Your Worst/Most Obnoxious Local TV Personality

Cafe Society
1

It seems every city of 5000 or more now has a local television newscast, and I was wondering who is your worst/most obnoxious, local TV personality.

In Las Vegas, on the local NBC channel, there is a weatherman named John Fredericks. He does really lame ad-libs, and cracks himself up and acts like he can’t even do the weather because he is laughing so hard at his own lame comments. He also make PETA seem like light-weights, always takes his dog on location shots and has started to show pictures of people’s cats and dogs on their “birthday”. So, in between shots of pitbulls named “fluffy” and dumb ad-libs, he sometimes doesn’t even get around to giving the weather report.

The other local pain is a car salesman named John Barr…an Australian who does car commercials that are so far over the top that they have been named the worst TV commercial several years in a row in the local newspaper best/worst of Las Vegas edition.

Any nominations from your local channel?

2

Also in the great state of Nevada (Reno area this time), on the ABC station:
A man named Tad Dunbar does the evening news. The thing with Tad is that it appears that he was the victim of some horrible genetics experiment that was designed to breed a pig and an bulldog. Not only is Tad a rather portly fellow, but his jowls almost reach the floor. He may have had jowl implants.
Tad also does the health report. Forgive me, but I’d take health tips from Keith Richards and Jack Kevorkian before Tad Dunbar.

In Texas this time: a guy named Stacy Urban that owns a Nissan dealership. One of his radio commercials starts off, “Hi, I’m Stacy Urban from Urban Nissan. What’s new with Nissan this year? The all new Pathfinder Armada, that’s what!” (But imagine him saying “what” like “watt”) Just an annoying human being.

3

Gary Radnich. I’m so glad his smug face is now lost to the ethers of independent local stations. He’s the sports guy on what used to be San Francisco’s NBC affiliate. He’s still there, but the station, having lost NBC is pretty much a joke. Unfortunately, he still pops up at the ballparks and has a show on the popular KNBR 680 radio station.

4

For Ireland (population approaching 4 million but the TV is still very ‘local’ in style and content) I nominate Pat Kenny, a man who manages to be both oleaginous and smug, while simultaneously being stupid and vacuous.

He took over the reins of the world’s longest running talk show (the Late Late Show) from Gay Byrne, who is also oleaginous and smug, but overflowing with charm and talent.

5

Savannah’s worst (but, oddly, most beloved) news guy was Doug Weathers. Think Ted Baxter WITHOUT the wit! He would flub his lines and stop reading the Tele-Prompter and screw up the director in the control booth. He had a drinking problem at one time and may have done the news under the influence.

Best line: (In reference to the police finding a nameless homeless man dead in a Dumpster earlier in the day)

“And at this time, he is still dead.” (meaning, of course, that he was still unidentified)

He finally retired and was replaced by a humorless drone with helmet hair - Mike Manhatton.

6

Cal Worthington has been an institution in Anchorage for longer than I have been a resident here. He also has dealerships all over the West Coast, I believe. Cal is really obnoxious at all, but his commercials have always been… well, unusual. Some of his classic lines: “I’ll stand on my head to sell you a car!” “I’ll eat a bug to sell you a new car!” and “Here’s Cal Worthingtion and his dog Spot!” Each of these voice-overs was accompanied by footage of Cal performing the stunt. When the “dog Spot” thing runs, the animal shown is anything but a dog; usually it was lions, and tigers, and bears (oh my!) He also showed stunts like being strapped to the top wing of a biplane doing loops. I gotta give him credit though - when you think of Fords in Anchorage, you think of Cal Worthington. And his dog Spot. And now for the really scary news: Cal Jr. is gonna take over! I met Cal Jr. at a social function, and he has all the salesmanship skill of his dad. A scary thought, indeed.

7

Oops! That should read: Cal is really not obnoxious at all.

8

Philly is a major media market, so out-and-out incompetence is fairly uncommon. Luckily, we have plenty of obnoxious personalities to hate.

The top station is the ABC affiliate, where Peter Boreanz’s father is the main weather guy. He cracks himself up like clockwork – once a week, on the 11:00 Friday broadcast. TGIF this, Dave Roberts.

I gave up on that station after they led off the 6:00 news one night with a one-two punch of stories on urban violence: One about someone rushing up and pushing a kid off his tricycle in South Philly, and the other about some lowlife punching his pregnant girlfriend in the stomach. Neither of these struck me as particularly newsworthy or edifying items.

Having sworn off Channel 6, though, I had to figure out which of the other two stations to switch my allegiance to. All the anchors are annoying in one way or another, so I based my decision on the weatherpeople.

The NBC affiliate had four people:

*John Bolaris, a very handsome gentleman who left the station after some kind of scandal involving emails and a female reporter from another station; I (blessedly) do not recall the details. John Bolaris is notorious for hyping the storm of the century (it turned out to be less than an inch of snow) and for his desire to “name” the various winter storms. This idea didn’t catch on.

