When William Burroughs met Francis Bacon a lot of tea was drunk, cigarettes smoked, a few secrets shared but very little was revealed about the two men. At times, this “historic meeting” of two great minds in 1982 is like the old class reunion where two former pupils meet up only to find they have very little in common other than they once shared the same classroom together.

The two men first met in Tangiers in the 1950s when Burroughs was technically on the run for murdering his wife after a “shooting accident” during a drunken game of William Tell. Bacon was then in a brutal and near fatal relationship with a violent sadist called Peter Lacey who used to beat him with a leather studded belt. Bacon once remarked in a documentary that he had lost all of his teeth to his lovers—Lacey was the boyfriend who knocked most of them out.

It was Allen Ginsberg who first introduced Bacon to Burroughs as he thought Bacon painted the way Burroughs wrote. Ginsberg had also wanted Bacon to paint his portrait in the act of having sex with his partner Peter Orlovsky. Bacon wondered if Ginsberg would be able “to keep it up” for the duration of the sitting. In the 1960s, Ginsberg again asked Bacon to paint his portrait. Bacon demurred claiming he had an aversion to long hair and beards and preferred painting short-haired, clean-shaven men because he could see the skull underneath the skin.

Burroughs thought he and Bacon were “at opposite ends of the spectrum.”

“[Bacon] likes middle-aged truck drivers and I like young boys. He sneers at immortality and I think it’s the one thing of importance. Of course we’re associated because of our morbid subject matter.”

This meeting between the two men was filmed by Mike Southon at Bacon’s studio/home 7 Reece Mews for a documentary on Burroughs directed by Howard Brookner. Burroughs appeared slightly standoffish, self conscious, and occasionally looks bored though he almost warms up when he riffed on some of his favorite subject matter—Jajouka, Mayans, and immortality. He also looked far older than Bacon, but was in fact five years younger. Bacon is waspish, bitchy, gleeful like a naughty schoolboy, and delivers the best lines (Jackson Pollock is “a lacemaker,” Mary McCarthy is “a bitch”).

According to Burroughs, when the pair first met in Tangiers they had several conversations about art though Bacon feigned not remembering the details. Burroughs reminded him that he had dismissed the then popular trend in art Abstract Expressionism as “mere decoration.”

Bacon recalled their mutual friendship with Jane and Paul Bowles, going on to discuss Jane Bowles’ mental decline and the tragedy of her last years being tended to by nuns, a situation which Bacon thought ghastly. Ironically, Bacon died just over a decade later being tended to by nuns after becoming ill in Spain (an asthma attack).

Burroughs seemed a little ill-at-ease having a camera crew film his every word. The pot-bellied Bacon seemed more relaxed (he’s on home turf) and even made the occasional dig at Burroughs. When discussing painters Bacon asks “Do you mean Monet or Manet?” like Lady Bracknell.

This is the unedited footage of something that (understandably) ended up being but a few minutes in Brookner’s finished documentary. I suppose one would have (perhaps) expected something far more scintillating and IQ-raising when two great artists meet but Burroughs and Bacon skate around subjects and stick to those things that obsesses them without revealing too much—even if they can’t always remember people’s last names or who or what it is they’re exactly talking about.
 

 
What are you gonna do when you’re on the back slice of life wondering where the fuck your dreams have all gone? Are you still going be there waiting in line at fifty or sixty, the rain running down your neck wondering what you could have been if you’d had just a little more faith? Had a little more desire to change and be the very one thing you always wanted to be?

Peter Boyd-Maclean took that chance. He quit his stellar career as a London-based filmmaker and award-winning TV documentary director and formed a band called Book of Shame. Boyd seemed to have it all but he wanted something more, something real, something to call his own. He teamed-up with multi-instrumentalist Gary Bridgewood from Troubadour Rose. Over a two-year period the pair jammed, rehearsed and laid down tracks for their debut album (out this month) with a little help from singers Jo Foster and Claire Nicholson, percussionist Fergus Gerrand, pedal steel BJ Cole, and renowned record producer (Wire, Depeche Mode, Swans, Laibach, and St. Etienne) Rico Conning.

