Anyone else watch The NBC Nightly News last night (Nov. 29?). About two minutes into the broadcast, the WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP fire alarms started in the studios, and they didn’t manage to turn them off till about five minutes before the show ended.
I was highly amused (and glad that mine is not the only office with near constant, deafening fire drills). Brian seemed more amused than annoyed, and carried on with his prompter-reading manfully, but I wonder if there was a Jessica Savitch-quality meltdown at 7:01.
I wonder too if they did it on purpose? I stayed tuned solely to see if they ever got the alarm turned off . . .
I was surprised to learn that he’d been a firefighter for a while. When someone first mentioned that in commentary about this event, I assumed it was some reference to his (rather delightful) Saturday Night Live host appearance; I thought he played a firefighter in an interview but could be misremembering.
Here’s what really tickles me. The networks do two feeds of their evening news – at 6:30 and 7:00. Normally they just repeat the 6:30 feed, but if there’s breaking news that needs updating, or (ahem) a technical problem, they’ll do the newscast over again. So Brian Williams, or the director, or the executive producer, or whoever it is whose job it is to have a temper tantrum had to get through another show before blowing up.
I usually flip around the various news shows at that time, but I found it so amusing the way he was handling it ("…and once again I’d like to apologize for the fire alarms…") that I had to keep it on the whole time.
Of course somewhere, some studio exec is going to hear stories like mine and declare “Fire alarm noises in the background! That’s what people want in a newscast!”.
That was a good episode of SNL and Brian Williams was funnier and his acting was better than many of the name-brand comedians and actors who are the usual guest hosts.
