Peter Boyle - 1935(?)-2006

I’ve tried to get away from writing obituaries for TV performers, but sometimes you just can’t avoid it. This is one of those times.

Peter Boyle died today at New York’s Presbyterian Hospital. Until fairly recently Boyle was probably best known for his screen roles – notably the campaign manager Lucas in The Candidate and the Monster in Young Frankenstein - he also did considerable television work before Everybody Loves Raymond. One of his first acting parts was in the 1970 CBS summer series Comedy Tonight. He played Senator Joseph McCarthy in the TV movie Tailgunner Joe, and the title character in a short-lived show (six episodes) called Joe Bash about a lonely cop. This show is so obscure that only the barest of episode descriptions can be found. In 1994 he played “Stanilslas Kelly” in an ABC pilot Philly Heat, the cast of which included Ving Rhames and Tate Donovan. Most of his other pre-Raymond TV work was as a guest star. In Midnight Caller he played the Gary Cole character’s father J.J. Killian in two episodes. He played Dan Breen, Andy Sipowicz’s AA sponsor who is eventually killed by his abusive, mentally disturbed son. Perhaps most famously he played Clyde Bruckman in one of the most famous episodes of The X-Files “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose”, the role for which he won his only Emmy Award.

Of course it was for the role of Frank Barone that most TV viewers know him today. Amazingly he was the only member of the adult cast of that show not to win an Emmy award, despite having been nominated seven of the nine years the show was on the air. Boyle was perfectly cast as the sarcastic, angry, Frank, and you could always see a sort of twinkle in his eye when his character put one over on his wife Marie, played by Doris Roberts. Reportedly, when he auditioned for the part of Frank, producer Phil Rosenthal kept him waiting, which made the actor increasingly angry so that when he finally came in to read, “He came in all hot and angry, and I hired him because I was afraid of him.” Because of efforts to cross several of CBS’s Monday night sitcoms over, Boyle appeared in an episode of Bill Cosby’s last series Cosby. That show co-starred Madeline Kahn, who had appeared with Boyle in Young Frankenstein and before that in Comedy Tonight.

Peter Boyle met his wife Loraine Alterman on the set of Young Frankenstein - she was a reporter for Rolling Stone. Through her close friendship with Yoko Ono, Boyle developed a friendship with John Lennon, who served as Best Man at the couple’s 1977 wedding. They had two daughters. In recent photos he appeared increasingly gaunt and ill, possibly as a result of the multiple myeloma (a form of plasma cell cancer) and heart disease that he suffered. Peter Boyle was either 71 (according to most sources including IMDB) or 73 (according to Wikipedia).

Why I'll Be Watching The Dancing With The Stars Finale

Forget Emmitt Smith (right) and Mario Lopez (left), I'm watching this show because of their partners, Cheryl Burke and Karina Smirnoff. It's sort of like "Chick Flicks". Guys who "know" realise that you get the best nudity in "Chick Flicks." Guy films have nudity all right but it's usually one of the action heroes who's exposing his bits, as opposed to - you know - a woman. Well in Dancing With The Stars you have lithe athletic young women without a trace of excess body fat that I can detect, dressed in frequently revealing costumes shaking what their Mamas made them. And best of all, the Parents Television Council thinks it's all good clean fun. I'm glad they can't read my mind!

Celebrity Fun & Games - Well Games Anyway

It's probably fitting that I couldn't review Gameshow Marathon last week. Oh no, it's not because the show got better in the second week although it did...sort of. No, the reason why it's fitting is because it gave me the opportunity to see the opening episode of the eighth season of Celebrity Poker Showdown, a show which is both entertaining and serves as a reminder of what you can do with celebrities - whether A, B, C, or Kathy Griffin class - playing games.

Actually Wednesday's episode of Gameshow Marathon seemed a bit better than the episodes that preceded it. Beat The Clock was a perfect show for this format because it was basically a show full of silly stunts which tended to make people look absurd. Essentially it was a series of party games rather than guessing prices. Plus the original show was old enough that it was new for most of the audience both in the studio an watching at home. Most of the celebrities who participated in the show - Paige Davis, Tim Meadows, Kathy Najimy and Leslie Nielsen - all seemed more animated and having more fun in this episode than they did doing The Price Is Right or Let's Make A Deal, not that it would too hard to exceed their excitement levels in those episodes (the exception was Paige Davis who has a bubbly personality, even if she sometimes dances around like a stripper looking for her pole). There are problems, although again the age of the show means that they aren't as visible as some of them were in the first two episodes. We don't remember Clayton "Bud" Collyer's time hosting Beat The Clock. We may remember him as host of the more intellectual To Tell The Truth - and Ivan and I know him as Superman from the radio Adventures of Superman and both the Fleischer and Filmation Superman cartoons - but for most of us, if we remember Beat The Clock at all it is probably the syndicated version hosted by Jack Narz around 1970. Others have complained that while Ricki Lake is trying hard to get into the spirit of the games she wasn't Bob Barker or Monty Hall, one who is still doing his show and the other who is very well remembered. I, on the other hand, find Ricki extremely annoying - particularly her voice - and she's not a good fit personality wise for doing a game show.

No, the host isn't a problem for me, and the fact that it's celebrities is a minor problem. My problem is I'm not entirely sure what these people are playing for and why it's these celebrities. The celebrities are supposed to be playing for charity but for the life of me I can't tell you what or how their charities are getting. The celebrities aren't being paid off in cash when they win something on the show, they're putting merchandise into a prize pool for a lucky at home winner who text messages in the correct answer to a trivia quiz. Does the celebrity get the monetary value of their prize for his or her charity? I don't know. What I do know is that the winner of the final game - a session of Family Feud - gets $100,000 for their charity. Does that mean that none of the other charities gets any money? Again it's not clear.Then there's the celebrities themselves. Apparently the show is set up so that only six specific celebrities get to try to make money for their charities, even though we saw Betty White, George Foreman and Adam Carolla sitting in the audience of The Price Is Right looking as if they had a chance to play. Carolla got up in the middle of an audience shot for The Price Is Right looking as if he had been promised he'd have a shot at the show and was ticked off that they picked Leslie Nielsen instead. It was all a set up though - White, Foreman, and Carolla, along with Kathy Griffin, Bruce Villanch and Adrianne Curry - are there to be the panel for the Match Game portion of the series and the producers made it clear in their promos who the six celebrities were going to be. Finally there's the game shows themselves. Since game shows tended to have a half hour format - except for the current incarnation of The Price Is Right - there seems to be a tendency to try to stretch the material to fit an hour show, and it isn't working.

It's this lack of clarity, together with a feeling of being set up and the distinct impression that some if not most of the celebrities were just there to keep their profile up and had no interest in the games or in having fun that makes Gameshow Marathon less than enjoyable for me. By comparison Celebrity Poker Showdown was enjoyable for me. The episode I saw last week was the first of the eighth tournament and for the first time was occurring outside of Las Vegas, at the Harrah's casino in New Orleans with winnings going to charities in the New Orleans area and tied to Hurricane Katrina relief. Last week's lineup included Jason Alexander (Seinfeld, and participating in his second tournament), Brian Cranston (Malcolm In The Middle, also in his second tournament), Jamie Bamber (Battlestar Galactica), Susie Essman (Curb Your Enthusiasm), and Kevin Sorbo (Andromeda). The difference between this and Gameshow Marathon was palpable. The celebrities clearly seemed engaged and for the most part interested - the exception seemed to be Sorbo - and having fun playing the game. Presumably doses of Southern Comfort, which had signed on as a sponsor - the "Loser's Lounge" was renamed the "Soco Lime Lounge" - helped that along a little. The objectives were clearly laid out - lose in the first round and your charity gets $5,000, win and you get a shot at the lion's share of the PartyPoker.net $1,000,000 prize pool. For the audience what made the show enjoyable was that these people were playing as badly as most of us play. There are plenty of Poker shows on TV where the viewer can see play the game with a tremendous level of competency, on this show we can see famous people for the most part playing like a bunch of donkeys. Host Dave Foley has settled into his role as genial host and poker ignoramus quite well. In fact he's a reasonably good player and has gone deep in several tournaments. The big change for this season, and some say the weakest part of the show was replacing Phil Gordon - who stated that he decided not to renew his contract because he was tired of commentating on people who play as badly as many of these celebrities - and has been replaced by Phil Helmuth (there are some who claim that Gordon's contract wasn't renewed because they could get Helmuth for a third the money, which seems absurd if you know something about Helmuth - a lot of people suspect he'd want to be paid a dollar more than whatever Gordon was getting). If anything Helmuth is probably to analytical for the show and has yet to develop the chemistry that was so abundant between Gordon and Foley.