With a handful of singles already released, Book of Shame has earned comparisons to Captain Beefheart, the Velvet Underground, Joy Division, Radiohead, and even Alice Cooper. Boyd-Maclean’s life-so-far and the beginnings of Book of Shame read like a once-upon-a-time in a land not so very far from here tale full secrets, a bad step-parent, fortuitous meetings and a helluva lot of talent.

Boyd-Maclean started out making Super-8 movies as kid ‘cause he thought in pictures and couldn’t express himself in words. He had a difficult childhood, one that was much darker and far more disturbing than he might ever care to admit. As a student at St. Martin’s College, London, he teamed up with Rik Lander and pioneered scratch video under the name the Duvet Brothers producing promos for New Order and M|A|R|R|S track “Pump Up the Volume.”
 

The Duvet Brothers promo for ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order.
 
The Duvet Brother presented a three-hour installation of their scratch video work at the Edinburgh Festival in the late 1980s, where media exec. Janet Street-Porter stood up and said “Why aren’t these people working in TV?” Cause TV back then was clunky and dull and had hardly changed since the 1960s. The installation eventually kicked-off their careers in television but first they were invited to Hollywood to make video installations for the movie Less Than Zero and then back-projections for Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Through Street-Porter, Boyd-Maclean brought his handheld shaky scratch vision to “yoof TV” providing the style-template for the next decade.

Everyone wanted a piece of Boyd-Maclean’s televisual craft and somehow he ended up in the Music & Arts, or Musical Farts, Department at BBC Scotland in the early nineties. That’s when I first met him. It was obvious from the get-go young Boyd-MacLean was a prodigious talent whose natural flair far outstripped the lesser hopeful ambitions of his contemporaries.

But television is a rum beast which like Kronos devours its children or at least their talent for lesser rewards.

Yet, Boyd-Maclean made a highly successful career in TV-land, directing films and documentaries, producing animation series, and winning a shitload of awards. But something was missing. That ability to express his inner thoughts and emotions thru film were constrained by the demands of TV and the adverts who financed it all. With the rise of reality TV, television was little more than the wrapping paper to sell advertiser’s product.

One day, he chanced upon an old broken violin at the family home which he thought might be valuable. He took it to a menders to be fixed where he met Gary Bridgewood. The violin proved not to be that valuable but the meeting with Bridgewood undoubtedly was.

Having not spoken in a long, long time, I contacted Boyd-MacLean to talk about his new and so-far well-received career as a middle-aged indie rock god.
 

 
More from Book of Shame, after the jump…
 

Clint Eastwood pictured on the sleeve of his 1962 single for “Rowdy” and “Cowboy Wedding Song.”
 

“He will never make big as a singer.”

—Lyricist and record producer Kal Mann on Clint Eastwood’s prospects as a singer in the early 60s.

Well, Kal Mann—who wrote songs for Elvis Presley and Chubby Checker—wasn’t exactly wrong, but Clint Eastwood didn’t care. In fact, twenty-plus years after Mann declared Clint’s musical career was a pipe dream, he and Merle Haggard would occupy the number one spot on the Hot Country Singles chart with “Bar Room Buddies” in 1980. Eastwood’s love of music is well documented and, in addition to his many other talents, he is an decent pianist. In all, Eastwood’s musical career spans nearly five decades dating back to 1959 when Eastwood landed the role of Rowdy Yates on the television series Rawhide. There are several occurrences of Eastwood singing on various episodes of Rawhide, and the actor would leverage this experience and record his first EP in 1961 containing two singles put out by Hollywood record label Gothic; “For All We Know,” and “Unknown Girl of My Dreams.”