*Glenn “Hurricane” Schwartz – short, pudgy, glasses, bowtie. [Just went to their website to see if he has a prissy little moustache or not – and find that – sweet Jesus – “Hurricane” has written a book about Philly weather, “the first since 1847.” Oh, and in one pic he has the 'stache, in the other he doesn’t. 'Nuff said.] I have whiled away whole minutes of my life wondering whether the “Hurricane” moniker was self-bestowed or given by someone else with a spirit of contempt that he failed to recognize.

*Some normal guy with a normal name who I can’t recall anything about. God bless him.

*Kathy Orr, a smart, competent, schtick-free woman.

I went with the third station, the CBS affiliate – and was delighted when Kathy Orr came over to said station about a year ago.

PS: On preview, I note the posts on Cal Worthington – good lord, is he still around? I remember him (and his dog spot) from when I lived in SoCal in the '70s.

9

When I was growing up in Omaha during the 50s and 60s, there was a local afternoon movie show hosted by Sally Rosen, the aging overly made-up wife of the Rosen and daughter of the Novak of Rosen-Novak Chevrolet. The show was called “Sally Rosen Presents The Afternoon Movie”.

This ghastly-looking woman had a ghastly delivery to match.

There were so many of her painful intros to her husband’s sales manager’s pitches for extremely tired old iron throughout this alleged movie that my sister and I called the show “Sally Rosen Prevents The Afternoon Movie” or" Sally Rosen Resents The Afternnoon Movie".

10

I’ve lived in a fair number of large cities. One thing I’ve noticed is that car dealers seem to compete to have the very worst, most obnoxious TV ads. The ads are generally amateurishly made (probably the dealerships have arranged an “in kind” payment, or are using someone’s brother/daughter who is in college, studying to be the Next Big Movie Director), and of course the ads star the owner of the dealership, because he is SOOOOO charismatic. He might very well BE charming in person, but he generally comes across as a slug on TV.

In fact, most locally produced ads seem to star the owners of the business in some way. I’m sure that this is partially to save money, but also partially for ego gratification. I’m convinced that if the owner could swallow his or her pride and hire a semi-professional actor (and in Las Vegas and in the DFW metroplex, at least, there’s plenty of actors desperately looking for any kind of paying work, and they’ll work fairly cheap) that the ad would bring in much more trade.

Other trends in the bad TV ads I have noticed: ambulance chasing lawyers. I specify ambulance chasers because apparently they specialize in accident and injury cases. Discount clothing stores. Local insurance companies (the national chains tend to have professionally produced ads, as opposed to the owner’s kid brother with a videocam noted above). Hmmmmmm, I haven’t watched TV in a while, so I can’t really remember what else is on. I do know that the ads are part of why I quit watching a lot of TV in the first place.

I will turn on the local news now and then. Why must we have “color radar”? Isn’t black and white radar good enough? For that matter, why do so many stations need a weather team? I could understand having people cover different shifts, but do we really need half a dozen people working on the 6 PM weather report? And do they all need to be on the air? Just pick the most photogenic one, tell him or her not to babble about cells, and let us know whether or not to take an umbrella or a sweater or use plenty of sunscreen. I do not want a short course in weather science on my evening news. I just want to know what to expect, in the unlikely event that I will set foot outside my house on that particular evening. (Chance of Lynn emerging from her house: about 10% per day, given good weather conditions. If it’s icy or snowing, not a chance in hell unless she’s on her way to the ER.) The sportscasters are even worse. They get EXCITED. Sometimes I think that they’re about to wet themselves right there on camera, and I wonder if I’d even notice. Given a choice, I’ll go to the bathroom during the sports and watch the bad commercials.

11

Here in the greater Detroit area it’s Keith Faime (sp?). You might have seen him; he was on Survivor a while back. He’s the Heath Guru for one of the local news stations. He’s the quintessential “granola nut”; if you follow his dietery advice, you might be healthier but it’s guaranteed to be a bland, tasteless existence. Salt? Bad. Sugar? Bad. Caffeine? Bad. Fat? OH MY GOD YOU WILL DIE IF ANY LITTLE BIT OF FAT COMES WITHIN FOUR MILES OF YOUR LIPS :eek: Oh yeah, it’s always “artery-clogging fat.” You will never hear him say “fat” without the words “artery-clogging” appended to the front. All of the this is presented with a sanctimonious attitude that is fully capable of inducing nausea in unsuspecting viewers. Your only hope is the change the channel the moment you see him appear on your TV.

12

Does daytime TV count, or is it “fish in a barrel?”

There’s a woman on a Washington-area magazine program that has been needles under my fingernails the few times in the last twenty years that I’ve been obliged to be in the same room with someone abusing themselves by sucking up that show.