CBS has touted Gameshow Marathon as being a British import, which is true as far as it goes. The original show was a special called Ant & Dec's Gameshow Marathon and was shown on the British commercial network ITV as part of the network's 50th anniversary. In other words it was a one shot deal. There was a solid reason for it which CBS seems to be lacking. I don't know if CBS thought that they could make more of the series than just a one shot - I certainly suspect they'd like to - but with what they've done they've certainly not succeeded. I think there are things that they could have done that would have made it more successful. One approach might have been to widen the pool of celebrities; you might not be picked for Price Is Right but you could be on Let's Make A Deal or one of the other preliminary round games, and in the same way if you were picked for Price Is Right and didn't win you wouldn't be able to guarantee that you'd be playing in one of the other shows. Another way to work it would be to select a group of ordinary people and actually play the games for the prizes leading up to the final big windfall for the players who made it to the final round of Family Feud. The truth is however that the format is cumbersome and it is difficult to really grasp who gets what for the people they are representing. The difference between this and Celebrity Poker Showdown is clear. There the format is clear as is exactly what the charities are getting, the pool of participants is wider, the celebrities are having fun and are interacting with each other while competing. And yeah, they're making mistakes and on the whole are doing something that they have no expertise at (although next week's episode features Jennifer "The Unabombshell" Tilley, who won the 2005 World Series Of Poker Women's Event and followed that up with the World Poker Tour's Ladies Night tournament - I would love to see her destroy the rest of the field) and making fools of themselves. But that's why the show is fun and why there have been eight tournaments. I have absolutely know doubt that we won't even see a second run of Gameshow Marathon which for the most part is a good thing. I think my only regret will be that we won't be able to see more Beat The Clock - it was fun in a sort of nostalgic non-bug eating way.

How Badly Can You Mess Up A Cooking Show? This Bad

Normally I don't think that it's good practice to write a review of a movie or TV show when you fall asleep part way through it.There are exceptions to this rule of course and Celebrity Cooking Showdown is one of them. It is hard to find a word that is really suitable to describe just how bad this show is so I'll go with a word that I normally don't use: this show sucks, or as Ned Flanders might put it, it "suck-diddly-ucks".

Now strictly speaking I didn't fully fall asleep, I sort of dozed into that happy land of closing your eyes and opening them and realising that five minutes have passed and you have absolutely no memory of what happened in those few minutes except that your eyes have been closed and you liked it. As opposed to keeping your eyes open and actually seeing this steaming pile of crap.

The first sign that this show was going to be awful is when Howie Mandel handed off to the new show's host - Alan Thicke. Now I'm a Canadian and have fond memories of when Alan Thicke hosted an afternoon talk show up here but since then I've increasingly found him to be living up to his name - Thicke, as in "thick as a brick". Somehow he seems pompous and maybe a bit arrogant. Suffice it to say that I haven't been able to stand him since Growing Pains.

In this show Thicke's job is a sort of combination of game show host and colour commentator. In the game show host role his job is to introduce us to the contestants and their professional chef advisors, as well as to explain the rules of the game. The trouble with that is that there seemed to have been more rules than were needed and they kept adding rules. The celebrities had to make three dishes - a salad, a main course and a desert - in a period of 50 minutes. If they'd left it at that it might have been okay but the producers seemed to be adding rules. The celebrities have all the ingredients they need to make their dishes ... except for for two which are hidden in the pantry. The professional chefs have already taught their celebrity proteges how to make the dishes and can't help them ... except that the celebrities are allowed to help the celebrities twice, for two minutes each time when either the celebrity or they decide that they need help. In fact after the last "professional intervention" occurred Thicke stepped forward and threw some sort of red flag onto the ground, presumably to indicate that no further aid would be permitted. Then suddenly he tells us that the professional chefs would be allowed to help the celebrities in the last three competitive minutes of the show. It almost seems as if Alan Thicke had forgotten to tell us this little detail or the producers suddenly realised that these people needed help so they'd better give them a few minutes with there pro at the end of the show to make sure things are edible.

The truly ridiculous part of Thicke's participation isn't his role as "game show host," it's his job as colour commentator. I have to admit that his failings here aren't his fault. Thicke doesn't know much about food which would seem to be a handicap for someone hosting a show that is essentially a cooking competition but the fault lies more with the producers for forcing him into this sort of double duty. At times Thicke has to resort to asking the celebrities' professional teachers what they're doing and how they're doing, a practice that frequently leads to the pro cheerleading for his celebrity. The best solution would be to hire a second host to serve as a neutral expert - a Phil Gordon or Phil Hellmuth to Thicke's Dave Foley - who would explain what the celebrities are doing and more importantly whether they are doing it well.

The professional chefs are an interesting group, probably more so than the celebrities. The chefs are Wolfgang Puck (chef to the stars and "media whore" - who appears occassionally on the NBC series Las Vegas), Cat Cora (the first woman Iron Chef on Food Network's Iron Chef America), and hot young L.A. chef Govind Armstrong. As for the celebrities, On Monday the three celebrities were supermodel Cindy Margolis (who on Monday was showing a ton of cleavage), Kansas City Chief's All-Pro Tight End Tony Gonzalez, and Days of Our Lives star Allison Sweeney. To say the least none of them looked particularly comfortable in the kitchen, which as far as I'm concerned is a problem. Most of these people are as bad in the kitchen as I am, if not worse. I at least want to see people who know what they're doing in the kitchen. Since this is a competition there are judges. Here the show has shown some sense. The two judges are "lifestyle consultant" Colin Cowie and former New York Magazine restaurant critic Gael Greene (who is either nuts about hats or desperate to hide her identity by looking absurd). Their task, at least in the first three shows, is to judge the celebrity's food - usually based on one taste - based on flavour and presentation. On Thursday night viewers will judge the winner's dishes at least as far as presentation (obviously) with the judges votes only counting for taste.

I am not prepared to say that the producers of this show got it all wrong. There was one aspect that I thought was brilliant and that was running the show in real time. Rather than breaking for commercial and carrying on after the break without apparent interruption - and yes this would involve editing but it's what all the versions of Iron Chef have done - action occurs while the show is in commercial. I suppose this could get a bit confusing on those occasions when a pro chef has gone down to help his celebrity and returned, all while the TV was showing GE appliances and an assortment of other consumer goods. On the other hand the show falls down with the provision of a large and boisterous crowd which is extremely extracting for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that Thicke seems to be forced to shout all the time. They do seem to insist on counting down time any opportunity they can get.

NBC seems to be pretty desperate to get onto the whole "celebrity/reality" concept which saw C listers dancing with professional dancers on Dancing With The Stars and figure skating Skating With Celebrities on Fox. There's even celebrities playing Poker on Bravo's Celebrity Poker Showdown. I suppose that some one at the network thought that combining "celebrities" with cooking would be a good match, drawing in people who watch celebrities and those who watch something like food network to see how to cook the sort of food they will in reality never even try to prepare. The result was bad: the UPN version of Iron Chef USA was bad but this was ten thousand times worse. In watching the celebrities trying to cook I always had the distinct feeling that the gimmicks of the competition's rules - like hiding two key ingredients - took away from any weight that the show might have had. In the end it came across as a poorly thought out mess. My one hope is that once this week of episodes of this ends someone will be wise enough to consign this show to the in sink garbage disposal of history.

Too Much Bread, Not Enough Jam

So I admit that I have a fondness verging on addiction for Dancing With The Stars (to the point where I'd like to see a Canadian version) but like various Shakespearean heroes, the show has a fatal flaw. As the series goes on there are fewer performers and since the dances are physically taxing in terms of energy there is a brief period of time that the celebrity dancers in particular can go on before there are consequences - like falling or suffering a myocardial infarction. The net result is that the actual dancing part of the show takes less time each and every episode. Now in part they've combatted this by adding a second dance to the program for each team, but the problem continued. In last night's episode the problem came to a head in part because the programming weasels at ABC made a particularly stupid move.

The stupid move that the programming weasels made was to can Crumbs. Now as I understand it the "plan" is to put some sort of reality programming into the second hour of Thursday next week. And over the last two weeks they've shoehorned a repeat of Grey's Anatomy into the post Dancing With The Stars time by cutting Primetime back to a half hour. But they didn't have that luxury this Thursday so to fill the time slot, instead of burning off a final episode of Crumbs, they expanded Dancing With The Stars to two hours. The result? Well it wasn't pretty.