Eastwood was not a bad singer—but his baritone vocals and style were rather unremarkable within the country genre. Eastwood’s material was pop, but crafted towards a more country & western kind of swing, keeping in line with Eastwood’s Rowdy Yates character in Rawhide.

Eastwood would continue to tap into his success as the star of one of the longest-running TV westerns programs by finally putting out a full-length album 1963 strategically titled, Rawhide’s Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favorites. Clocking in at under 30 minutes, the album contains mostly standards including “Don’t Fence Me In” written by Cole Porter and Robert Fletcher (and first popularized by Gene Autry). It’s not without its charm as at times Eastwood sounds like he is channeling Bing Crosby and his version of “Don’t Fence Me In” from 1944. Posted below is an assortment of audio from Eastwood’s early recordings—others can be found online. CD’s of Clint’s musical contributions are easily found on eBay should you want to add some Clint to your music collection. (PS: you should want to.)
 
Clint Eastwood sings, after the jump…

 
In the 1980s, the widespread availability of VCR technology represented a palpable opportunity for some. Porno peddlers, schlock horror directors, and innovating game designers all saw new possibilities in VCR distribution. But they were not the only ones. There was also a wave of direct-to-video holistic health merchants looking to improve the lives of middle-class TV viewers all across the country.

Readers perusing the November 1, 1987, issue of The Daily News—less than two weeks after “Black Monday,” the severe dip in the stock market that would mark the beginning of the end of the economic boom associated with “Reaganomics” and would incidentally also inspire a 2019 Showtime series starring Don Cheadle—were confronted with a full-page feature titled “Calling Dr. Video!” which drew attention to a handful of videocassettes competing for inclusion in your “video-medical library” at home. One of them was a curious videocassette called Video Aspirin, the handiwork of a Woodland Hills-based psychologist named Barbara Cheresnick-Rosenbaum (Ph.D.).
 

 
It is possible that the use of the term “aspirin” in the video’s title was a wee bit misleading. I am doubtful that Dr. Cheresnick-Rosenbaum (Ph.D.) herself ever expected her techniques, which used the mnemonic C.A.L.M. (Creating Circulation, Applying Pressure, Life’s Breath, & Muscle Relaxation), to have the instant efficacy with headaches that Bayer’s most famous product does. Rather, it was a way of implanting the idea that yoga-ish meditative practices can have tangible health benefits, a premise that I think few people today would have a big problem with.

I’m not going to say there’s a single thing wrong with the content of the video, which appears to have preceded the eventual popularity of the term “mindfulness,” usage of which hit a dramatic spike right after this video was made. However, something about the video testimonials of that era induced their makers to employ a rather stilted rhetorical style, the primary strategy of which was to enunciate everything in the slowest terms imaginable, and repeat everything a lot. I think they figured VCR owners were just dim. The music, credited to “Aaron” of “Studio West Productions,” constitute an unimpeachable argument in favor of hiring a pro.
 

 
via Obscure Videos

 
America doesn’t need another Wally George. He was host of the Hot Seat - a reality talk show that ran locally on Southern California cable network KDOC between 1983-1992. Best known as the “Father of Combat Television,” a sensational form of tabloid programming that would eventually be emulated by the likes of Jerry Springer and Morton Downey Jr, Wally was a right-wing, god-fearing extremist with a sleazy white combover and a profound admiration of President Ronald Reagan.
 
Every Saturday night, Wally would invite those with opposing viewpoints—adult entertainers, satanists, punk rockers, human rights advocates—onto his “hot seat” to discuss topics of old-school patriotism, invigorated by a raucous studio audience of suburban teenage degenerates. People like Timothy Leary, rape-rock band The Mentors (led by El Duce), Angelyne, GWAR, Rick Dees, Night Flight’s Stuart Shapiro, and countless other “ludicrous liberal lunatics” have all taken insults from the farcically contrarian Wally George. Revisiting old episodes of the Hot Seat on YouTube, it’s almost painful to find pleasure in its psycho-babble, given the shitty climate of Trump’s America. But for what it’s worth, the show was often brilliant.
 

