Roger Catlin | TV Eye

Inside Scoop, Ho Hum

During the twice a year press tour, I’m always amazed at how so many of my fellow TV writers gather around the network executives, not so much to pepper them with probing questions as to bask in their wisdom – to glean an insight into programming, to eke out an insult at another network, or hear once more the inside story behind some big show contract negotiation.

I often thought it was my own inability to grasp the importance of counter programming Thursdays at 9, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Especially when there were free drinks and starlets around to bother.

The only time I ever hung around to eavesdrop is when Janice Dickinson, dripping from the hotel pool, approached CBS Pooh-Bah Les Moonves and tried to engage him in conversation (apparently once they had had a thing, someone told me). Les avoided her like a plague with plastic surgery.

Another time I approached Jeff Zucker to question the whole wisdom of “Father of the Pride,” the expensive animated comedy he was so high on. I told him the only group who would really want to see fuzzy animals were kids, and they definitely weren’t the appropriate ears for all its randy dialog (Result: he looked at me blankly as if to say, “Where are you from again?”

Anyway, one of the guys who is in love with this kind of insider stuff even when it isn’t very interesting is Bill Carter, whose new book “Desperate Networks” (Doubleday, $26.95), covering developments in network TV or the last few years, is about as fresh as last year’s newspapers.

The Clown and the Holocaust

My big score at the Friends of the Prosser Public Library book sale in Bloomfield Monday was the fifty cent hardcover “Clown: My Life in Tatters and Smiles” (Prentice Hall, 1954), with an autograph from the droopy faced author himself, Emmet Kelly.

An apparently popular memoir in its time (it was in its third printing a month after its first) his “story of struggle and success, of disappointment and triumph” (according to the book jacket) includes of course several pages of the devastating Hartford Circus Fire 10 years earlier that he both played and survived (drinking his sorrows at the Bond Hotel afterwards).

The book jacket calls the incident “the terrible holocaust that destroyed the Big Top,” which shows you how long a half century really is (what with holocaust used to describe a terrible fire; it’s also weird to see Holocaust in lower case and big top in upper).

There are several pictures of the famous clown in various antic poses in the book, but not the classic picture of him frantically carrying a water bucket as flames flickered behind him. As he explained in the book,

There was nothing I could do with it because the tent was burning too high from the ground and the flame was spreading.

Kelly was told by a clown name Willie that everybody got out safe…

But Willie was mistaken about that. He was wrong by a count of one hundred sixty-eight.

Zippy By the Index

Just got the latest compendium of Zippy the Pinhead comic strips, “Type Z Personality,” reminding me once again what a miracle this daily dose of absurdity and non sequitirs and splendid commercial architecture can be.

But as fun as it is to read the strips again (and remember so many of them) is that the collections on Fantagraphics which used to be called Annuals, include valuable indexes that pinpoint the diners, roadside attractions and even references to many of the non-sequitirs.