The tease at the start of the episode showed the celebrity dancers preparing for their performances for the night. Which is about all we saw of them live in that first hour. Most of the time was spent with Tom Bergeron - and to a lesser degree Samantha Harris reviewing the performances that the teams had done during the previous weeks. First we were "treated" to the best of Jerry & Anna then to Stacy & Tony and finally to Drew and Cheryl, all in considerable detail. We saw excerpts from all but one of the dances from each couple. After all they were going to be doing their favourite dance from previous weeks so it wouldn't be "helpful" for us to see how they'd done them before. We might compare them with what the teams did live and see faults and flaws - or at least differences - in the current performances. Interspersed between these taped highlights were taped highlights of the professional dancers doing routines that had been performed during previous one hours results show. The one hour results show was of course created once ABC decided that they could shelve Faith and Hope for a few weeks and no one would notice. And actually once they made up their minds that the results show would be live throughout what they had was not a bad product, with the emphasis on the potential music/variety format and the results of the dancing taking second place.

Now all of this occurred during the first excruciating hour of the final dance session. There was still an hour to go, which is the flaw in the whole procedure. The first hour was a waste of time - at least of my time since I could have used that hour to watch Survivor and not been forced to use my late feed to catch up. Beyond that it hurt the flow of the show. If the programming weasels were determined to have a two hour final dancing episode, they could have at least put the first dances for each team in the first hour, interspersed with the material on training, and staged the second Freestyle routines in the second hour. Or better yet they could have chopped the damned thing down to ninety minutes - as in previous weeks - which would have made the entire program tighter. Looking at professional routines could have been held of until the results show or just dumped all together. After all aren't we there to watch B or C class celebrities make fools of themselves by dancing?

By the way, just for the record, I think that Thursday night was the night that Stacy "not an elf" Kiebler lost the competition. Stacy & Tony's Jive was spectacular of course, but the whole house of cards collapsed with the Freestyle dance which literally looked as if it had been recycled from Saturday Night Fever and featured just one lift. It was a safe routine and consequently it was a capital "B" boring routine. The judges thought so to the point where they actually awarded higher marks to Jerry and Anna (in the most absurd Afro wigs ever) than to the "weapon of mass seduction". But the truly amazing performance came from Drew Lachey and Cheryl Burke who earned a second perfect score with their Passa Doble done to Michael Jackson's Thriller followed by a knock-out routine done to the song Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy that featured plenty of lifts and athleticism and earned them another perfect score of 30 from the three judges. More to the point it showed just how weak and safe the routine that Stacy and Tony put together was.

If I were to handicap this thing right now, I'd say that Drew and Cheryl are the likely winners, but given the way that the voting is set up it is entirely possible for any team - including Jerry and Anna - to win. What I can predict, with unerring certainty, is that the final results show of this season will again be an oversized extravaganza. It will, on the whole, be better than the two hours on Thursday night if they remember to focus on music and dance rather than building tension for the results - that can be done in half an hour or an hour - but in my opinion it will still be a bloated production compared to what it probably should be. An hour - fine; ninety minutes - pushing it; but two hours? Too little substance trying to cover too much time, or as I said above, "too much bread, not enough jam."

Grandpa We Hardly Knew You

It seems that there's considerable controversy about exactly how much of the biography of Al Lewis is true. Virtually everyone believed that Al Lewis, who played Grandpa on The Munsters (and no it wasn't Grandpa Munster - he was Lily's father not Herman's - but Grandpa Sam Dracula) was born in 1910, was active in the efforts to free Sacco & Vanzetti, was a circus clown, got a PhD in Child Psychology in 1941, ran for Governor of New York at age 88. Now it appears as if it may all have been a house of cards.

Media outlets are updating their obituaries of Lewis when Lewis's son Ted stated that his father was born in 1923, not 1910. This throws a considerable amount of the "Al Lewis Legend" into disarray. Did he get a degree in Child Psychology? If so then he was highly precocious since he would only have been 18 at the time. Of course that's to be expected from a youth who had been an activist for Sacco and Vanzetti at age 4. He would have been a youth of 75 when he ran for governor and forget working in the circus or as a medicine show performer - if he was going to get that PhD at 18 he'd have to be glued to the books 24/7.

I'm not calling Ted Lewis a liar however this whole thing stinks like one of Al's cigars. I tend to distrust memoirs from family members. All too often a family member has an axe to grind - if you don't believe I cite Gary Crosby (son of Bing and author of Going My Own Way), Christina Crawford (daughter of Joan and author of Mommy Dearest), B.D. Hyman (daughter of Bette Davis and author of My Mother's Keeper), and Maria Riva (daughter of Marlene Dietrcih and author of Marlene Dietrich). I'm not asking for a lot but taking either Al Lewis or Ted Lewis entirely at their words has now at the very least become difficult. I need documentation.

Of course none of this takes away from the fact that Al Lewis was a very funny and fascinating man or that Sam Dracula was a great comic creation. In fact sifting the truth and the fiction to reveal the real Al Lewis might make him more interesting. Or it might be a case where, when given the choice between the truth and the legend it is better to - as the newspaper man in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance said "Print the legend."

Al Lewis - April 30, 1910-February 3, 2006

One of the most amazing figures in TV history was Al "Grandpa" Lewis. Very few other actors parlayed a character on a show that lasted only two years into both a career and a persona, but once Al Lewis found Grandpa Munster in The Munsters he was set for life.

Al Lewis was born in Woolcott New York, but his family moved to Brooklyn as a child and he was a New Yorker from that point on. He worked as a hot dog vendor at Ebbetts Field and, in the 1920s, as a cricus performer before returning to college. He graduated from Columbia in 1941 with a PhD in Child Psychology. He returned to acting in 1949, working in Burlesque and the last days of vaudeville. His first TV role was in an episode of a series called Decoy, and he appeared in a number of dramas over the years. However it was his work in comedies that really caught people's attention. He appeared in a couple of episodes of The Phil Silvers Show (aka Sergeant Bilko).

Still it was Car 54 Where Are You? that brought him to general notice. Although the role of Officer Leo Schnauser was a supporting part to the main characters of Gunther Toody (Joe E. Ross) and Francis Muldoon (Fred Gwynne). He would later portray Leo Schnauser in the 1994 film remake of Car 54 Where Are You? The relationship with Gwynne continued when the two were cast in The Munsters. Gwynne played the Frankenstein-like Herman Munster while Lewis played the cigar smoking mad scientist vampire known as Grandpa. Grandpa was - allegedly - the smart one in the relationship. Of the character of Grandpa, Lewis once said "The role of Grandpa is not complicated because you're wearing odd makeup or bizarre costumes. That's not what complicates a role. What makes Grandpa a little odd is the fact that he had no prototype. When I approached this role, I knew that whatever I was doing was original. So no director could say to me, 'Listen, remember how he did it, this is how I want it done.' I worked very hard creating that character. I made those lines work. The walk and the posture all fit the character. As to the character itself, you might say that Grandpa was a kind of Dracula-type Major Hoople."

Car 54 Where Are You? and The Munsters were Al Lewis's only regular TV roles. The two series lasted a total of four years. He would continue to act for many years - his last credit was in 2002 as Father Hanlon in a movie called Night Terror - but all of his later TV appearances were guest appearances. Yet over the years he remained a familiar figure who came to look like Grandpa, with his bushy sideburns and receding hairline. He actively promoted this image. At one point he owned a Greenwich Village restaurant called "Grandpa's" and he'd make personal appearances at the drop of a cigar. This attachment to the "Grandpa" character caused something of a rift between him and Fred Gwynne for a number of years because the Harvard educated Gwynne desperately want to put The Munsters behind him and be regarded as a serious actor.

In later years Al Lewis's political activities caught public attention when in 1998, at age 88, he ran for Governor of New York on the Green Party ticket against George Pataki - he won 52,000 votes which was enough to earn the Greens a line on the state ballot for the next four years. It really shouldn't have come as a surprise - Lewis's involvement in political causes went back to at least 1927 when he was involved in the unsuccessful efforts to gain clemency for Sacco and Vanzetti. For a number of years he hosted a politically oriented radio show in WBAI-FM, a non-commerical listener supported radio station in New York. He once said about his politics that "if anything I consider myself an anarchist." During the 1990s he was a frequent guest on Howard Stern's radio show and Stern once had to censor Lewis when Al led on an obscene chant directed at the FCC.

Besides politics Lewis - who was 6'1" but looked shorter (probably because he was usually seen alongside Fred Gwynne who was 6'5" and wore special boots as Herman which made him taller) - was passionate about basketball and for many years was a basketball scout for Red Auerbach of the Boston Celtics.

