I’ve been to a fair few drag shows, and they usually have a presenter who’s one of the more successful performers, so it doesn’t really seem that different to me.
I’m not a viewer of their shows or of makeover shows in general though.
Are you basically saying there are, and never have been, any people famous in America for presenting, except Alex Trebeck?
John Peel comes to mind, both for being a nationally-revered DJ and also for, er, “liking them young” - his first wife was 15 when they married while he was in his mid-20s, and there were other stories of sex with underage girls, some of which came out after his death.
No, I’m saying that most of them are not generally famous to people who aren’t their audience - just like the announcers for televised bowling tournaments are not famous beyond their viewers. There are exceptions like Pat Sajak and Alex Trebek and Dr. Phil and Oprah - but they are exceptions and even they (with the exception of Oprah) don’t have the level of fame that Savile seems to have had.
Most people in the US could name Alex Trebek back in the 80s and 90s, surely? (Everyone could name Oprah, but I guess she doesn’t count because she was a successful, though not that famous, actress, first).
Savile was famous, but it’s not like he was Michael Jackson, except for the other thing they had in common. I mean, nobody outside the UK and Ireland would have been expected to have heard of him even in his heyday.
Televised bowling tournaments aren’t exactly an apt comparison.
Probably, that’s why I said he was an exception - but yeah, I’ve gotten the impression that Savile was at a Michael Jackson level of fame, even if only in the UK and Ireland.
No, she was a newscaster (local news someplace like Tennessee?) moved to Chicago, hosted a talk show, became famous for her (national) talk show, then, did some acting.
“Presenters” at a national level are known, but they’re not giant celebrities. I wouldn’t call Pat Sajak a celebrity, really. Does anyone? He does some stuff on TV, so he’s known, but not idolized. Right?
I think the issue might be that there’s a difference in understanding of what “famous” means, in terms of UK celebs. Savile was famous, and pretty much everyone would have heard of him in the 80s and early 90s. But nobody would have expected anyone outside the UK to know who he was.
He wasn’t exactly idolised - he did do a lot of charity work, so he was respected for that by those who didn’t know that he was trying to put weights on his good side in a deal with God. People didn’t want to be like him, they took the piss out of him.
If it weren’t for his misdoings, virtually nobody under 30, and very few people under 40, would be aware of who he was. He’d be on the same level as, say, Bob Monkhouse, who was huge in the UK at the same time (and apparently a lovely man), but only remembered by the public on “remember the 80s?” style shows.
This localisation is not a UK-only thing. Last time I went to Disney in California there were frequent pop-up guides at some rides hosted by some guy who kept saying “hey, you know who I am!” I had no idea at all, and it was Jimmy Fallon.
Given what we already know about Trump, I doubt that anything we find out after he dies will be surprising. I mean, we already know that he is a rapist, a thief, a bully, a deadbeat, a fraud, a tax cheat, a con man, a racist, a misogynist, an aspiring fascist dictator, probably connected with organized crime … You think there’s something that’s shockingly worse?
Carl Sagan? Neil De Grasse Tyson? David Attenborough? Steve Irwin? Bob Ross?
No, but I wonder whether people who support him today out of fear will stop doing so when they see him dead or not. You know there were no nazis at all in Germany after Hitler commited suicide, right? I have see something similar in Spain after Franco’s death, though a minority remained loyal. I just wonder: how many will claim they did not knnow anything and how many will defiantly remain fascists in all but name.
I guess it’s a factor of being a much smaller country - many of our TV and radio stations are national, and back in the 70s and 80s when we literally only had 3/4 TV stations, you might get a 3rd of the population watching the same TV show on a Saturday night. That’s why these TV presenters were national stars - literally everyone watched them.
At its peak in 1980, Jim’ll Fix It attracted audiences of 20 million viewers - at a time when the population of the UK was 58 million. Saturday nights in 1980 was either watch Jim’ll Fix It or go down the pub!
TV developed rather differently in the UK. It was centralised and institutionalised, the audiences were huge. Lots of resources were concentrated on TV production and some quality shows were made. It made many performers household names. Savile was there from the beginning, being one of the few radio DJs to transition successfully to TV with his zany image and eccentricities. Children’s TV shows were a very important part of it. Something for the kids to watch after school.
This concentration lasted until the 90’s when access to many more commercial channels became common. These days broadcast TV in the UK is almost as dire as anywhere else with a frantic search for formats in a crowded field. UK TV production houses do seem to churn out formats that are popular around the world. The Apprentice was one such show and the US version made Trump the face of Big business. Celebrity unlocks a lot of doors for ‘talent’ to entertain. Sadly it also let’s in predatory monsters that exploit weaknesses in our institutions.
Behind all of these scandals is a failing institution. There seems no shortage of those.
Actually, The Apprentice is American in origin. But UK TV production companies do knock out some incredibly popular TV show franchises - Bake Off (aka great british baking show), Strictly (dancing with the stars), Who wants to be a millionaire, Pop Idol (American Idol) etc.
Ah! So it is!
Here was I feeling guilty about what had been unleashed upon the world.
I know, almost makes me feel warm and fuzzy towards Alan Sugar.
Wow. I can think of people who’d happily kill for that kind of market share!
Some West German TV shows had regular 20+ million audiences in the seventies too, when there were only three TV channels. Everybody, and that means 90+ % of the population, knew the presenters (Rudi Carell, Hans Rosenthal, Blacky Fuchsberger, Peter Frankenfeld, Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff, I could go on). These people were overwhelmingly famous and I can imagine that it was the same for Savile in the UK (West Germany had a population of 60 million, so it’s very comparable).
ETA: also don’t forget that the whole UK (and Germany) are in the same time zone, so in the seventies everybody watched the same program at the same time. I remember that at school, the next morning after an exceptional show or movie on TV, the whole schoolyard talked about it.
Wow, Rudi Carrell was a TV presenter? Not having watched German TV in the 1970s and 1980s, I know him only from his recording of “Wann wird’s mal wieder richtig Sommer?”, which these days pops up on just about every New Year’s Eve “hit songs of the past” countdown.
He was an all-rounder in entertainment, he could sing, dance, act and do funny sketches (which he wrote himself), but first and foremost he was known as presenter of big time variety shows, at least in the seventies. His two most popular shows were “Am laufenden Band” and “Lass dich überraschen”. Later he turned more to comedy (Rudis Tagesshow).
ETA: I was 7 when “Wann wird’s mal wieder richtig Sommer” came out. It was a big hit and you couldn’t escape it. Though I’m a big music buff, only decades later I first heard “The City Of New Orleans” and learned that “Wann wird’s…” was a cover (though the lyrics are completely different, they have nothing to do with each other).