The Revolution WILL Be Televised, After 2:30 In The Morning
Transcript
00:00Most Stowbilly children, especially teenagers, knew that the really good stuff didn't show up on TV until at least 11.30 on a Friday night.
00:09That's when Channel 8 in Cleveland handed over the reins to a weatherman and a broadcast engineer, a.k.a. Houlihan and Big Chuck.
00:17Houlihan and Big Chuck's show was an amalgamation of schlocky horror movies, song parodies, certain ethnic jokes, and sketch comedy clearly filmed on the cheap with someone else's equipment.
00:29It was pure camp, but we watched every last minute of it, all the way to the last segment where Houlihan and Big Chuck, dressed in tacky animal print pajamas, would read jokes submitted by their loyal viewers.
00:43We needed to hear these jokes because we would inevitably be retelling them at school on Monday morning.
00:48By the end of the broadcast, we would be too exhausted to move from the couch to the TV set, so we just let it run.
00:55We just let it run.
01:00The end of Houlihan and Big Chuck may have signaled the final gasp of local programming, but it was not the end of late-night television as we knew it.
01:08Our sleep-deprived Midwestern minds could still be blown by the rock concerts featured on another channel.
01:15It may have been Don Kirshner's rock concert or the Midnight Special, like any of us could tell the difference at one in the morning.
01:23Whichever show it was, Cousin It and the Cousin It Band were usually getting down with their bad selves on a smoke-filled stage.
01:31All I remember is that they were scary to watch, but clearly devoted to their craft.
01:36They may have been the Allman Brothers. They may have been Blue Oyster Cult.
01:41They may have even been the Doobie Brothers or Foghat, but whatever it was, it was clearly a taste of music from the land of cool people.
01:50It's just too bad we weren't nearly awake enough to let sonic art wash over us.
01:55For those of us whose parents did not believe in the beauty of cable television, another late-night music show became our own version of MTV.
02:03NBC would show two hours of last year's hottest videos, but we didn't care.
02:08We got to see Adam Ant and Cyndi Lauper and Talking Heads and, well, those other guys with the hair.
02:15I think they had synthesizers, but don't quote me on that.
02:18While the midnight special and rock concert may have an abundance of soul, the late-night video show on NBC had the promise of a Madonna-like product, sir.
02:28Life for a bleary-eyed stowbilly boy became much better as soon as he learned a go-go or bangle or Benatar would play a significant role in it.
02:38With the arrival of home VCRs, the late-night music video show became one of the first things we learned to program on the timer.
02:45Meanwhile, the comedy was still going strong on other channels, even if it took a turn to the left.
02:52If Saturday Night Live was the best American late-night sketchcock comedy of its day, then SCTV was its hipper Canadian cousin.
03:00The cast of SCTV read like a who's who of comedy, from John Candy to Rick Moranis to Eugene Levy, with stops in between for Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Joe Flaherty, and Catherine O'Hara.
03:12SCTV, which stood for Second City Television, had the luxury of taping their segments over time, but they still maintained a sense of immediacy like Saturday Night Live.
03:23Characters like Doug and Bob McKenzie, horror show host Count Floyd, and the Five Neat Guys became the stuff of legend.
03:31If another kid at school quoted the Farm Film Report, he blowed up, he blowed up real good, then you knew he was hip to the same late-night jive.
03:39It was one thing to stay up until the pajama jokes on Houlihan and Big Chuck, but something else entirely if you stayed up until the end credits of SCTV.
03:49There were many Sunday mornings when devoted SCTVers would drag themselves to church or simply call in sick and sleep until noon.
03:57There were other shows on network television that would have clearly been out of place at any other time.
04:04Some of us still remember The Uncle Floyd Show, which was undoubtedly the strangest half-hour of the night.
04:10Uncle Floyd, as some of us discovered later, worked the same alternative comedy venues as Paul Rubens, a.k.a. Pee Wee Herman.
04:19His show could loosely be described as a talk show, although his guests were not generally known for their conversational skills, and his personal sidekick spent the entire show in a catatonic stupor.
04:32What made The Uncle Floyd Show so entertaining was the fact that it just showed up at 2 or 3 in the morning and was never actually listed in the local TV guide.
04:41This turned an otherwise avant-garde comedy show into a how-did-this-show-get-a-time-slot, subversive act of programming.
04:49Occasionally, the original Pee Wee Herman show, which should never be mistaken for the sanitized CBS version, would also show up on extremely late-night television.
05:00Pee Wee's show often showcased the alternative, edgy, dark comedians and performers our parents should have warned us about.
05:08Yes, there really was a band called The Plasmatics. Yes, there really was a 2.30 in the morning.
05:14No, The Plasmatics and 2.30 in the morning shouldn't be in the same sentence when you're 12 years old and hopped up on Doritos and cheap soda.
05:23Whenever extremely late-night network television would fail us, there was always the audio-visual toss-up known as UHF.
05:31If the local UHF channels, like WAB 43 or Channel 61, hadn't already called it a night, they would usually show grade-Z horror movies, like Attack of the Wasp Woman or The Flesh Eaters.
05:44I'm saying it now, this was a miscalculation of epic proportions.
05:49The Flesh Eaters plot revolved around a group of very unpleasant people who survived a plane crash and were now trapped on a deserted island.
05:57Unbeknownst to them, but plenty be-knownst to the 12-year-old audience, they were also surrounded by alien flesh-eating bacteria.
06:05One unprotected step into the water and it would be a bubbly, fluorescent kind of death for someone.
06:12The only member of the cast I was hoping would go flesh-eater-free was the plane's pilot, who reminded me of the guy who should have gotten the role of the professor on Gilligan's Island.
06:23As it turned out, he did indeed escape the island, after figuring out a way to electrocute the little alien buggers in bulk.
06:31Creepy, creepy movie.
06:34The other UHF channels held their own after-hours charm, including the public television station that decided to broadcast the next day's object lessons during the wee smalls.
06:43At three in the morning, even first-grade math was a challenge.
06:47Another UHF channel, clearly from a distant location, showed fuzzy reruns of shows like Mr. Ed and the Munsters, two shows that are far too high-concept at three in the morning.
06:59The freakiest opening credit of a television show ever has got to be the creepy marionette Lucille Ball dancing her way through Here's Lucy.
07:08Wrong, wrong, wrong.
07:11One dirty little secret about UHF channels and the Stowbilly Boys who watch them is about to be revealed.
07:17One UHF channel decided to dip its toe in the paid television market, which would include adult movies with adult content.
07:24Their plan was to scramble their signal at a certain time at night, then offer de-scrambling devices to paid subscribers.
07:32Our plan, however, was to hope the engineer in charge of scrambling the signal would either shirk his duties or call in sick.
07:40The scrambled signal would be vaguely watchable, if a wavy, soundless negative of a picture could be defined as watchable.
07:48We didn't care, as long as we could see flashes of wavy, negative breasts on an actress with black teeth.
07:54The station insisted on showing cheaply produced European sex comedies from the 1970s, most of which were based on familiar fairy tales.
08:03The experiment didn't last more than a few years, but during that time, many of us received an incomplete education that would require years of careful de-scrambling.