Bad things on TV, then and now.

[rocketeer]

In the past there was good TV and bad as in all era's including these modern days.
Yesterday I viewed a modern program and could not really think why they made it.
Doctor Pimple Popper!
Just why would a TV company make a series about squeezing peoples boils and zits where puss erupts in close up like Mount Etna spewing lava. As I say in my opening line there were both good and bad TV but I can't think anything as rubbish TV from the past as bad as this.
John.

 

[GHT]

100 Vaginas, a recent program about the vulva, and there was me thinking that I was going to watch a program about Swedish motor cars.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-...empowering-spread-of-the-legs-laura-dodsworth

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Pimple popping" videos have been a fad on Yoo Toob for several years now. It's an obsession that some people have with boils, cysts, blackheads, festers, ingrown hairs, and extruded pus. Go figure. I've got a sore on my leg right now that, if it gets any worse, might be good for 13 weeks on TLC.

Pretty much all the bizarre stuff you see on TV nowadays is an attempt to capture some odd internet niche or other. If there's a way to monetize it, the Boys from Marketing are there to do it.

I'm not sure, though, that even a six hour pimple-popping marathon could approach the smarmy horror that was "Queen For A Day," an audience participation program that had excruciating runs on US radio and television in the late forties and early fifties. The object of this monstrosity of human degradation was to parade unfortunate women before the microphone -- those dying of incurable diseases, destitute widows, starving single mothers, maimed accident victims, etc. -- and have the audience vote on whose story was the most gut-wrenching. The lucky winner would receive a new Bendix automatic washing machine, a sable coat, a full suite of Presdwood furniture, and a year's supply of Aerowax. And a great big hand from our audience for being such a real, game American.

 

[3fingers]

There has always been absolute dreck available posing as entertainment, albeit without pus and drainage. I have heard of the program but haven't seen it.
The "golden years" of Hollywood are much shinier in memory. Among the great pictures we all love is a lot of truly forgettable stuff that nobody remembers or watches for good reason.

 

[rocketeer]

Pretty much all the bizarre stuff you see on TV nowadays is an attempt to capture some odd internet niche or other. If there's a way to monetize it, the Boys from Marketing are there to do it.

I'm not sure, though, that even a six hour pimple-popping marathon could approach the smarmy horror that was "Queen For A Day," an audience participation program that had excruciating runs on US radio and television in the late forties and early fifties. The object of this monstrosity of human degradation was to parade unfortunate women before the microphone -- those dying of incurable diseases, destitute widows, starving single mothers, maimed accident victims, etc. -- and have the audience vote on whose story was the most gut-wrenching. The lucky winner would receive a new Bendix automatic washing machine, a sable coat, a full suite of Presdwood furniture, and a year's supply of Aerowax. And a great big hand from our audience for being such a real, game American.

Yes I guess if there is a potential audience and money can be made the TV producers will say 'Go for it!'

Wow Lizzie that "Queen for a day" really scrapes the barrel. I got into trouble on a Talk about anything Friday late night 'phone in' for complaining about 'Death disc's" on the airwaves. I said "All these trash recordings should be consigned to the bin as soon as they were written". My subjects in question were Red Sovine's Teddy Bear CB recording, Danny Mirror's I remember Elvis Presley, and 3 Stars and, a song about the Buddy Holly air crash. As the call gained momentum other's phoned in about how this song and that song had changed their lives it appeared to be a similar theme on who had the saddest tale to tell.
After a few more calls about how heartless I must be the Disc Jockey played us out with a "Just for You Johnny I will play this...... I know you'll enjoy singing along" and played The Cheers version of Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle boots(The terror of highway 101).
Thanks, J.

 

[ChiTownScion]

"Pimple popping" videos have been a fad on Yoo Toob for several years now. It's an obsession that some people have with boils, cysts, blackheads, festers, ingrown hairs, and extruded pus. Go figure. I've got a sore on my leg right now that, if it gets any worse, might be good for 13 weeks on TLC.

