Enotes

I feel sorry for those who never got a chance to see "Truth or Consequences." I don't mean the town in New Mexico , either. I'm thinking of "T or C" this morning amid the news that host Bob Barker is in the hospital after a fall near his Southern California home. "Truth" didn't give Barker, 91, his start in broadcasting, but it put him on television for the first time. And there Bob stayed for some 51 years. It was game show---and reality TV, if you want to know the truth---pioneer Ralph Edwards who passed the torch of "Truth" to Barker, in 1956. Edwards created "Truth" on the radio in 1940. The premise was wacky yet simple. The show was among the first "audience participation" offerings of the day. Regular folks would have to answer an obscure trivia question---always designed for the contestant to fail---and when the answer was wrong, there would be consequences. These usually came in the form of w...

Tim Allen isn't the second coming of Mel Blanc. He isn't the next "Man of 1,000 Voices," as Blanc was known. But Allen is the "Man of 1,000 Places," as in, his voice seems to be everywhere. You can't escape Allen these days. He's in your car, voicing "Pure Michigan" ads. And he's certainly all over your television, lending his voice to Chevrolet and Campbell's Soup ads. He's in your DVD cases, as Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story movie franchise. And, I am happy to report, Allen's face is on TV now, too, and has been, as Mike Baxter in ABC's Last Man Standing , a sitcom heading into its third season this fall. Good for Allen; readers of this blog may remember this piece I did on that show when it was set to debut, hoping for its success as Allen returned to the small screen after a 14-year absence. But it's Allen's voice that goes to show that there's a lot of money in reading copy into a microphone ...

What is becoming increasingly clear in the fallout of the misogynist remarks made by conservative wonk Rush Limbaugh is that the Republican Party is about to place in nomination for the most important, most treacherous job in the world, a man who doesn't have the courage to stand up to a talk radio host. So how can we expect the GOP nominee, as president, to stand up to the bullies, dictators and other ne'er-do-wells that exist on this planet? Answer: we can't. They say silence is deafening, and in the case of Limbaugh and his attack on Georgetown student Sandra Fluke, the silence has managed to be louder than Limbaugh himself---and that's not easy to do. Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich have each offered tepid, milquetoast responses to Limbaugh, who called Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute," while also calling for the young woman to produce sex tapes. All because Fluke had the temerity to want to testify on Capitol Hill about the Universi...

Starting next Monday, hundreds of thousands of metro Detroit women will have to start talking to their husbands again on weekday mornings. For 45 years, they've been waking up with Dick Purtan--until Friday, when the radio veteran hangs up his microphone. For over three decades, the women around town got their news from Bill Bonds at 11:00 p.m., went to bed with Johnny Carson, and woke up with either Purtan or J.P. McCarthy. But then Johnny retired in 1992, Bonds left channel 7 in 1995, and J.P. passed away later that same year. That left Purtan as the last true media giant in Detroit. And, maybe, the last we'll ever know. Longtime radio observers like Specs Howard Institute's Dick Kernen disagree with me. Kernen says that as long as someone "has the magic, like Dick, to create quality content," then "personality radio" will stick around, despite that medium's changing landscape. As much as I'd like to believe that, I'm not as confident as Ke...

If you made a list of some of the most confounding, bizarre people to ever grace our radio and TV waves -- at least in the Detroit area -- then no doubt that list would include Howard Stern and...The Ghoul? Those forces once collided, but more on that in a moment. First, The Ghoul. I won't spend a lot of time on the describing here, because I'm going to play a hunch and presume that most of the folks whose eyeballs are hitting this blog know who The Ghoul is/was. But, just in case... The Ghoul was a Saturday night icon on Detroit TV, circa the early-1970s and beyond (off and on). He showed lousy movies, but the movies were the interludes between his comedy bits, which included a stuffed frog and lots of Cheese Whiz. The stuffed frog was Froggy, and even he became iconic, thanks to The Ghoul. The Ghoul used terms like "over day" and "don't you know." He had something he called "The Ghoul's Vault of Golden Garbage," with garbage pronounced ...