Back in the day, Bob Vila used to be on the popular PBS show This Old House. I was younger and not into home improvement but my mom liked watching it so I saw my fair share without really knowing the nuts and bolts of it. It was a running joke (not on the show) that Bob was a bit of a yutz and Norm Abram, his assistant, was the guy with any actual skill. This dynamic was “known” well enough to make its way into the sit-com Home Improvement with Tim and Al. At least I always assumed it was a play off that.
How much of this was real and how much was just talk and people playing up minor events? I see Bob’s had other shows since and sponsorship deals so he must not be a complete tool (I’ll be here all week!) but I’m not qualified to remark on it.
It’s been years since I saw an episode of This Old House, but I rarely saw Bob pick up a tool. He was a host playing the part of a homeowner functioning as a general contractor, one who would know enough about all these trades to hire people who really knew each trade.
Yeah, I think his was the role that Howdy Doody (or whatever his name is) plays on the current incarnation of TOH - host, knowledgeable enough to ask intelligent questions.
I saw one of his later shows a few times, but I was not impressed. He really didn’t seem to bring that much to the show except narration, and his pacing was terrible (or maybe that was the editor’s fault).
Roddy
According to Wiki, he got his TOH gig after winning an award for remodeling an old home. I’m guessing he must have done some hands on work there. It could be that his more hands-off role on TOH helped birth the notion that he wasn’t skilled.
I can remember laughing at some scene with Norm taking a nail gun away from Bob on a roofing project but it could have easily been overblown in my mind. Like I said, once you get the idea you start looking for things to reinforce it.
I know some of the folks that work on This Old House, and you have to realize that it’s entertainment first and foremost. It’s not the hosts role to be doing major difficult repairs and jobs, that’s the specialist’s job. The host needs to be friendly, entertaining, relate-able, and willing to ask questions as a proxy for the audience. How he appears on screen has little to do with what he does behind the scenes.
I don’t think of Bob as bumbling, I think of him more like that Wild Kingdom guy. You know, “Let’s watch as ___ wrestles that alligator!” or “Okay, so now we have to fish the wire down through the walls to the basement” and he’d pick up the tool and then edit, voila, basement!
I recall This Old House had a how to segment for awhile in the early seasons. One of the tradesman would show Bob how to do some minor repair on camera. Bob was playing the part of the homeowner just learning. He always seemed to do ok.
I also recall Bob showing the HO’s how to do a simple project like stripping wallpaper… He’d leave them working away.
Eventually the show eliminated any home owner sweat equity. Everything was done by tradesmen.
Bob seemed more like a contractor that coordinates and hires labor and watches the schedule/budget. Some contractors prefer not being hands on workers themselves.
So was there an inaccurate meme that Vila was incompetent when he was actually just fine or was there never any such notion and I’m just completely misremembering? Does anyone else remember hearing this impression?
Zsofia, now that you mention it, I remember the same sort of jokes about Marty Stouffer and/or Marlon Perkins. “The African water buffalo is extremely dangerous during mating season so Bob will have to be very careful as he exits the safety of the jeep to get up close…”
Johnny Carson did such jokes regularly… but in reality, Jim Fowler was rarely in any real danger. Most of the time, his animal encounters were carefully staged.
Fact is, nature is… well, boring. It’s bad television. You could take a film crew to the rain forest for months and not get enough footage to make a decent 30 minutes of TV. So, if “Wild Kingdom” needed footage of Jim wrestling an anaconda, chances are, they brought an anaconda and staged the shot for the cameras.
HOMEOWNER: Once they removed the interior walls and exposed the chimney we realized the whole thing was wired for 67v, and will have to be removed. Unfortunately, the flue is part of the foundation, requiring a complete tear-down.
BOB: That’s too bad.
I don’t know how frequently it happened, but there were a number of episodes where a $30,000 relatively minor renovation turned into a $100,000+ major operation, and Bob’s reaction was “that’s too bad.” Mrs. Raza and I now use that phrase at appropriate (and, unfortunately, oft-occuring) times.
