Forgotten television shows: volume six

I remember when we first got cable. This is back when you actually had people from the cable company coming door to door and pitching the very idea of cable to you. Getting cable meant that you would have this whole world of cable channels available to you. Which mainly showed reruns of shows that you’ve already seen, strange religious broadcasting and Australian Rules Football. Unless you had Showtime and then it was “All Gallagher, All The Time.” But we were different, we had HBO. And that meant that we had…

Not Necessarily the News

(Also known as The Daily Show fifteen years prior to The Daily Show or Not the Nine O’Clock News ten years later and not British)

It was a combination news parody/sketch comedy show. But, since it was pre-taped months in advance it couldn’t be cutting edge political commentary. Instead you touched upon those old reliable items like “Unrest in the Middle East”, “Reagan is an idiot” and “Make fun of suburbia.” A lot of the show mirrored what the Daily Show does today. A news set serves as the backdrop for stories from field reporters that get more and more bizarre as the show goes on. They would also drop in taped pieces, editing news footage with overdubbed commentary. It was basic and simple but it really worked.

And you can’t forget the most lasting contribution of the show, Rich Hall’s Sniglets. Yes, the words that aren’t in the dictionary but should be. Like Esso Asso, the guy who will drive through a gas station to avoid a red light. Again, I can’t recall Maxwell’s equations for the life of me but I’ve always remembered that definition. I’m not saying that this was high comedy but remember, for a time you could walk into any bookstore in the country (or at least any mall bookstore) and find a collection of Sniglets waiting for you in the humor section.

I guess my point about mentioning this show is not about any one sketch or personality (because seriously, how much can one say about Stuart Patankin) but because it really drove my sense of humor and my writing style. It was one of those shows that I watched when I was ten and was happy that I watched the news enough that I got a lot of the jokes. And I found that being irreverent worked and that you should never take the real world too seriously. Combine that with shows like You Can’t Do That on Television, and The Muppet Show (out on DVD today) and the Monkees and Monty Python and you can see where my wit and writing style comes from. All of those shows are literate without every really showing it and all play with the conventions of normal storytelling. They joke about the conventions and play with them. But all of them held up a mirror to the world, saw what was wrong, and made people aware of it through humor. On my best day, I hope to come close to achieving that. I miss a lot of the time, but I at least try.