In June 2003, Al Lewis underwent his third angioplasty. Complications occurred and his right leg below the knee and the toes on his left foot were amputated, and he spent the next month in a coma. Al Lewis passed away on Friday but his death was announced by WBAI-FM program director Bernard White during the time slot which had been home to Lewis's radio show. White said of Lewis, "To say that we will miss his generous, cantankerous, engaging spirit is a profound understatement." Indeed.

An Apology

I made a truly hideous omission yesterday which I only discovered this morning when I drifted over to Mark Evanier's blog (as I do every morning). Yesterday, January 26, was the birthday of the greatest character actor ever to grace the movie or TV screen. Yesterday Charles Lane - Homer Bedloe himself - turned 101 years young. I think I missed it because of all the attention being given to Mr. Lane's old piano teacher - Wolfgang Amadeaus Mozart's birthday is today. In fact CBC2 is playing his music all day today.

Ice Falls

Dancing With The Stars was bound to spawn imitators. Last summer we had So You Think You Can Dance which was the bastard child of Dancing With The Stars and American Idol and while I initially couldn't see it working it was relatively not bad. Now there's Skating With Celebrities which is the bastard child of Dancing With The Stars and the Olympics. This bastard child should have been stopped by the morning after pill. What an awful awful steaming pile of crap. Even Fox, the network that created it, calls it "Train Wreck On Ice!"

I didn't watch it live on either feed that I receive. I sampled a bit during commercials in Criminal Minds and Lost but frankly it was too horrible and I found other things more interesting and compelling - like Speed's coverage of the Barrett-Jackson Classic Car Auction (they had a 1969 E-Type Jag last night that went for about $40,000 and a few minutes later a Mark II Saloon like the one Inspector Morris drove that went for about $30,000 - I'm not a car guy but I was lusting in my heart believe me) - but in the interest of journalistic integrity not to mention the the desire to see just how bad it was, I did tape it. Tape has a great effect on this show; you can skip through the boring and/or bad parts. Of course if you do that you're left with only the performances of Jillian Barberi (with John Zimmerman) and Dave Coulier (with Nancy Kerrigan). And I'm only 40% kidding - they're the only "celebrities" who seem to have any idea of what they're doing on ice skates.

Rather than bore you with the rather grisly details (it was tough to digest) let me try to explain why this show won't be anywhere near the hit that Dancing With The Stars has been.

1. Everyone can dance. More accurately everyone thinks they can dance, as Master P proves every week. Not everyone can skate - I can't (weak ankles) - and even people who can skate can't necessarily figure skate. Dave Coulier ground the toe picks off his figure skates because he kept digging them into the ice because figure skates work and feel different from hockey skates. That still puts him ahead of Todd Bridges (and hands up if you thought he'd turn out to be the most well-adjusted kid actor from the cast of Diff'rent Strokes) who only roller skates and had to wear a baggy costume to hide the elbow pads, wrist guards and knee pads he was wearing, and Debbie - sorry Deborah - Gibson who has never skated before. With the exception of Barberie and to a lesser extent Coulier, these people sucked (and that's not a word I normally use).

2. The choice of pros. Of the professional skaters two are over 40 (Tai Babilonia - 45 - and Lloyd Eisler) and two are over 35 (Nancy Kerrigan and Kurt Browning). Moreover Browning and Kerrigan were solo skaters and the mechanics of working as part of a pairs unit are significantly different from doing a solo. Add to that working with an inexperienced partner and you have an absolute recipe for disaster.

3. There's no viewer participation. In Dancing With The Stars the audience votes, even if they don't know a Tango from a Viennese Waltz. Oddly enough the viewers of Skating With Celebrities probably know more about Figure Skating and can judge it more critically than people who watch Dancing With The Stars. Over the past two or three decades, Figure Skating has been a staple on North American TV and not just at the Olympics or even the World Championships. Over the years we've seen amateur competitions, professional competitions, professional exhibitions, and in Canada hour long shows that a single skater (first Toller Cranston, then Brian Orser, and finally Kurt Browning). In short the general public knows Figure Skating a lot better than they know Ballroom Dancing (as is proven by the continued survival of Master P on Dancing With The Stars) and is capable of rendering competent judgement. Unfortunately they aren't given the chance. A judging panel made up of professional coach Sir John Nicks, fan favourite Dorothy Hamill, and journalist Todd Lund votes on the performances. The team with the lowest combined score after two weeks is sent home. Which is fine and probably wouldn't affect the results any but definitely biases the competition towards Coulier and Barberie who have far more skating experience than any of the other teams. Even then the scores seemed to have been skewed in such a way as to artificially create tension by keeping all of the teams close in terms of points. Here's my fearless prediction - it'll come down to Barberie vs. Coulier and I suspect the one of those two who works for Fox will probably win.

4. This takes off from 3 in that people know skating. This isn't even bad Figure Skating; most of these people would have to spend years working to achieve bad. The result though is that instead of being entertaining it becomes a rather distasteful farce - or worse a freak show - and why watch farce when in a month you can be watching the absolute best in the world doing what they're best at.

5. About the only people who look like they're actually having fun are Barberi and Coulier. Compare that to Dancing With The Stars where everyone (with the probable exception of Master P) looks like they're having a ball - pun very much intended.

To sum it up Skating With Celebrities isn't the worst show on TV, isn't the worst new show on TV (that double "honour" still goes to The War At Home) and in a world which gave us The Swan and Rebel Billionaire isn't the worst reality show ever. It isn't even the worst "celebrity reality" show - remember I'm A Celebrity - Get Me Out Of Here! (which coincidentally also featured Bruce Jenner). However it comes pretty low on the "suckiness meter" in each and every one of those categories. I've seen my first - and last - full episodes though I might continue to sample during commercials, but only because the Barrett-Jackson Auction ends this weekend. If you want to see Figure Skating wait for the Olympics, and if that's too long a wait, rent Ice Castles, Ice Princess and any Sonja Henie movie you can get your hands on. Whatever you do do not waste your time with this!!!

Shelley Winters - 1920-2006

I once said told Stephen Cooke and Tom Sutpen that if you saw Joan Blondell at the stage of her career when I first encountered her, you would never have thought of her as a sex symbol. The same holds true of Shelley Winters. She was a sex symbol at one point in her career. She was a blonde bombshell before Marilyn Monroe - who was her one-time room mate and who by all reports she taught to hold her head in a particularly sexy way - but she tired of it and became what Monroe later wanted to become, a damned good actress with two Oscars and a host of roles in the 1950s that were important and influential. But that wasn't my Shelley Winters.

My Shelley Winters was Mrs. Rosen in the original Poseidon Adventure (her fourth Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor - the photo I have here is of Shelley with her Poseidon Adventure "husband" Red Buttons on the Oscar red carpet many years later), and Julie Andrews (probably bisexual) superagent in S.O.B. (and yeah I watched that movie to see Julie Andrews's boobs, and yeah it was worth it). It was the Shelley who did one shot guest appearances in a variety of unworthy TV shows starting in around 1966 with Batman (as "Ma Parker"). She was apparently memorable in her final major TV role as Nana Mary in Roseanne where she played Estelle Parson's mother despite being only seven years older than her (I never watched Roseanne mainly because I loathe Roseane Barr). But most of all my Shelley Winters was the queen of the talk show. Take a look at her IMDB filmography. Go below the 130 listed parts in movies (mostly theatrical), 20 appearances as herself - several as an Oscar presenter - to her "Notable TV Guest Appearances". There they sit, her talk show appearances on both sides of the Atlantic. These started in 1957 when she did The Steve Martin Show, and included appearances in Britain on something called Late Night Lineup, on Parkinson and it's successor at the BBC Wogan twice each, and even on Ruby Wax's The Full Wax twice. Her last "chat show" appearance - I suppose his qualifies - was on Inside The Actors Studio (something for which she was eminently more qualified than most people who appeared on the show - not only had she attended the Actors Studio, she taught there). She did one episode of the NBC Letterman series Late Night with David Letterman, but her true venue was The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson. Between March 1970 and March 1991 she made twenty-one appearances on the show. Twelve of these appearances occurred between March 1970 and July 1973. She was a much less frequent guest in the 1980s and early 1990s when I saw her.