‘Wally! Wally! Wally!’
 
An incident in 1983 saw special guest Blase Bonpane, an alleged pacifist, overturn Wally’s desk during a crossfire argument on the invasion of Grenada. The incident received national attention and as a result, the Hot Seat gained syndication. It was a period of peak acclaim for the small budget talk show, so Wally George did what many low-brow personalities were doing at the time, he put out a novelty record.
 

 
 
Wal-ly! Wal-ly! was a four song “mini-album,” released in 1984 by Rhino Records. Running at just twelve minutes in length, the record is seething with conservative agenda and nuances of sexism, homophobia, racial stereotyping, and other laughable qualities of nationalist scum. The title track, a “Louie Louie” parody named for the show’s anthemic crowd chants, is a reaffirmation of Wally’s commitment to exposing the liberal conspiracy and making right for our beloved country. What type of music do you think Sean Hannity would make, if given the opportunity?
 
Listen up you liberal loonies, stream Wally George’s 1984 novelty record, after the jump…

“My name, as you may have guessed, is Theodore. I come from a strange stock. The members of my family were mostly epileptics, vegetarians, stutterers, triplets, nail biters. But we’ve always been happy.”—Brother Theodore

I’m not sure this story qualifies as an actual anecdote or just a meandering way of introducing an amazing collection of YouTube clips, but here goes nuthin’...

As a lad growing up in Wheeling, WV in the 1970s, at approximately the age of twelve, I decided that I was no longer going to eat the food I was being served by my parents. In a home where greasy pan-fried hamburgers (or “Steakums”) were the typical main course and Kraft macaroni and cheese substituted for the “vegetable group,” I simply wanted to eat healthier. My parents were not very happy about this this demand—for that is what it was—and it seemed really insulting to them, but what could they do? The severity of my new diet must have really taken them by surprise. I became, pretty much a Fruitatarian, or a raw foodist, years before this was common. What influenced my twelve-year-old mind to do something like this was an obscure book I found in the local library with the distinctly unappetizing title, Mucusless Diet Healing System by Dr. Arnold Ehret.
 

 
I won’t go into the details of the diet, which extols the value of avoiding “mucus” and “pus” in your food—sounds like an admirable goal, right?—but suffice to say that while Dr. Ehret’s work still has many followers—he’s thought of as the founder of Naturopathy—many diet experts consider him a total quack. But I am not here to debate the merits of his ideas, pro or con, merely to offer some brief context before I send you off to read this short essay, The Definitive Cure of Chronic Constipation.

Okay? You got that? At the very least skim it. The language he uses is quite distinctive isn’t it? The total disgust he expresses about the workings of the digestive system is almost Nietzschean in its peculiar character. This absolutist tone must’ve contributed greatly to my pre-teen interest in the diet.
 

 
Now flash-forward to the late 1990s, New York City. I had become friends with the then 91-year-old Theodore Gottlieb, better-known as the infamous dark comedian Brother Theodore, a big influence on monologists Eric Bogosian, Lydia Lunch and Spalding Gray, who had been performing his totally insane one-man show at the tiny 13th Street Theater in Greenwich Village for ages and was a frequent guest on David Letterman’s late night talkshow during the 1980s. Theodore, or rather his persona, was once described as “Boris Karloff, surrealist Salvador Dalí, Nijinsky and Red Skelton…simultaneously.” That’s not far off the mark.

At his age, it was not much of an exaggeration to say that Theodore had “been around forever.” He was delivering lines like “The only thing that keeps me alive is the hope of dying young” long before I was born. What was a great gag when he was, say, 50 years old, and then to STILL be delivering a line like that at the age of 93, as he did on my UK television series, Disinformation, well that, shall we say existential tension is what made his nonagenarian performances so incredibly spell-binding.
 