Pretty much all the bizarre stuff you see on TV nowadays is an attempt to capture some odd internet niche or other. If there's a way to monetize it, the Boys from Marketing are there to do it.

I'm not sure, though, that even a six hour pimple-popping marathon could approach the smarmy horror that was "Queen For A Day," an audience participation program that had excruciating runs on US radio and television in the late forties and early fifties. The object of this monstrosity of human degradation was to parade unfortunate women before the microphone -- those dying of incurable diseases, destitute widows, starving single mothers, maimed accident victims, etc. -- and have the audience vote on whose story was the most gut-wrenching. The lucky winner would receive a new Bendix automatic washing machine, a sable coat, a full suite of Presdwood furniture, and a year's supply of Aerowax. And a great big hand from our audience for being such a real, game American.

I remember the host of the show. A really oily character named Jack Bailey.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Queen" even had a knock-off imitation called "Strike It Rich," which encouraged desperate people to send in a written litany of the terrible things that happened in their lives. Those submitting the most pathetic stories would be selected to appear on the program and participate in a quiz segment in order to qualify for prizes, an arrangement not unlike trying to make a starving dog do a trick in exchange for a bone. If they failed the quiz, the program host would invite listeners at home to call in with donations for the by-now-fully-degraded destitute person.

Critics of "The American Way" noted that programs like this revealed the casual exploitative brutality at the heart of said Way, and they had a point.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There has always been absolute dreck available posing as entertainment, albeit without pus and drainage. I have heard of the program but haven't seen it.
The "golden years" of Hollywood are much shinier in memory. Among the great pictures we all love is a lot of truly forgettable stuff that nobody remembers or watches for good reason.

When you read movie-industry trade magazines of the Era you'll see mentions of hundreds and hundreds of pictures you've never heard of -- not just junk ground out by fly-by-night Poverty Row companies, but even pictures from the major studios. Some of the latter you used to see in local-TV film packages, which sold the great pictures, the good pictures, and the drek in non-negotiable bulk, requiring the purchaser to take them all or take none, just as the block-booking system had required theatres in the Era to take all or none.

But since "old movies" stopped being mainstream TV entertainment and evolved into specialist fare for buffs and cineastes, all these junky pictures have been tossed back into the vault, and the only place you see them is TCM or, occasionally, You Tube. These kinds of pictures generally aren't monstrously awful, and if you watch only one at a time once in a while you might feel like "hey, even the worst of the Era is better than the schlock of today." But I challenge anyone anywhere to watch a dozen B westerns or B melodramas in a single sitting and emerge from the experience with such an attitude. About the third one in, you'll realize that other than having different bland-faced, utterly generic actors going thru the motions, they're really all the same picture.

The same thing is true of radio shows. I love radio as a creative medium, and I love much of what came out of radio in its prime, but I'm also the first one to admit the massive amount of trite, reptitious trash it cranked out. There are over two thousand episodes of "The Lone Ranger" that have survived, and I know people, grown adults yet, who have listened to every single one. And all I can say is "Why?"

 

[Fading Fast]

When you read movie-industry trade magazines of the Era you'll see mentions of hundreds and hundreds of pictures you've never heard of -- not just junk ground out by fly-by-night Poverty Row companies, but even pictures from the major studios. Some of the latter you used to see in local-TV film packages, which sold the great pictures, the good pictures, and the drek in non-negotiable bulk, requiring the purchaser to take them all or take none, just as the block-booking system had required theatres in the Era to take all or none.

But since "old movies" stopped being mainstream TV entertainment and evolved into specialist fare for buffs and cineastes, all these junky pictures have been tossed back into the vault, and the only place you see them is TCM or, occasionally, You Tube. These kinds of pictures generally aren't monstrously awful, and if you watch only one at a time once in a while you might feel like "hey, even the worst of the Era is better than the schlock of today." But I challenge anyone anywhere to watch a dozen B westerns or B melodramas in a single sitting and emerge from the experience with such an attitude. About the third one in, you'll realize that other than having different bland-faced, utterly generic actors going thru the motions, they're really all the same picture.