Shelley Winters was in her element on Carson. She was outrageous. When I saw her, it always seemed as though she's lubricated herself very well with the backstage booze supply. She'd come out and usually talk about Hollywood in the old days and talk about sex lives - her own and others. They played up her often imperfect memory - I remember one sequence where she couldn't remember the name of one of Johnny's wives, which was important to the story. But some of her most memorable performances occurred before I was able to see the show. In 1969 she was responsible for spreading the incorrect rumour that Jerry Mathers (from the movie The Trouble With Harry and the TV series Leave it to Beaver) had died in Vietnam. But perhaps her most infamous performance was when she dumped an ice bucket full of ice and water over the head of Oliver Reed after Reed made some remarks about women that Shelley took exception to. (I have a suspicion that this tape no longer exists, erased as so many of those early shows were. Too bad - Reed got what he deserved and she was the perfect person to give it too him.) It's worth noting I suppose that that was Reed's first - and last - appearance on The Tonight Show while Shelley made a dozen more appearances, the last just a few months before Johnny's final show

Shelley Winters was a great actress, a great character actress, and a great character. Expect TCM to do a retrospective sometime this week, much to the irritation of people who foolishly believe that a schedule should be sacrosanct.

You Make Me Feel Like Dancin'

Okay I admit it. I should have been watching Four Kings or The Office or My Name Is Earl for review purposes but instead I was watching the second season debut of Dancing With The Stars instead. Yes they are, at best, B-List celebrities, and some of them I've never even heard of (in the case of Kenny Mayne it doesn't help that I'm a Canadian and the only time I see ESPN is at my brother's house on Sundays), and yes I did criticize it last summer, but you know what, it is fun and It does make me feel like dancing if only because I know that I'd be better at it than P Miller. And probably Kenny Mayne.

One thing that has to be said about this season of the show is that they seem to have learned from the mistakes they made last year, the big ones and the little ones. Overall the camera work seems much better. They didn't point a camera at one of the footlights which caused the resulting glare to washed out the screen to obscure the dancers, who were after all the focus of the event. That happened a number of times in the first season, and not just in the first episode. In this first episode the only major problem occurred when one of the hand held cameras crossed in front of the field fo view of one of the studio cameras. Moreover the director seems to have gotten the message that dancing isn't something you can adequately show from the waist up. You have to see the whole body and in particular the feet. More of the shots followed Fred Astaire's rule about filming dance, that you have to see the whole body in every dance sequence.

One major problem has been eliminated with the decision to run a half hour results program on Friday rather than having teams which have already been eliminated in the previous week's voting perform again the second week. A bigger problem for me is the decision to open the phone lines for voting at the beginning of the show before any of the performances have taken place. This just seems to invite the sort of voting which happened last summer. In my mind it is probably better to open the phone lines for a specific length of time after the show has aired. Of course, since this is entertainment rather than a "real" competition - no matter what the participants may want to believe - I suppose it's acceptable. On the other hand I think the ten team formula, which led to the show expanding to two hours this week and 90 minutes next week may be more of a problem. The show didn't seem to flow as well at two hours and it did bring them into opposition with CSI. I think the show would probably do better with a smaller number of contestants - say eight - and as a result a shorter premiere episode.

Another improvement was with the hosting. Last season Tom Bergeron was initially a terrible host. He seemed to regard the whole thing as a big joke and made atrocious jokes through most of the first couple of episodes until it became clear that the show was a big hit. In this first episode he hasn't been joking nearly as much about the experience. In fact he was playing it entirely straight while maintaining a jovial manner. Last summer Bergeron's backstage co-host was former Entertainment Tonight co-host Lisa Canning. Canning isn't back this season but has been replaced by Samantha Harris of E! News. I'm not sure that the change is for the better. The backstage host's job is basically to interview celebrities which was after all Lisa Canning's job at ET and Samantha just didn't seem quite as sharp as Lisa had been.

Of course what we all want to know know is "how was the dancing." Let's just say that it ranged from spectacular to worse than Evander Holyfield ... by several orders of magnitude. Admittedly there were reasons. George Hamilton said broke four ribs falling off a yacht. Tia Carerre had a baby three months ago and is struggling with losing the weight. The best excuse of all of course goes to Master P (also listed as P Miller) who replaced his son Romeo in the competition approximately a week ago. That said he gave the single worst performance of the night. He seemed to make very little attempt to work with the music and on the whole danced the Cha Cha like a traffic cone (male celebrities did the Cha Cha - female celebrities did the Waltz). The man made Evander Holyfield from last season look like a brilliant dancer. With two exceptions the rest of the male dancers were inferior to the female celebrities. George Hamilton - he of the magnificent tan - may have been restricted in some movements by his injury (and his age - 66) which but his dancing seemed to be restricted. He was a slightly more animated traffic cone, and the difference between him and Master P - and the reason why I voted for him - was that he at least seemed to be trying. ESPN's Kenny Mayne was the second male dancer to go and he seemed to combine an inherent lack of ability with a great enthusiasm that led him to be, well silly. At one point he literally waved off a move he was supposed to do when he realize he was out of synch with his partner, Andrea Hale. At other time he made somewhat discreet waves to the audience. But again, unlike Master P he tried. The best of the male contestants were Drew Lachey and Jerry Rice. It was certainly expected that Lachey would put in an excellent performance - he was a member of the boy band 98 Degrees (along with his brother Nick of course), is currently appearing on Broadway in Rent and is married to a choreographer. He didn't disappoint as he earned the top judges marks of 24. The big surprise of the men was former 49ers wide receiver Jerry Rice. Her partner, Russian born Anna Trebunskaya seemed dubious at first. She seemed to have no real understanding of American football and in an interview stated that "real men play hockey, or soccer ... or volleyball." On the dance floor however he had a fluidity of motion as well as a strength and most importantly and enthusiasm that was exciting to see. Lachey has a leg up with his previous experience but Rice certainly has a lot of potential as this competition goes on.

The majority of the female dancers tended to be better than the men. None received a score lower than 19. That went to Soap Talk host Lisa Rinna, who made a number of slight missteps through her performance . For all that, I thought that Tia Carrere turned in a satisfactory performance. Her movements were graceful but not particularly spectacular. Spectacular came from WWE wrestler Stacy Keibler who used her previous dance training and very long legs to considerable advantage. For all that her past training might come back to haunt her if the judges expect more from her because of it. Surprises were KTLA morning news personality Giselle Fernandez whose performance was excellent in terms of fluidity, and Tatum O'Neal. Tatum was giving something of a comic performance backstage, although how much of that was the producer's idea is a good question but when it came to the dancing she was spot on.

Dancing With The Stars was an improbable ratings hit last summer. I don't expect it to draw the sort of ratings this winter that it did in the summer particularly on a Thursday night. I think that ABC made a mistake in approaching the series as anything more than cotton candy in the summer. That said I watched it, and will probably watch it again next week, because it can get addictive. Sort of like cotton candy.

John Spencer 1946 - 2005

I hate writing obituaries but sometimes there are people who you just have to write about. John Spencer, who died late on Friday, was one of those. He would have been 59 on Tuesday.

On TCM they sometimes have a brief segment following some of their movies called Damned Good Actors. It think that this is a description that fit John Spencer to a T. He made his television debut as a teenager on the second season of The Patty Duke Show. His character disappeared when production of the show moved from New York to Hollywood after Patty Duke turned 18 (New York Law was less restrictive with regard to the hours a juvenile actor could work than California law). He was a student at New York's Professional Children's School where some of his fellow students were Liza Minelli and Pinchas Zuckerman. Spencer worked in regional theatre and off-Broadway productions for much of the 1970s and '80s, winning an Obie for his role in the play Still Life and a Drama Desk nomination for The Day Room.

His film career began in the early 1980s with small parts, like one of the airman at the missile silo at the start of War Games, and often parts in cheap movies. In 1990 he had a major supporting role in the Harrison Ford movie Presumed Innocent which probably led to his first major break, the role of Tommy Mullaney on L.A. Law. He was perfectly cast as the gruff former prosecutor whose alcoholism had led to the end of his marriage and nearly the end of his career before he got a second chance with Mackenzie Brackman. Adding Spencer was a major - and positive - addition to the cast of L.A. Law and he was one of the outstanding figures on the show particularly after Susan Dey, Harry Hamlin and Jimmy Smits left the cast. Spencer's role on L.A. Law helped his career insofar as it got him a better class of supporting roles including parts in forget Paris, The Rock, Copland and The Negotiator although he still appeared in some pretty awful movies. In 1998 he was one of the leading characters in the short-lived NBC series Trinity, co-starring as Jill Clayburgh's husband.

