-up.

Fred Kaplan doesn't think Republicans can be trusted anymore to do what's right for the country in terms of National Security. I think Fred Kaplan's right, at least with regard to the current G.O.P. leadership.

For no particular reason, I got to thinking recently about Stan Worth, a singer-musician-composer who was a bit of a celebrity in Los Angeles in the sixties and seventies. This post will tell you everything I think I know about him and I'm hoping it will prompt others to offer additions and/or corrections.

I believe the guy I'm talking about was Stan Worth Jr. and that he followed in the footsteps of his father, Stan Worth Sr., who was a popular New York lounge performer in the forties and fifties. Senior reportedly did a twenty-year stint at the Hotel Pierre following a long tour of duty with Peter Duchin's orchestra. Junior worked the same club beat on the opposite coast, playing local nightspots. Here's an ad from 1967 for a place called the Ruddy Duck which was located out in the valley in one of those buildings that was a different restaurant or nightclub every few years for a decade or two. There's now an insurance company at that address.

It seems to me the Stan Worth Trio was always playing somewhere during my childhood. I never saw them or him live but Mr. Worth seems to have been that rare lounge act that ever did anything else. He gained a following and managed to get hired for an awful lot of TV jobs. Probably everyone reading this can recall and sing the theme song for Jay Ward's cartoon show, George of the Jungle. It was written and performed by Stan Worth and so were the themes for the other segments on that show, Super Chicken and Tom Slick. Here's Stan Worth with the George of the Jungle song. I think Bill Scott did George's jungle yells and everything else is Stan Worth and his crew…

He also did a lot of game show themes including Let's Make a Deal, Hollywood Squares and High Rollers. He had bit parts in a number of TV shows and movies, usually playing a lounge pianist, but I became most aware of him for two things. One was a series of very funny singing commercials he did for the White Front department stores. They're all gone now but there were once a bunch of them around Southern California selling things cheaper than anyone. The commercials were just Stan sitting at a piano and singing of the glories of White Front and I thought they were wonderful.

The other thing he did was this: During the late sixties and early seventies, there were numerous attempts in L.A. television to create talk shows in the style of Johnny Carson's, the idea being that the show might start on local TV but could then go national. None of them did but on every one that had a band, the band seemed to be the Stan Worth Trio with a few additional members.

Stan Worth died in a plane crash in 1980. That's everything I know about him. I'm hoping someone reading this will have something to add.

That's my friend Shelly Goldstein and, yes, that's her real hair. It's not some cheap wig she put on for a photo to promote her show, One Fine Day: The Groovy Girls of the Sixties. This tribute to the warblings of Lesley Gore, Janis Joplin, Carole King, Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark, Mama Cass and other fab femmes of that decade is happening in L.A. for one night — next Tuesday, February 19 — at the Catalina Bar and Grill in Hollywood. Usually, Shelly performs it in England or other places far from my town. Tickets are going fast so if you're in the area and want to be ruthlessly entertained, get yours now. You can snag a deuce (or however many you want) at this website. Hope to see you there.

The other day here, I said I didn't understand why the backers of a new high-speed rail system to Las Vegas had decided to make it run between that town and Victorville, CA. Jennifer Hachigian Jerrard, a reader of this here site, did some Googling or Binging or whatever she did to find this article that says the idea is to ferry folks from the Inland Empire (a section of California) there. I don't know that I buy this explanation but there it is.

Why we love Elizabeth Warren…

Take a moment and experience this blog post by Disney Legend Floyd Norman. (Being named a Disney Legend was the second greatest honor Floyd ever received. The first was when I hired him to draw Jabberjaw comic book stories to be published in Rangoon.) He writes about his experience on the movie, Sleeping Beauty. For that matter, almost everything on Floyd's blog is worth reading.