 
His show was in the form of a stern lecture. It was nearly impossible to tell if this was an act you were seeing or if he was utterly batshit crazy, a berserk “genius” impervious to laughter as long as an audience bought tickets. The props were a chair, a table, a chalk board and a styrofoam cup. There was a single spotlight. If you were anywhere near the stage in that little theater he could totally scare the shit out of you. Of course, whenever I brought friends, I took them right down the front!

It was an act, I can assure you. Theodore in real life was a mellow old bohemian guy who lived several lives in his 94 years. He’d been in Dachau, for instance. His mother, stepfather and sister were killed, but Theodore’s release was secured by none other than Albert Einstein—his mother’s adulterous lover!—who paid his way to America after the war. He’d also been on Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and most famously on Late Night with David Letterman (Theodore, along with Harvey Pekar, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson and Captain Beefheart, was one of the most memorable and emblematic oddball Letterman guests of his early era).  He was in The Burbs playing Tom Hanks’ great uncle and was the voice of “Gollum” in The Hobbit cartoon. He had a cameo in Orson Welles’ The Stranger. He was even in a porno movie, an X-rated parody of Jaws called Gums (Theo plays the boat captain, in a thankfully non-balling role. The former concentration camp prisoner is also seen, rather inexplicably, wearing a Nazi SS uniform for most of the film). In his nineties he was dating a woman in her mid-forties. He rode a bike around New York City until he was well into his eighties. Theodore was an old Beatnik, that’s the way I saw him. I think that’s largely the way he saw himself.
 

 
And talk about a weird way to make a living! He really wasn’t anything like his crazed monk act in real life, though. And let me tell you, when you are in your thirties and have a friend who is in their nineties… you learn things about life. Not all of them good, either. 94 years is a long time to live. Too long, if you ask me. I’m quite sure he felt that way, too.

Theodore apparently had great difficulty memorizing lines, even his own material and so he only really ever did two major monologues—he’d switch off between them when he felt like it—for over 40 years. One was called “Foodism”—we’ll get to this one in a minute—and the other was called “Quadrupidism” where he’d extol the virtues of human beings getting down on all fours (everything went to hell when our ancestors stood up according to his theories).
 

 
One day I was visiting Theodore at his apartment and I was looking at his sparse book shelf. On it sat The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, Baudelaire’s Les Fleur du Mal, an Edgar Allan Poe anthology, The Portable Nietzsche, some Saint Augustine, and… ta da… The Mucusless Diet Healing System by Dr. Arnold Ehret. I remarked to him that I myself was a pre-teen adherent to Arnold Ehret’s unconventional ideas about diet and he replied that it was the inspiration for his “Foodism” monologue.  “I merely exaggerated his writings. Just slightly. That was all it took!”

My jaw hit the ground. He’d managed to craft one of the most brilliant comic monologues of all time based on Ehret’s zany diet-sprach. I was awestruck at how amazing this revelation really was. I mean… how creative!!!

You read that essay about constipation, right? Promise me? Now go watch this extended excerpt from the “Foodism” lecture performed on Late Night with David Letterman in the mid-80s.
 

 
After the jump, every single Brother Theodore appearance on ‘Late Night With David Letterman!

 
Mid-1983 through 1985 are considered Iggy Pop’s “quiet years,” but he was still active and looking for ways to challenge himself. Acting was one such endeavor, with Pop taking classes and auditioning for various roles. This included a 1984 tryout for a part on a new NBC program, Miami Vice. During a 1986 newspaper interview, casting director Bonnie Timmermann talked about Iggy’s audition for the show.

He came in with his big eyes and black hair and sat and stared at me. Despite his reputation as a wild man, he was gentle. I immediately liked him. Iggy came in for a biker role, but we ended up giving him another part.