It was with The West Wing that actor and character came together in one of those perfect fits that happen so rarely. Although Spencer said of Leo McGarry "He has qualities that I wish I had more of. I often say to Aaron [Sorkin], 'You're writing the man I'd like to be.' " the two men were close in a lot of ways. Like McGarry, Spencer was an alcoholic and a workaholic. In an interview for AP he said "Like Leo, I've always been a workaholic, too. Through good times and bad, acting has been my escape, my joy, my nourishment. The drug for me, even better than alcohol, was acting.'' Spencer was nominated for five Emmy Awards as Best Supporting Actor and won once in 2002. It always seemed to me to be a bit of a snub to nominate him in the Supporting Actor category as it always seemed to me that the role of Leo was very much the equal of Martin Sheen's Josiah Bartlett, and it seemed particularly strange in those years when Stockard Channing was nominated as Best Supporting Actress for doing far less. True, Bartlett was the showier part but in so many ways Spencer was the glue who held the show together, who linked Bartlett with the bulk of his staff. Indeed, if the original plan for the series had proceeded, where the President either wasn't seen or rarely seen, McGarry would have been the principal character even if Rob Lowe was getting more money per episode. Spencer brought the proper weight to the tough brilliant and occasionally troubled character of Leo. There are so many great scenes with Leo that John Spencer made live. My favourite Leo scene was one where Spencer made the words seem like his own experience. He's explaining to his lawyer - played by Joanna Gleason - that he can't have just one drink, that he can't understand people who can only have just one drink. It's a rivetting near soliloquy and one of his best performances on the show.

There is a certain irony to a couple of events on the show in light of John Spencer's death. In the sixth season episode "Birnam Wood" Leo suffered a near fatal heart attack which took him away from his job at the White House. The episode seemed to have an impact on Spencer. He stated that "I do not want to have a heart attack. Since (I shot that episode) I have taken much better care of myself. I did the thing I have been trying to do for years - I stopped smoking." Reportedly the next episode of The West Wing which was to air on January 6 was to feature Leo in a Vice-Presidential debate where the issue of health care comes up. Reportedly the character was supposed to say "By an overwhelming percentage, the first warning symptom of a heart attack is death. I'm fortunate to be here." There are no reports at the moment of how The West Wing will be handling John Spencer's death.

Spencer was an only child who was married and divorced in the 1970s. According to his publicist he is survived by "cousins, aunts, uncles, and wonderful friends." Not to mention a great many stunned fans.

Don Adams - 1923-2005

I hate writing obituaries. I particularly hate it when it's an obituary for an actor who has a special place in my memories. Don Adams was one of those people.

Born Donald Yarmy in the Bronx in 1923, his father was a Hungarian Jew who ran a number of small restaurants, while his mother was Irish. During World War II he served with the Marines and contracted malaria on Guadalcanal. Later during his Marine Corps service he was a Drill Instructor. Following the war he worked as a commercial artist during the day while working as a stand up comedian in clubs at night. He took the professional last name of his first wife, singer Adelaide Adams (born Adelaide Efantis) because his own last name tended to get him in at the end of auditions. In 1954 he won on the Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts series using a routine which he wrote with his boyhood friend Bill Dana (who would gain fame for his own routine as Jose Jimenez). This led to appearances on Ed Sullivan's Toast Of The Town and eventually a regular appearance on Perry Como's Kraft Music Hall, and then costarred with Dana in the latter's own series. He had also started what would become another aspect of his career - voice work for animated cartoons such as Tennessee Tuxedo and later Inspector Gadget.

Of course Don Adams is probably best known for the role of Maxwell Smart, Secret Agent 86 of CONTROL. It was an ideal match of man and part. Get Smart was both witty - thanks in no small part to a huge group of writers which included Buck Henry, Pat McCormick and Adams himself (although Mel Brooks is credited as one of the series creators, Buck Henry has said that he didn't contribute that much after the initial episodes) - and had a considerable amount of physical slapstick comedy in the mix which made it the best satire of the "James Bond" style secret agent movie that could be found. It was certainly more cutting about the absurdities of Bond than either the Matt Helm or the Derek Flint movies (although I have a personal fondness for James Coburn's Flint movies). The character spawned a number of catch phrases including Would you believe..., and of course "Sorry about that Chief" all made more enjoyable by Adams' clipped style of speech which he picked up during his time as a Drill Sergeant. There were also a host of visual gags, like the security systems at Max's apartment, the fact that CONTROL's answer to Q was a woman working as a stripper, and Max's shoe phone (a 9D Florsheim if you're interested). The show ran for only four years on NBC, and after the network dropped it it was picked up for a single season by CBS.

Like Bob Denver, Don Adams never really caught another role as big as the one that made him a household name. He had a single season series called The Partners in 1971, and 1985 he appeared in the atrocious Canadian series Check It Out with Dinah Christie and Gordon Clapp, who would later go on to play Detective Medavoy in NYPD Blue. He also did a number of revivals of the Maxwell Smart role. One was a 1980 feature film The Nude Bomb which tossed out just about everything about the character and the original show (Barbara Feldon was nowhere to be seen and was replaced by Sylvia Kristel - yes Emmanuelle herself) - Don hated it. There was also a 1989 made for TV movie with Barbara Feldon which thankfully ignored The Nude Bomb, and finally a 1995 Fox series with Don as Chief of CONTROL and his wife, 99, as a congresswoman. The show was meant as a springboard for Andy Dick, but whenever Adams and Feldon were on screen they dominated. Finally, starting in 1999 Don Adams did some commercials for a Canadian long-distance phone service as Maxwell Smart. For a number of years he had wanted to do serious acting and a part in the revived Alfred Hitchcock Presents was written specifically for him, however the producers didn't believe that he could be anything but funny and the part went to Martin Landau.

Don Adams was married and divorced three times, and was the father of seven children. Although Maxwell Smart wasn't, the actor who portrayed him was a well read amateur expert on both Lincoln and Hitler, as well as a talented painter and poet. He also enjoyed gambling on horses and playing cards with friends like James Caan, Don Rickles and Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion. According to his son-in-law Jim Beaver (who is a frequent poster to various movie newsgroups as well as one of the major characters on Deadwood), Don Adams had been suffering from Lymphoma for a number of years but his health took a serious turn for the worse after his daughter Cecily (Jim's wife) past away last year. According to Jim: "In recent weeks he had declined to continue medications or treatment for his ailments. Following his emergency hospitalization on September 24, he was unable to breathe on his own. As per his instructions, life-support systems were turned off Sunday night. Two of his former wives and three of his children, as well as other family members, were with him when he died."

Dana Elcar - 1927-2005

Dana Elcar, probably best known for playing Pete Thornton for six years on MacGyver died on Monday of complications from pneumonia. His family decided to delay release of the information to keep things quiet. He was 77.

For years before MacGyver Dana Elcar was one of those dependable but anonymous character actors who you always knew but could never quite name. He was "that guy; you know the one who was in ... and he did .... and ..... Now what was his name? Well you'll know him when you see him." He did a lot that would get him recognised if never really becoming a big name before MacGyver. His IMDB lists over 100 guest appearances on TV shows from 1959 when he appeared in the Play of the Week production of John Steinbeck's Burning Bright with Colleen Dewhurst, to his last on-screen appearance in 2002 when he did an episode of ER (actually his first screen appearance was in a 1954 series called A Time to Live that ran 15 minutes an episode on NBC. In between he worked - usually in guest appearances - in a host of TV shows that TV fans are bound to remember, including The Defenders, Gunsmoke, Mannix, The F.B.I., Hawaii Five-0, Ironside, The A-Team, and quite literally a host of others. In some cases he appeared in the same show in different roles - he appeared on three different episodes of Mannix in three different roles over a three year period. Although most of his work was on TV he also appeared in movies, notably as the fake FBI agent in The Sting.

Somehow I always think of Dana Elcar before MacGyver, as yelling. It seems he was always playing some ticked off bureaucrat or commanding officer of something who was usually yelling at someone. In 1975 he was Lieutenant Shiller, and yelling at Robert Blake in Baretta. In from 1976 to 1978 he got to yell at Robert Conrad, playing the base CO in Black Sheep Squadron. However it was MacGyver that made people remember Dana Elcar's name. He appeared in the pilot episode as a minor character named Andy Colson, but when it was decided to have Mac work for the Phoenix Foundation, Elcar was added to the cast as his boss and best friend Pete Thornton. In a statement Richard Dean Anderson, who played MacGyver said "At a time when I had very little business being called an actor, he made things so easy for me. It was a learning experience that was very warm and loving for all seven years."

Dana Elcar was diagnosed with Glaucoma after the fourth season of MacGyver. It was decided that the character of Pete Thornton would also learn that he had glaucoma. By the time the series ended Elcar was nearly totally blind, which in part may explain why he did neither of the two MacGyver TV movies. His post MacGyver appearances, in a 1993 episode of Law & Order and in the 2002 episode of ER were playing blind characters.

(I hate writing obituary posts because sadly I have had to do a number of them for actors I liked a lot.)

Leon Askin - 1907-2005

Leon Askin died in Vienna on Friday at age 97.

