THE CHAT SHOW FORMAT WAS ORIGINALLY intended as a forum for entertainers to seem like reasonably pleasant and likeable folk so that we would buy their sometimes dodgy products, and, naturally, this has always attracted politicians, eager as they are to be liked, yet having nothing at all to offer anyone except things that belong to someone else.
SO I WAS SOMEWHAT SURPRISED by the media reporting that when beaming Barack Obama appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno this week it was the first time that an active US president has been on a chat programme. Every American president has appeared on Jay Leno’s programme since it started broadcasting as The James D. Leno Show in Schenectady, New York, in 1765, where it remained until it moved to California in 1848, with a brief stint in Rhode Island during the prohibition years.
OF COURSE THE TECHNOLOGY needed to see the show in the past was beyond the average budget, but I have recordings of all the shows, except the one involving President Nixon, the tape of which I seem to have misplaced, and I often re-run them in the living room on a pleasant Saturday evening in the company of my wife and children.
SO I WAS SOMEWHAT SURPRISED by the media reporting that when beaming Barack Obama appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno this week it was the first time that an active US president has been on a chat programme. Every American president has appeared on Jay Leno’s programme since it started broadcasting as The James D. Leno Show in Schenectady, New York, in 1765, where it remained until it moved to California in 1848, with a brief stint in Rhode Island during the prohibition years.
OF COURSE THE TECHNOLOGY needed to see the show in the past was beyond the average budget, but I have recordings of all the shows, except the one involving President Nixon, the tape of which I seem to have misplaced, and I often re-run them in the living room on a pleasant Saturday evening in the company of my wife and children.
GREAT MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY took place live on air with Mr. Leno. Who will ever forget Washington trying to sell his plough, Lincoln, who was allowed to do the monologue “at the top of the show”, when Kennedy announced the space race (“We will win because our Germans are better than the Russians’ Germans”) and when Gerald Ford misread his cue-card and announced, “Stay tuned for conman.”?
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