The show is called Northwest Afternoon, (fashionably shortnened to its initials for some time now, which cracks me up because ‘NWA’ has other connotations at the opposite end of the spectrum from Northwest Afternoon’s flavour of bland, although just as ridiculous,) and the offender is a woman named Cindi Rheinhart.

Everything about this woman is horrible, from the relatively minor offense of the way she spells her name, (you know she dots that ‘I’ with a heart in her correspondence, too,) to her excesses of plastic surgery that make Michael Jackson’s look positively subtle, (the skin around her eyes is stretched so tight that it affects her ability to enunciate clearly-- really, there’s a reason she’s the only woman working in front of the camera for which no photographic evidence can be found on the internet, absolutely horrifying,) and she somehow manages to be more stupid and irritating than her subject matter, which is going some. It sounds like she prepares for her show my pounding an ounce of cocaine up her butt. She screams, shrieks, and streeeeetches out random wooooooooooooords, which I’m convinced she dooooooooes instead of saying “um,” as she gathers her thouuuuuuuughts.

She comes across like a four-foot-high pudgy-yet-skeletal emodiment of the D.T.'s in a fright wig. Aaaaaagh!

13

Wow , no one has mentioned Buffalo, New York yet ?

Declan

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Mark Patrick in Indiana. He used to do Sports for one of the TV stations. He lost that job and somehow got a local TV radio talk show AND it then went national or seminational or something. He is AWFUL. He makes bad, 3rd grade humor jokes. He makes Howard Stern seem like an intellectual giant. HE has stupid sign off lines that he plays and that callers, for some reason, call in to request. He does know something about sports, but he spend most of his local show discussing stupid old songs and movies along with trying to be funny. And its not like his show is that long. I’ve noticed Tony Kornheiser, if anyone listens to him, does the same thing.

          There is also a guy named Cody Stark that does the weather on the Fox station and tries to do impersonations, but they are just BAD.  PAINFULLY bad, like if a middle school tried to put on a play and forced everyone to have a part.
15

Yup, Cal’s based in the Los Angeles area and I grew up watching “CAL WORTHINGTON AND HIS DOG SPOT!” on local TV. Did anyone else misinterpret his theme song’s refrain, “Go see Cal, go see Cal, go see Cal” as “Pussy cow, pussy cow, pussy cow” or am I the only one?

16

Cal Worthington’s dealership in Carson (OK, in the nameless sprawl of LA) was just down the 405 from where I used to live. I still remember the sign, showing him with his arm around a tiger and the slogan

GO SEE CAL
GO SEE CAL

tastefully slapped underneath.

Now that I live in the Buffalo area, I have to suffer the HUGE ads from Fucillo Chevrolet, where everything is HUUUUUUUUGE. It’s the HUUUUUGEST car dealership in all of Western New York, you know, and the deals are HUUUUUUUGE.

17

Bridget Smith, on the CBS local news station out of San Antonio.

She resembles Tammy Fae Bakker with a suntan, and is sent to cover news stories only when the audience is not expected to take the story in question seriously at all. Specializes in embarrassing random passersby with bizarre and idiotic questions.

A close second is the guy who owns a tire dealership there, who insists on taping his own commercials on his home camcorder, as well as singing his little jingles himself. Resembles a tire commercial as performed by your drunk middle-aged uncle at Christmas.

18

This thread is making me think about how truly awsome and incredible The Legend of Ron Burgundy is going to be.

[For those who haven’t heard of it, The Legend of Ron Burgundy is a movie coming up with Will Ferrel playing a 19070’s local news anchor]

19

Gee I never liked Melanie Wingo of the Medford, Oregon ABC affiliate station - err I mean “newswatch shtation.” But who really bugs me is the regular weather guy on the NBC shtation. I forget his name, and their website is T.O.A. bull, but anyway, the guy is a total dip. A trained chimp could do his job better than he can. Oh and more than twice there were typographical errors in the newscasts.

20

Can’t say that I’ve watched Cody Stark, but I used to think Mark Patrick used to have his funny moments when he impersonated Marge Schott and Harry Carrey on the Bob and Tom Show. Didn’t like him at all on the Hoosier Millionaire Show, which is now hosted by the unspeakable and previously-mentioned Cody Stark.

It seems like WTHR in Indianapolis has some unbearable personalities. Angela Cain, who has the worst hair and the smarmiest, over-dramatic delivery on the station. Paul Casey, who can’t say a single sentence without uttering “uh” at least two or three times. His traffic reports would be a third shorter if he could just gather his thoughts. Gerry Dick, who’s gigantic head distracts me during his business reports. If it wasn’t for his oversized skull, he would be totally uninteresting.

The Terre Haute stations really get some third-string on-air talent. Two that spring to mind are Mark Allen (wussy anchorman) and Kevin Orpurt (weatherman / potential stalker). These two might work at the same station. I think Orpurt took after the mayor of Terre haute with a baseball bat after he caught him fooling around with his wife.