Probably best known to North Americans as General Burkhalter, Askin's professional career actually began in Austria in the 1920s. Born Leon Aschkenasy, his first stage appearance was in 1926, and he worked steadily through the 1930s both in theater and doing political and literary caberets in Vienna, Dusseldorf, and after the rise of the Nazis and later the Anschluss in Austria, in Paris. At the start of World War II he was interned in France as "an enemy alien". He emigrated to the United States in 1940 - before the German invasion of France, and did stage work as both an actor and director with Washington DC's Civic Theater. His production of Shakespeare's anti-war play Troilus & Cressida had the misfourtune to open on December 5 1941. Following the U.S. entry into the war, Askin joined the U.S. Army Air Force and rose to the rank of Technical Sergeant writing orientation material for soldier going overseas, and eventually serving in England. During this period he became an American citizen. At the end of the war he was able to travel to France in an effort to locate members of his family. He learned that his parents had been sent to the concentration camp at Teresienstadt and later learned that they had been executed. Returning to the United States, Askin returned to directing this time on Broadway, where he was also a founding member of Actors Equity.

In 1952 Askin went to Hollywood to work in the Columbia film Assignment Paris. He remained in Hollywood until 1993 and appeared in over 60 movies, usually as a foreign "villain". Among the films he was in were Road To Bali with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, The Robe with Richard Burton, Knock on Wood with Danny Kaye, Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three with James Cagney. He also worked in Germany in the period, notably in the 1962 remake of the Fritz Lang classic The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. His IMDB entry lists over 60 TV appearances, including The Adventures of Superman, My Favorite Martian, Daniel Boone, a two part episode of Switch (with Eddie Albert), Happy Days, and Three's Company. He did voices on Scooby and Scrappy Doo. His last American TV appearance was in an episode of Different Strokes, although his final TV appearance was in an Austrian miniseries, Alma - A Show biz ans Ende. In 1993 Askin returned permanently to Vienna where continued to work occassionally in film and theatre with his last film credit coming in 2001. In 2002, at the age of 95 he married media specialist Anita Wicher.

It is a General Burkhalter that Leon Askin is likely to be best remembered. Although most people writing about the series describe Burkhalter as a Nazi, it is more complex than that. Burkhalter would probably be better described as an old imperial officer who just happened to be working for the Nazis. He's sufficiently apolitical to not care who is in charge just so long as he has the best wine, the best food and the best women. Burkhalter was an opportunist, but he was also at least vaguely competent, certainly more competent Colonel Klink but it also makes him less sympathetic than Klink, and much less sypathetic than Sergeant Schultz. (Of course Howard Caine's character - Gestapo Major Hochstetter who really was a Nazi - was the least sympathetic of the lot.) Nevertheless Burkhalter was an immensely funny character to watch, alternating between the impeccable Prussian martinet who constantly threatens Klink with a one way trip to the Russian Front, and the jolly aristocrat who is enjoying the war because of the food and the wine and the beautiful women. What made it work of course was that Askin was an excellent actor, and had both the face and voice to make the character work.

Well Apparently They Were

I thought that America wasn't ready for Dancing With The Stars and said so in my review. Apparently I was wrong, at least for the first episode. The overnight ratings are in and ABC scored an impressive (particularly for the summer) 10.6/16 rating with 13.23 million viewers. In the important 18-49 age group the show drew a rating of 4.2/12. This made it the highest rated show of the night. By contrast the show's lead-in, a Supernanny repeat, drew a 5.9/10 with 7.74 million viewers and an 18-49 rating of 2.4/6. The WB's Beauty and the Geek which was on opposite Supernanny had 3.5/6, 3.09 million viewers, and an 18-49 rating of 1.6/6 to finish 4th in the time slot.

Who knew?

Is America Ready For This?

Three new reality shows debuted tonight, two in the United States and one in Canada. Predictably I'm going to review the one which seems just slightly more innovative than the others - and also the one that I think will probably be the lowest rated, which in the summer of 2005 is saying a lot.

Every so often you come upon you come upon a train wreck. It may not have happened yet but you know it will. Dancing With The Stars is going to be a train wreck. I just don't know that the United States - or Canada for that matter - is ready for ballroom dancing on network TV, particularly when the dancing is done by people who have very little experience in ballroom dancing.

Ballroom dancing has achieved a new level of visibility recently. The 1996 Japanese movie Shall We Dansu? receive critical raves when it was eventually released in the United States, and was eventually remade last year as Shall We Dance? with Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and Jennifer Lopez. ABC has describe Dancing With The Stars as an international sensation, and it is, although not always under that name. In Britain the series is known as Strictly Come Dancing and has featured UK media "stars" like comedian Julian Clary, David Dickinson (host of Bargain Hunt), and opera singer Leslie Garrett. The Australian version, also called Dancing With The Stars had veteran actor John Wood, Olympic Gold Medallist James Tomkins, and Home And Away Star Rebecca Cartwright, and there's a New Zealand version that's currently airing.

The show's format pairs a "star" with a professional ballroom dancer. Let's just say that some are more adept than others. In the US version of the show there are six teams (the British, Australian and New Zealand series had eight to ten). They are John O'Hurley (Seinfeld) with Charlote Jorgenson; four time Heavyweight Boxing champion Evander Holyfield with Edyta Sliwinska, Joey McIntyre (Boston Public and the band New Kids on the Block) with Ashley Delgrosso; Kelly Monaco (General Hospital) with Alec Mazo; supermodel Rachel Hunter with Jonathon Roberts; and reality star Trista (Rehn) Sutter (The Bachelor and Ryan & Trista Get Married) with Louis van Amstel.

The partners have had five weeks to work together to learn the various dance moves and to develop routines for each of 10 styles of dance. Following their training period the teams dance at a Los Angeles club in a live broadcast hosted by Tom Bergeron America's Funniest Home Videos. Here I think is part of the problem with the show. Instead of playing it straight, Bergeron decides to go for the cheap joke. Thus when talking about Rachel Hunter he mentions that even though shes a supermodel she "uses her powers for good." it's an old joke and it was a bad joke when it was new. I get the distinct feeling that Bergeron would rather be anywhere else. Fortunately Tom doesn't get to talk much, which is just as well because a little of him goes a long way. Then things go to the judges. The head judge is professional Ballroom Dancing Judge Len Goodman, who was also a judge on the British series Strictly Come Dancing and has been either dancing or judging dancing for most of his adult life. He's assisted by Hollywood choreographer Carol Ann Inaba, and Bruno Tonioli who was also on the British show and has worked with people like Elton John, Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney, Kate Winslet and Tina Turner. They each rate the dancers from 1 to 10 (Bergeron: "Which means that the tops score is thirty"). Finally viewers get a chance to vote American Idol style by phone or on-line.

The dancing was variable, ranging from slightly better than high school prom quality to not quite ready to enter a real competition. Teams had the choice of the Waltz or the Cha Cha Cha, and while no one truly embarrassed themselves in terms of screwing up, but a couple of these people shouldn't be allowed on a dance floor unless they're the ones getting married. Evander Hollyfield gave a particularly poor performance, mainly standing in place moving his arms and occasionally his feet while his partner Edyta moved around him. Allegedly he was doing the Cha Cha Cha. The dance that Rachel Hunter and Jonathon Roberts were doing was allegedly the Waltz, but it looked to ballet like for my definition of the Waltz. The worst judges' assessment waited for Kelly Monaco who was described as looking too stiff, "as if someone had died." The best dancers may have been the teams Joey McIntyre and Ashley Delgrosso and John O'Hurley and Charlotte Jorgenson (although I at least was impressed with Trista and Louis).

There were few if any problems with the live broadcast. There were a couple of times when Bergeron tried to talk over the crowd and the crowd won, and one incident where a camera literally lost a pair of dancers in the flare from a footlight, but those sort of things can almost be expected in a first broadcast. The judges were relatively mild in their assessments of the teams. There are no Simons in this group: the meanest comment was when Len said of some team: "A garden needs a mix of lawn and flowers. You were all lawn." It says something however that I can't remember which team he said it of.

I can see the appeal of Dancing With The Stars. Ballroom Dancing is a beautiful thing and even sensual thing when you're doing it (the dancing generations of the '50s and '60s have a lot to answer for), and if there's a market for hours of figure skating in the winter, then there should be a market for this. The trouble is that I don't know what that market is, and whether they'll be watching in sufficient numbers to give this show the ratings it would need to survive. The problem isn't that the people are "B" or even "C" list celebrities - on the whole television doesn't attract "A" list celebs at the best of times and this show isn't going to make a breakthrough in that area (well Robert Duval might be interested - he's a major fan of ballroom dancing to the point where he taught Waltz classes on the set of Lonesome Dove) - and loathe though I am to say it, the problem isn't Bergeron. The reason I don't expect the show to succeed is simply that it doesn't have the excitement and fire of an American Idol or the dramatic tension of a Survivor or even a Hell's Kitchen. Worse, despite the success of Shall We Dance? I don't believe there's as much interest in Ballroom Dancing in North America as there is in Britain and Australia. All of which saddens me slightly because unlike a show like The WB's Beauty And The Geek which also debuted Wednesday night (and which I'll review tomorrow after it re-airs) it at least has the advantage of originality.