The same thing is true of radio shows. I love radio as a creative medium, and I love much of what came out of radio in its prime, but I'm also the first one to admit the massive amount of trite, reptitious trash it cranked out. There are over two thousand episodes of "The Lone Ranger" that have survived, and I know people, grown adults yet, who have listened to every single one. And all I can say is "Why?"

As someone who watches way too much TCM and who listened to many of the "old" radio programs that were played in repeats on Saturday and Sunday morning radio growing up in the '70s, I agree with all of this.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It always bugged me that the radio stuff that got rerun was almost always the corny/kiddie western-superhero-mystery stuff and not something like "The Columbia Workshop." It's the same way that "Fifties Television" is generally remembered as dopey formula sitcoms and repetitious filmed westerns and not as "Your Show of Shows" or "Kraft Television Theatre." When "nostalgia" is the primary motive for reviving an era, the result will always be the lowest of all possible common denominators.

I imagine that when the time comes for 2010s nostalgia, people won't be watching "Breaking Bad" or "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," but the pimple popping and house flipping and dump picking shows will get all the attention.

 

[Fading Fast]

It always bugged me that the radio stuff that got rerun was almost always the corny/kiddie western-superhero-mystery stuff and not something like "The Columbia Workshop." It's the same way that "Fifties Television" is generally remembered as dopey formula sitcoms and repetitious filmed westerns and not as "Your Show of Shows" or "Kraft Television Theatre." When "nostalgia" is the primary motive for reviving an era, the result will always be the lowest of all possible common denominators.

I imagine that when the time comes for 2010s nostalgia, people won't be watching "Breaking Bad" or "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," but the pimple popping and house flipping and dump picking shows will get all the attention.

It was only in the '90s, when I had a few dollars and discovered old radio program CDs, that I learned that there were better radio programs than the mediocre stuff that I listened to as "old" radio in the '70s. I don't remember the names of the programs, but a lot of good plays and movies were put on as radio plays - just an example of something that was good that I "discovered" on those CDs that I had never heard in the '70s.

That said, now that everything is always on somewhere, you can now find, somewhere, most of the good and bad from the '70s TV (can't say the same for '50s and '60s TV).

 

[MisterCairo]

Fear Factor, Big Brother, Survivor, most "talent" shows, most talk shows (Jerry Springer is off the air - FINALLY).

Tons of dreck out there.

Off to binge Storage Wars and Forged in Fire now....

 

[GHT]

On the trivial thread Lizzie wrote:

Spend half an hour reading Gab or certain corners of Reddit and you'll wish sincerely for the extinction of the human race.

So out of curiosity I Googled lowest common denominator TV. I forgot to add UK and Reddit came up. They were discussing a show that I've never heard of called Maury. The following two comments more or less sums up bad TV. But then again, bad by whose definition?
11 months ago
Maury's target audience is unemployed people who watch TV at 3PM. It's the same reason why all the commercials are pay day loans, IRS tax refund schemes, and pregnancy testing. It's not that hard to believe it's still on considering that target description is a couple million people in the US.
11 months ago
You can tell a lot about a shows target demographic by watching the commercials that air during it. Soap Opera shows are full of ads for prescription drugs and reverse mortgages, for example.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Fear Factor, Big Brother, Survivor, most "talent" shows, most talk shows (Jerry Springer is off the air - FINALLY).

Tons of dreck out there.

Off to binge Storage Wars and Forged in Fire now....

Amateur talent shows were very very popular on radio in the mid-1930s, and many were as excruciating as the ones you get today. Major Bowes was every bit as oily and insincere as the hosts you get today, and some of the talent was even worse.

The only amateur show of the Era that bears listening today is the amateur segment featured on Fred Allen's show -- Allen had the great good sense to not take the format the least bit seriously, and his lighthearted approach to the whole concept, and the way he interacted with the performers really made a difference. Allen also refused to have "lemon" acts on his show -- Bowes always had one or two lemons so that the audience could have the derisive experience of hearing them get gonged, but Allen refused to hurt the dignity of sub-par contestants by subjecting them to public humiliation on a coast-to-coast network. He just didn't have lemons on the show at all, and this gave his show a dignity the other amateur programs always lacked.

