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May 22, 2022 9:24 am  #1


You Were Probably Watching This 30 Yrs. Ago “Tonight”

May 22nd marks exactly 30 years since the landscape of late night TV changed for good - it was the last ever Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. And chances are pretty good many of us were tuned in that night to see a legend say his final farewells.
 

 
I always thought it was the previous night’s show that was the true great goodbye, when Bette Midler and Robin Williams were both in fine form in their last appearances on the iconic show. Instead, Carson’s final episode was both touching in places and sombre in others, ending with him sitting on stage on a stool in the last three minutes, promising “...when I find something that I want to do and I think you will like that I come back that you’ll be as gracious in inviting me into your home as you have been.” 



But he never really did and of course, what could top three decades as the #1 late night host in television history?
 
I believe he only made two more appearances on the tube - once as a guest voice on The Simpsons and the other, a very memorable surprise walk-on during the David Letterman show, in which Letterman insisted he sit in the host’s chair one more time. The ovation from the audience was one of the longest in memory, going on for a minute and a half non-stop.



 It was not lost on anyone that his final TV stint came on CBS - and not his longtime home of NBC.
 
By the following Monday, the set had changed and a new era began, when Jay Leno took over hosting duties on the world’s longest running late night talk show, promising a line-up of all-star guests for the big debut.  



Despite the fact he’s long gone, you can still see Carson’s work on display if you have an aerial. Antenna TV on WGRZ’s 2.2 subcarrier shows a selected hour, complete with the famous monologue, every weeknight at 10 PM. (Which is the timeslot where Global once showed it when they owned the Canadian rights in the early 80s.)
 

 
In the eyes of some critics, Carson overstayed his welcome by a few years, with younger audiences seemingly preferring Letterman. But despite the fact he was barely on in the latter years with vacation time and days off, Carson remains for most the gold standard. There is not likely to be another host who can do it for so long or with so much class. And three decades ago “Tonight,” that ‘class’ was forever dismissed. 

 

May 22, 2022 12:22 pm  #2


Re: You Were Probably Watching This 30 Yrs. Ago “Tonight”

I talked with millennials and whenever I mention Johnny Carson, they invariably answer, "Who's that?" I kid you not. It was before their time of course, but still...


"Life without echo is really no life at all." - Dan Ingram
 

May 22, 2022 12:40 pm  #3


Re: You Were Probably Watching This 30 Yrs. Ago “Tonight”

This doesn't surprise me. There are members of my generation who have never heard of Jack Paar. Yet despite his time hosting the Tonight Show - including a very memorable night where he walked off the show in protest over a censored joke, leaving sidekick Hugh Downs to finish the program - and arguably being one of the most famous names in the world, almost no one I knew back then had any idea who he was. 

Fame, as they say, is fleeting.

Here's the audio of the famous walkout, with the statement at around the 9:30 mark: "I'm leaving the Tonight Show," (Audience groans and gasps.) "There must be a better way of making a living than this."



He returned a month later, with an equally quotable line.  “As I was saying before I was interrupted…When I walked off, I said there must be a better way of making a living. Well, I’ve looked… and there isn’t.”

And by the way, Dale, wasn't "I kid you not?" a phrase that Paar always used?

Last edited by RadioActive (May 22, 2022 1:00 pm)

     Thread Starter
 

May 23, 2022 7:05 am  #4


Re: You Were Probably Watching This 30 Yrs. Ago “Tonight”

RA: Which TV Guide edition did you feature? I don't recognize that ch 2, 10,12, 18 combination.

 

May 23, 2022 10:03 am  #5


Re: You Were Probably Watching This 30 Yrs. Ago “Tonight”

mace wrote:

RA: Which TV Guide edition did you feature? I don't recognize that ch 2, 10,12, 18 combination.

This was from the Westen New York edition. Here's the order:

Channel 2 = WGRZ. Buffalo
Channel 10 = WHEC, Rochester 
Channel 12 = WICU, Erie, Pa.
Channel 18 = WETM, Elmira, N.Y. 

WHEC was a longtime CBS affiliate, until they signed with NBC and made the switch to the Peacock network on Aug. 13, 1989, leaving WROC (Channel 8) to become the CBS station in Rochester. It must have been confusing for a while in that market, since both had been the other network's affiliate for decades.  

     Thread Starter
 

May 23, 2022 10:16 am  #6


Re: You Were Probably Watching This 30 Yrs. Ago “Tonight”

Dale Patterson wrote:

I talked with millennials and whenever I mention Johnny Carson, they invariably answer, "Who's that?" I kid you not. It was before their time of course, but still...

Ironically, the catchphrase "I kid you not" was coined (or at least popularized) by Jack Paar during his monologues.

RadioActive wrote:

This doesn't surprise me. There are members of my generation who have never heard of Jack Paar.  

I became slightly obsessed with Jack Paar in the 1980s. Read up about him in various books about the history of television, made a point of watching his rare appearances on Letterman and Carson in the 80s, watched the TV special he did on NBC and a retrospective on PBS, and when I visisted New York City and spent a few hours at the Museum of Radio Television (which, in the years before YouTube, had a video reference library where you could retrieve a rare TV show and watch it in a cubicle), one of the things I watched were some of the surviving recordings of Paar's Tonight Show).

Was sad, more recently, to discover Paar was a raving homophobe - he fired his first announcer, character actor  Franklin Pangborn, perhaps because Pangborn was gay and was known for playing "sissy" parts in films, wrote a flagrantly anti-gay chapter in his 1961 memoir with the title " Fairies and Communists " in which he accused "fairies" of taking over Hollywood, and during his 1973 comeback attempt on ABC "Jack Paar Tonite" he got into a tussle with the Gay Activists Alliance over his longstanding history of mocking references to gays. He never seemed to grow out of his views. Rewatching his 1986 appearance on Carson, I noticed one of his anecdotes included a gay joke in passing.

The irony, of course, is that Paar's persona was what used to be called "effette" and was widely assumed to be gay or thought to be "latently homosexual" - frequent Paar guest Jonathan Winter mused about this with Dick Cavett a few years ago asking “Dick, did you ever think that Jack was maybe deep in the closet?”

My guess is that like many homophobes, Paar was either deeply closeted and self-hating, or straight but resentful of perceptions that he was gay, and tried to deflect speculation that he was gay by being loudly making anti-gay statements.

Here's an interesting article on Paar: Fairies and Communists: The Homophobia of Jack Paar by Kliph Nesteroff

Last edited by Hansa (May 23, 2022 11:20 am)