Eddie Albert 1906-2005

Eddie Albert passed away of pneumonia on Thursday, a few weeks after his 99th birthday, in was announced on Friday evening. According to his son Edward Albert, Eddie Albert had suffered from Alzheimer's Disease for the past 10 years.

Eddie Albert's life was an eventful one, both inside show business and outside of it. Before World War II he provided intelligence information on German activities in Mexico while working for the Escalante Brothers Circus as a trapeze artist. During World War II he served in the US Navy as a beachmaster and salvage expert. During the Tarawa landings he rescued a number of wounded soldiers from the beaches in the small unarmoured boat he was provided with for salvage operations. For this he was awarded the Bronze Star. He was later assigned to a unit making training films and after the war he took this experience and used it to form a company producing educational films. He was involved as an activist for a number of causes, notably malnutrition - he travelled to the Congo to discuss the issue with Albert Schweitzer in the 1950s - and refugees. However he is most readily identified with the environmental movement. He became an activist in publicising the effects of DDT which led to the eventual ban on its use in the United States. He was also involved in conservation activities, being the chairman of the Boy Scouts of America's tree planting and conservation programs.

Eddie Albert's career in t he entertainment industry began in the 1930s. He started as a singer in night clubs and on the radio. Indeed he dropped his family name - Heimberger - because radio announcers constantly mispronounced it as "Hamburger". He later appeared on Broadway starring in Brother Rat. When the play was made into a movie he was brought to Hollywood to appear in it, and the sequel Brother Rat and a Baby, opposite Ronald Reagan. He went back to Broadway from time to time, including replacing Robert Preston as Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. In his Hollywood career he appeared in over 100 theatrical and TV movies. Among his most important roles were Roman Holiday in 1953 and The Heartbreak Kid in 1972. He earned Oscar nominations for both roles. Other major roles included Ali Hakim in the movie version of Oklahoma, the cowardly officer in Attack!, and the prison warden in the original version of The Longest Yard, a character he reportedly modelled on Richard Nixon. Robert Aldrich, the director of The Longest Yard as well as Attack said of him, "There's no actor working today who can be as truly malignant as Eddie Albert. He plays heavies exactly the way they are in real life. Slick and sophisticated." He was also a veteran television performer. In fact his first television performance occurred in 1936 when he participated in the first private TV broadcast by NBC to its radio licensees in New York. He made a number of guest appearances on dramatic anthology series such as Studio One in the 1950s and was active in TV movies and miniseries as late as 1995 (and did voice work for animated series as late as 1997).

Eddie Albert is best remembered for one series of course and that is Green Acres. He had rejected a number of other series - notably Father Knows Best - the role of Oliver Wendell Douglas, the Wall Street lawyer who decided to escape the rat race by becoming a farmer, appealed to the man who turned his front lawn into a cornfield and grew his own vegetables in a backyard greenhouse. At the time the series was regarded as just another rural comedy on a network which was famous (or infamous, depending on what you thought of the shows) for rural comedies. Today it is regarded as gem of surrealist comedy. Douglas might have seemed sane but in the context of the community where he lived - where pigs were treated as children and the show credits were sometimes read by the characters - he was the odd man out. Even though he did several other TV series including Falcon Crest, General Hospital and Switch (I used the only picture I could find online related to that series), it is Green Acresfor which he is and probably always will be remembered.

Frank Gorshin 1934-2005

I was saddened to learn from Mark Evanier's News From Me that Frank Gorshin has passed away at the age of 72.

Gorshin was a talented comedian and impressionist who was famous for his Kirk Douglas impression. At one time he was regarded as being at the same level of ability as Rich Little. Although Gorshin's acting career began in the mid-1950s, and included a number of dramatic and comedic roles, he is probably best known for two parts - The Riddler in the Batman TV series, for which he earned an Emmy nomination, and Commissioner Bele in the Star Trek episode "Let This Be Your Final Battlefield". Gorshin, a chain smoker, died of a combination of emphysema pneumonia and lung cancer. His final performance will air on Thursday night's CSI: Crime Scene Investigation finale.

Like all of the principal Bat-villains in the series (The Riddler, The Joker, The Penguin and Catwoman) he was perfectly cast. The thing about Gorshin that made him memorable as the Riddler was that his performance put his whole being in play. His voice was a major element of course, going from a low conspiratorial level to loud, triumphal and higher pitched, often in the same scene or even the same sentence. There was also his facial expression and his body language, and of course "The Laugh". All of these elements made the character Gorshin's, something that was proven absolutely when a contract dispute in the second season meant that Gorshin was replaced by John Astin as The Riddler in one episode. Astin is a fine comedic actor but he just couldn't replace Gorshin as The Riddler (an earlier "Riddler" script was rewritten to create a new villain, The Puzzler played by Maurice Evans.

(One curious thing though. All of the obituaries quote his age as 72 but if he was born in April 1934, as all of the obituaries also state, that would make him 71 by my math.)

Mason Adams 1919-2005

Usually when an actor gets "The Big Break" and becomes famous for a role, you suddenly see him everywhere in series that were produced before the big break. Ed Asner suddenly became visible after he became Lou Grant on Mary Tyler Moore, and the same thing happened to Sorrell Booke after he put on the fat(ter) suit and became Boss Hogg on Dukes of Hazard. It wasn't the case with Mason Adams. If you look at his IMDB listing, you'll find a mere seven acting credits including two guest appearances in the 1950s, and a 1947 short about Alexander Graham Bell called Mr. Bell in which he played Thomas Watson. So you won't see Mason Adams in much before his breakthrough role as Charlie Hume in Lou Grant. But you'll hear him everywhere because, in the words of Leonard Cohen, Mason Adams was born with the gift of a golden voice and it was only after Lou Grant that we also saw that he had the sort of face that carried a great deal of authority and wisdom.

Mason Adams did a lot of radio work, starting in 1940 and continuing until pretty much the end of network radio in 1959. The was Pepper Young in Pepper Young's Family and played a lot of villains in other radio shows. He was the Kryptonite Man in The Adventures of Superman with Clayton "Bud" Collier (who hosted of course To Tell The Truth on TV). I recall hearing a comedy skit featuring Adams as an increasingly harried baseball announcer. According to the Internet Broadway Database Adams also appeared in six plays, five of them before Lou Grant.

Charlie Hume on Lou Grant was a breakthrough role of course. Charlie started as a sort of weak yes-man for Mrs. Pynchon, but as time went by he grew "a pair" and became more assertive, to the point where you could understand why Lou respected him and why. One episode I remember in particular had Charlie confronting the clueless wife of a Central American dictator about torture in her country - torture that he himself had been subjected to. Charlie was very much a supporting character but he had his moments, enough that he was nominated for the "Best Supporting Actor in a Drama" Emmy three years in a row. His role wasn't as showy as Nancy Marchand's Margaret Pynchon, or Robert Walden's Joe Rossi who ironically was also nominated for "Best Supporting Actor in a Drama" three years in a row; the same three years as Adams (they lost twice to Stuart Margolin in The Rockford Files and once to Michael Conrad in Hill Street Blues).

After Lou Grant left the air (and I'm one of those who is convinced that the cancellation had more to do with Ed Asner's politics than ratings) Adams went on to a host of appearances in TV movies and miniseries. and a comparatively small number of guest starring roles in TV series. His last listed acting appearance was in an episode of Oz in 2003, although the last part I saw him was as a Supreme Court Justice who takes Bartlett to task for not considering a real liberal as his replacement on the bench. In these roles he usually played a fatherly figure, but someone with a certain amount of authority. An example was his appearance in From The Earth To The Moon as Senator Clinton Anderson, who deflates Walter Mondale's attack on the space program by asking about Gus Grissom. It's a tiny role, but Adams brings the right level of gravity to it to make it believable. But it's as a voice actor that Mason Adams will be best remembered. He was the reader for the books on tape versions of Lillian Jackson Braun's "Cat" mystery novels (and probably many others), and was always in demand as a voice for commercials. For the past 30 years he's been the voice of Smuckers - "With a name like Smuckers, it has to be good."