I love the Ask This Old House show. It’s the best of the bunch. Of course it has neither Norm nor Bob… Another pretty good show with Norm Abrams was New Yankee Workshop; but it wasn’t real enough for me in the sense that I couldn’t relate to building a piece of furniture. I think that’s why I like Mike Holmes’ shows (when he’s not being preachy), and Ask This Old House. I get to see people fix problems that I might have to fix. I love it.
One complaint about ATOH… man there’s a ton of advertisements! I always DVR them so I can fast forward through the lengthy advertisements. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was less than 15 minutes of actual content for each 30 minute show.
I’d totally watch a major network version of Ask This Old House. It’s all the enjoyment of home improvement stuff without all the fluff crap of reality tv. You know; like “let’s surprise the homeowner with a new kitchen” etc etc. blah!
I remember having that impression. I’d always watch it in the morning after sleeping over at a friend’s house. He, his mom and I would always joke at what a jerk Bob was, since you never saw the homeowners. We had a running joke that they would find people on vacation, break into their house, and do 35% of a remodeling job.
The new guy, Kevin O’Conner, definitely seems to yuk up the bumbling homeowner role. He also sets himself up as an easy target for the guys to pick on, and takes it really well - I think that’s a jab at Vila, who was rumored to be a bit of a diva. But whenever Kevin does pick up a tool, he definitely seems like he knows what he’s doing.
I find myself watching more “Ask This Old House” than the actual “This Old House”. It’s useful and gives me a lot of ideas (that I will never implement). Wait, no - they did a feature on compost last year that spurred me to build a compost bin, which I love. It’s always pretty practical stuff you should be able to do around the house, but wouldn’t have much of an idea how to do it unless you were already pretty handy or had some experience growing up around handy people.
Until I watched NYW, I didn’t realized so many woodworking tools could have lazers built into them. I especially like his (mortising?) machine that drills square holes.
I was almost on Ask This Old House a few years ago so I got insight into how it works. They show the homeowner doing the work, but the reality is that what you see on camera is usually the sum total of the work the person did. For example, in my case the project was to have been clearing an area and turning it into a backyard playground. The producer said that they would film me digging a bit at the start, pounding a piece of rebar into a 6x6, and spreading a bit of mulch at the end, but in between Roger Cook’s crew of professional landscapers would come in and do all of the work and my job was to stay out of the way. Unfortunately they chose to go with a different project so I never got the benefit of their free labor and materials (which is the real reason why I wanted to be on the show).
I was just going through my old TOH magazines (excellent, BTW) and found a pictorial article from when they hired the Howdy Doody guy. It was basically all of the experts giving him a hard/nasty job to do, mixed with light ribbing about how he was “just learning”. He also pops up every once in a while in the “I’m an Idiot” column (or whatever) writing about some of his past mistakes. They were of the average homeowner variety, nothing too technical.
Bob Vila always struck me as someone who hangs out with The Good Guys and shines in their reflected glory. But I always liked him.
That glasses guy in the interim between the two - what a dweeb. Hated that guy!
Is all of the TOH work free or low cost? I’d love to get my (completely ordinary) Victorian on the show, assuming I’d get high-quality work at a very low cost.
I like This Old House (although the local PBS station seems inconsistent in scheduling episodes), but I thought Ask This Old House was supposed to be about stuff that the average homeowner is capable of doing on their own. But some of the projects clearly require a team of professional laborers, or special tools or skills that a homeowner isn’t going to have. And I’d love them to explain how to identify and hire people to do stuff. Like what do you ask a contractor when looking for someone to do a kitchen remodel?
The work on Ask This Old House is all done for free. As I said, we were setting up a backyard playground. The producer told me that they picked our project because they had a sponsor that had been asking them to feature their mulch in a project. It was going to take over $2,000 worth of the mulch but there would be no charge to us, nor for the labor to clear the area and install the mulch.
This Old House (the one where they fix up a whole house) is somewhat different. You can submit your project for consideration but you pay for the work and materials, though some of the materials are provided by sponsors for “promotional consideration.”
Kevin O’Conner was actually one of the “homeowners” who had a project done by the Ask this Old House guys. When they needed a host the next season, they hired him. He does play the bumbling fool role pretty well tho…
