PhotoDude.com

Wed. Feb 26, 2003

Melanie the Storage Medium

Melanie the Storage Medium – If you’ve ever worked a job with odd night hours, you are aware of the vast wasteland the TV can become late at night and early in the morning. And it used to be even worse. Back in the late 70’s, I worked as a DJ doing either the 7pm-12mid shift, or the “graveyard shift,” 12mid-6am. I’d come home to my 13 inch black and white TV, and flip amongst the four or five broadcast stations I could pick up.

Usually, your choices ranged from a local community service show done with one camera, two lights, and half a personality, to the Reverend Earnest Angley slappin’ people on the forehead. But occasionally, if your timing was right, you could tune in to Atlanta’s Channel 17, then recently purchased by a youngish Ted Turner (and known as WTCG, I think), to catch a most bizarre and wonderful concoction known as “17 Update Early in the Morning.” The show featured Bill Tush (and later SNL star Jan Hooks) ... doing … well, all kinds of things under the guise of a newscast, including a sidesplitting send up of the evangelists you could find on the other channels at the very same moment. It was a hilarious show, and perfect for the hour it appeared. Alas, as WTCG grew into WTBS, the Turner Boradcasting System, CNN, etc, etc, “17 Update Early in the Morning” disappeared, and Bill Tush went on to be known as an entertainment reporter for CNN.

Why do I bring all this up? Because I just happen to know the person who may have the only surviving tapes of those shows, and she’s actually put a few online: “Old videotapes never die, they just end up in my basement. For years this has been an issue in our house as I’ve tried repeatedly to throw them out. Lately I’ve come to rethink this position. One unfortunate result of the colossal growth and frequent mergers of TBS through the years has been the routine purging of tape libraries. Now it seems the 50+ hours of quad reels stashed in my basement may well constitute the most complete remaining archive of the early years of TBS. I’m now considering leasing a climate controlled vault.”

“Ordinarily, I would never think of distributing this material on my site or anywhere else, but since Tush said he didn’t mind and the legal wizards at AOL/Time Warner probably have bigger fish to fry, here goes. For your viewing pleasure, here are a few tiny QuickTime clips of 17 Update Early in the Morning, circa 1977-79. Warning: if you’re not a baby boomer or have never seen the show, chances are you won’t find these clips funny. For the other three of you, enjoy.”

Oh, bless you, Miss Melly. I’m swamped with work and haven’t had time to view the QT videos yet, but I’m hoping that the other two people who are remember the show won’t abuse your bandwidth too much before I have that chance.

I just hope you’ve got one of the evangelist skits.