The Ig was slated to play opposite fellow Michigander Glenn Frey in a February 1st, 1985 episode named after Frey’s song, “Smuggler’s Blues.” But Pop didn’t turn up on set, and his absence was widely reported in the press. “He was supposed to be in the show. We announced it,” said an NBC spokesperson in January 1985. “But when it came time to make the arrangements, we couldn’t find him.” It seemed Iggy had simply flaked.
 

 
But that wasn’t the case. When Iggy saw a February 1985 article in the San Francisco Examiner about his “no show,” he was stunned. He never knew he had been given the part.
 

 
Miami Vice must have accepted this explanation, as Iggy was cast in another season one episode, entitled “Evan.” Pop’s part was that of a police informant named Thumper, a proprietor of a S&M-themed club. A scene was shot in the club’s setting, and Iggy’s guest role was noted in newspapers, but when the episode aired on May 3rd, 1985, the Ig was nowhere to be seen.
 

A publicity photo of Iggy Pop and ‘Miami Vice’ star, Don Johnson.

So, what happened with Iggy and the show this time?

This scene was cut by NBC Censors (Broadcast Standards Division) due to its S&M content. Camille Sands, an actress who had the small part of a dominatrix called Velvet, remembered later that the scene contained a customer of the S&M studio being molested on a torture rack while Don Johnson talked to Iggy Pop. The urge of NBC to cut this out led to the first serious argument with the Miami Vice producers, who refused to alter the episode. Subsequently, NBC used its contractual right of final cut, and cut the whole scene. (from the Unofficial ‘Miami Vice’ Episode Guide)

What would have been Iggy Pop’s dramatic television debut remains unseen to this day. All we have are a handful of publicity photos and snapshots taken on set.
 

 

 
Continues after the jump…

 
I remember watching George W. Bush deliver the State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, on the TV of a tiny barroom in the East Bay. No cocktail was strong enough. This was the speech that denounced the “axis of evil,” a coinage of Bush speechwriter David Frum, who has lately been rehabilitated as a true friend of democracy and stalwart defender of the realm. Perhaps when the professional eulogists are finished carving the likenesses of Poppy and W. into Mount Rushmore, they can squeeze in this august son of Canada, who believes the problem with the Iraq War was the people of Iraq.

With every patriot face now awash in tears for these old-fashioned Republicans, the kind who could, when the occasion demanded it, speak in complete sentences, let us remember “Qaeda, Quality, Question, Quickly, Quickly, Quiet,” the artist Lenka Clayton‘s alphabetized cut of the address, which blasted those sentences to rubble and sifted the bits. Marc Campbell posted this vid on DM many moons ago, but it’s worth revisiting now. On one hand, it is a cognition-destroying mindhammer that smashes illusions about the stimulus-response theory of government. On the other, even alphabetically reordered and condensed to 18 minutes, W.‘s oratory sounds like Pericles next to the barnyard squawks and grunts that will comprise the phonemic index of the 2019 State of the Union address, which I understand will be subtitled “A Case Study in Lycanthropy.”
 

Detail from the soundtrack LP cover

If you like the movie, you’ll love the soundtrack LP (side one: “A - My,” side two: “Nation - Zero”) and accompanying flip-book.
 

via Reddit

 
The sole object of a ghost story, wrote M. R. James, is to inspire “a pleasing terror in the reader”. James was an academic and writer who reinvented the ghost story for a new era. He believed ghosts should be “malevolent or odious” rather than those “amiable and helpful apparitions” that appeared in stories by authors like Charles Dickens in say A Christmas Carol. In an essay on ghost stories, he claimed the most successful tales “make us envisage a definite time and place, and give us plenty of clear-cut and matter-of-fact detail” but:

...when the climax is reached, allow us to be just a little in the dark as to the working of their machinery. We do not want to see the bones of their theory about the supernatural.

Montague Rhodes James was a scholar of medieval history, who served as Provost of King’s College, Cambridge University. Each Christmas Eve, he would invite a small group of friends and colleagues and students to share some sherry around a fire while he read his latest ghost story. He wrote one story a year and most of his tales of the eerie and the supernatural were set in the world of antiquities and academia, where an individual might accidentally stumble across some ancient secret or forgotten artefact that unleashes unnameable horror. 
 

