1983 - photo of Gordon and ALan:
http://www.macleans.ca/archives/alan...-up-the-night/
A Canadian star to light up the night
TELEVISION
Gillian MacKay
It was almost midnight by the time Alan Thicke finished taping his last performance of the day at the Metromedia television studios and headed across the back lot to his Hollywood office. Dressed only in black corduroy slippers and a peach velour bathrobe, which revealed a heavy gold chain nestling in his chest hair, he was a walking illustration of the Hollywood law that informality of attire increases in direct proportion to status. Alan Thicke may not yet be a household name in the United States, but in his small corner of Tinseltown the transplanted Canadian reigns supreme as both producer and star of Thicke of the Night, a 90-minute variety series which premiered this week across North America.
Running in the competitive late-night time slot opposite Johnny Carson, Thicke has exceeded even his own reputation for overwork in his bid to succeed where other contenders, like Merv Griffin and Dick Cavett, have failed. In the weeks before the premiere he logged 16to 20-hour days, sometimes sleeping overnight in his dressing room and fuelling his remarkable energy with boxes of doughnuts and pints of Häagen Dazs ice cream. Collapsing in a chair in his shabby, cluttered office, he popped a tablet of vitamin C into his mouth, chewing furiously. “I’m going to die,” he joked wearily. “I’m going to find out the series is a hit and then I’ll die.”
Pitting Thicke of the Night against the legendary Tonight Show is the most dramatic gamble of the fall television season. Certainly, the David and Goliath story has the American press buzzing about the mysterious Canadian who is, according to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, “as well-known in the United States as the capital of Mongolia.” In fact, the 35-year-old native of Kirkland Lake, Ont., has lived the good life in Los Angeles for 13 years, with a list of television writing and production credits as long as his Bel Air swimming pool. And in Canada, where he was host of CTV’s afternoon talk show, The Alan Thicke Show, he is a celebrity. From 1980 until last week, Thicke’s clean-cut good looks, affable personality and expert understanding of the medium made him the country’s most popular daytime star, with more than half a million viewers. Now L.A.-based Metromedia Television and MGM/UA Television Distribution are investing more than $7 million in the hope that the same magic will at least win a respectable corner of the insomniac kingdom where Carson has reigned for 20 years, if not dethrone him.
Another television legend, Fred Silverman, masterminded Thicke’s assault with Machiavellian finesse. Ironically, in his role as president of NBC, Silverman was instrumental in dissuading Carson from retiring in 1980. Since Silverman’s much-publicized departure from NBC in 1981 to become an independent producer, Thicke of the Night is by far his most ambitious undertaking. The show’s upbeat variety format is based, in part, on Silverman’s contention that the conventional talk show is dead, that “all the questions have been asked and all the answers given.” As the father of all talk shows, with 12 million viewers, The Tonight Show is hardly a corpse. But in Silverman’s view the show’s tired format, aging audience and sagging ratings have created a “vulnerability in the late-night market” which he aims to exploit with a mixture of Top 40 musical acts, zany comedy sketches and celebrity interviews with an offbeat twist.
Thicke of the Night is only one of many attempts to keep North Americans glued to their sets past 10 p.m. Ted Koppel’s hard-hitting news program, Nightline, and the breezy, sarcastic Late Night with David Letterman both have a sizable following. As the latest entry in the fray, Thicke of the Night has 26 weeks to prove itself or become television history. Silverman has spent more than $1 million on advertising and glittering media receptions in a promotional push that he acknowledges is “as important as the show itself.” Hard sell has paid off in an enthusiastic response from such major sponsors as Procter & Gamble Inc. and Johnson & Johnson which have purchased nearly all the show’s advertising spots through next March. And broadcasters have matched the support: 130 stations have picked up the show, including 13 NBC affiliates and two stations that Carson himself owns. Of these, 70 will run the program directly against The Tonight Show, which more than 205 stations carry. In Canada, Ontario’s Global Television Network will air an hour-long version of the show twice a week beginning Sept. 27.
The strong response is all the more remarkable since the stations bought the show without seeing a pilot. Instead, they watched a package of highlights from The Alan Thicke Show and Fernwood 2-Night, a brilliant satire on the talk show genre which starred Martin Mull and won a cult following in its two seasons on air (1977-78); Thicke was both a producer and writer. The show’s backers are therefore selling it as a sponsor’s delight: one to attract the young crowd without putting off the parents. Fernwood’s former creative supervisor, AÍ Burton, now executive producer at Universal Television, predicts: “Thicke will appeal to the folks— the people who watch television a lot and consider themselves average citizens. But he will not lose that other group he knows so well—the young people in the fast lane.”
In terms of versatility, Thicke of the Night is a bit of a throwback to the days of The Ed Sullivan Show where, on a single evening, The Who would smash their guitars and Kate Smith would follow with God Bless America. Thicke describes his brand of mainstream madness as “Monty Python meets Art Linkletter.” The show is as schizophrenic as it sounds. Fans of And Now for Something Completely Different will likely enjoy Thicke’s at-home interview with CHiPs star Erik Estrada, which is drowned out by a shouting match between a cameraman and a Spanish-speaking maid. But the same audience will likely snore through interviews in which Three's Company star John Ritter talks earnestly about learning to listen to his five-year-old son and Wayne Gretzky discusses his endorsement of a new breakfast cereal. Similarly, music lovers who tune in for raucous rock groups such as The Tubes can expect no thrills when Thicke sings the show’s title song. Despite his bid to become television’s first rock V roll talk show host, Thicke looks liks a crooner in the mould of his teenage idol, Bobby Darin, when he parades with his microphone. One crew member whispered, rolling his eyes: “Ed Sullivan may have introduced The Rolling Stones, but he didn’t try to sing like them.”
Thicke may not set the music world on its ear, but he has set a new record for total involvement. Unlike most talk show hosts, Thicke does just about everything on the set but flash the cue cards. Having developed the concept for the show, he oversees the musical production, writes, directs, performs many of the sketches and attends to the most mundane technical details. Thicke owns one-third of the show in partnership with Silverman, in addition to receiving an “extremely generous salary” which he will not disclose but allowed as being between “$3,500 and $7,500” per show. When Thicke belts out such lyrics as “I’m going to make it on my own,” which he wrote, the clichés of pop music have an uncanny ring of truth.
If anyone deserves to make it on his own, it is Alan Thicke. As his crowded resumé attests, he has been a model of drive and versatility. He began his career as a writer with CBC’s The Tommy Hunter Show in 1968 and went on to produce game shows like NBC’s Wizard of Odds. He also wrote more than 30 theme songs for television series such as The Facts of Life and Different Strokes and produced specials for comic Flip Wilson and singers Barry Manilow and Anne Murray. Jack McAndrew, head of CBC variety when Thicke produced and wrote The René Simard Show (1977-1979), says, “For shows with a light and popular touch, he’s one of the best in the business.” While the master of middle-of-the-road television also has ventured onto more subversive byways, such as writing for Richard Pryor and Fernwood, his taste runs more to madcap send-ups of the medium than savaging its cozy illusions. There will be no dark side to Thicke of the Night. Says Fred Willard, who played Martin Mull’s cohost on Fernwood and who will appear often on the new show: “This is good-natured fun, which it should be for a mainstream commercial show.”
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