While radio didn't have Springer-type sensationalism during the Era, the idea of freak-oriented talk shows caught on big during the late 1950s. Long John Nebel, who had the overnight slot at WOR, had a long parade of crazies and fringe characters on his program, especially UFO geeks, underground-civilization believers, and assorted paranoids. And then there's Joe Pyne, who was the sixties answer to the bloviating crackpots who infest the modern-day AM dial.

 

[HanauMan]

As a kid in the 1970s I used to listen to my local AFN stations wherever we were living at the time. Some of the radio shows which were broadcast came from the 50s & 60s, like 'The Creeper' or something like it. One radio show I still recall was played over the Easter period and was a Sci Fi play about some astronauts who somehow had ended up going back in time and seeing the Crucifixion of Christ. Have to say, I have fond memories of radio shows in the 1970s.

 

[MisterCairo]

There was a Canadian sitcom (most Canadians will find that to be an oxymoron) in the early seventies called "The Trouble with Tracy", generally regarded not only as the worst Canadian show ever, but one of THE WORST shows EVER.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Tracy

Curiously, and here's the golden era link, the scripts were based on US radio plays "Easy Aces".

 

[LizzieMaine]

The writer of "Easy Aces", Goodman Ace, was one of the true giants of the field, and the original production, in which he'd starred alongside his wife Jane, was -- and remains today, for those who get it -- a very enjoyable bit of radio comedy, with Jane as the lone innocent in a world of grifters, chislers, and manipulators. But it didn't translate into 1970s Canadian television *at all,* especially when whoever it was who adapted the scripts lacked any grasp of what it was that had made the original show work.

Ace himself had given up on trying to turn the show into a TV sitcom twenty years earlier, and if he ever saw the Canadian version, he didn't put his opinion of it on the record. Which is a pity, because I'm sure he'd have gotten off a good line or two.

 

[Just Jim]

There was a Canadian sitcom (most Canadians will find that to be an oxymoron) in the early seventies called "The Trouble with Tracy", generally regarded not only as the worst Canadian show ever, but one of THE WORST shows EVER.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Tracy

Curiously, and here's the golden era link, the scripts were based on US radio plays "Easy Aces".

View attachment 157891 View attachment 157892

I remember that show! I've tried prayer and alcohol and direct application of a ball-peen hammer to the cranium, but I still remember that show. Maybe electro-shock therapy?

 

[MisterCairo]

About as much of the show as I can find on Youtube (both Tracy and her tv hubby - comes out of the trunk at the end) have since died, Steve Weston as far back as 1985, fell out of a window at his home fixing something on the roof):

 

[Zombie_61]

In the past there was good TV and bad as in all era's including these modern days. Yesterday I viewed a modern program and could not really think why they made it. Doctor Pimple Popper!
Just why would a TV company make a series about squeezing peoples boils and zits where puss erupts in close up like Mount Etna spewing lava. As I say in my opening line there were both good and bad TV but I can't think anything as rubbish TV from the past as bad as this.
John.

For reasons she can't explain my wife likes to watch a show called Botched which, for those who have never seen or heard of it, is about two surgeons based in southern California who attempt to correct seriously flawed (i.e., disfiguring to varying degrees) cosmetic surgeries--nose jobs, tummy tucks, bust enhancements, corrective surgeries after some form of trauma, and so on, that previous surgeons (or non-surgeons, in some cases) made a mess of. But they also get their fair share of lunatics who want surgery so they can look like a Barbie doll, or a cartoon character, or an alien, or...well, you name it.

I'm sure most viewers just want to see the "freak show", but I'd bet there is a percentage of viewers who watch shows like this and Dr. Pimple Popper, and others of that ilk, so they can feel better about themselves. "I might not be perfect, but at least I'm not as screwed up as that guy/gal."