 
Among the best known of James’ short stories is “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1904) in which a rational, you might say somewhat skeptical, and bookish academic called Parkins discovers an ancient whistle among the dunes of a deserted beach while on holiday. The whistle has strange occult markings on one side and an inscription on the other that reads “Quis est iste, qui venit?” which Parkins translates as “Who is this, who is coming?” By removing the whistle from its burial place, Parkins soon finds out what rather than who it is that comes after him.
 

 
In 1968, the multi-talented Jonathan Miller brought the tale to television. Miller edged more towards a psychological (if not quite Freudian) drama in his adaptation of James’ tale which made the film’s supernatural elements all the more disturbing. Parkins or rather Parkin as he is called in Miller’s film, was played by Michael Hordern as a slightly stuffy, retiring man, who mutters and mumbles his way through the story—much of his performance was improvised—as if he is subconsciously aware his actions in finding the whistle symbolizes his own repressed desires and fears. Or as horror writer Kim Newman put it:

...a case of severe sexual frustration leading to absolute dementia

It’s a classic tale beautifully told and one of television’s most chilling and effective ghost stories.
 

A candid shot of Raquel Welch (as Captain Nirvana) and Robin Williams as the lovable alien Mork on the set of ‘Mork & Mindy’ in 1979.
 
I was still of a tender age when one of the most gorgeous women to ever woman, Raquel Welch showed up looking a bit like a busty, tanned David Bowie in thigh-high silver boots on Mork & Mindy. Are you with me? Good. Because in addition to Raquel’s role as Captain Nirvana—the leader of the very sexy-sounding fictional alien race, the Necrotons, we also get to see Playboy’s Playmate of the Year (1978), Debra Jo Fondren in a bikini in a golden cage. If any of this sounds like a blatant ratings grab, you’d be right. Originally, the episode “Mork vs. the Necrotons,” was going to be presented as a one-hour special but ended up airing as a two-part cliffhanger. If you remember anything about this show, it is likely this very episode or the perplexing thirteenth episode of the season when Mork became the first male Denver Broncos cheerleader. It’s hard to say. I came across a quote from Williams when he was asked about his feelings on the show, a contentious one for the cast:

“There were a lot of little kids who went through puberty watching that episode, and I think we lost a lot of the audience.”

It’s been well documented that Williams, Pam Dawber and the entire crew were challenged by Welch’s diva demands and behavior during filming. At one point the episode’s director, Howard Storm says Raquel suggested her younger, female hench-chicks should wear “dog masks” and she should lead them on to the set “on leashes.” Usually, this would sound like a pretty terrific idea given the fact that A) it came from Raquel Welch, and B) I rest my case. However, Storm mentioned to Welch she didn’t need to do anything but “snap her fingers,” and the girls would “drop to their knees.” Raquel liked this idea very much, and interestingly, the leash idea made its way on to the show anyway, and that’s all I’m gonna say about that.

I rewatched clips from both episodes while putting this post together, because of course, I did, and I laughed nearly to the point of exhaustion at times thanks to the gift which never stops giving—the comedy genius of Robin Williams. Much of Williams’ comedic outbursts on the show were improvised and timing to accommodate the actor to do so was written into scripts early during the show’s first season. After being so pleasantly reminded how great and profoundly weird the show was, I picked up season one and two on DVD for less than twenty bucks and will be binging on the show as soon as they show up. In anticipation of this blessed event, I’ve posted some great photos including some sweet, candid shots of Williams and Welch on the set, and footage of Williams and Welch from the show. Nanu Nanu!
 

Another candid shot of Williams and Welch.
 

 

Playmate of the Year 1978, Debra Jo Fondren (Kama), Raquel Welch, and Vicki Frederick (Sutra).
 
More Mork after the jump…