Worst TV Variety Shows Ever

Ok, I'm getting the name wrong, then. I meant the Hudson Brothers' night time show. I saw two or three episodes, and man, it was bad.

 

I saw that too. I’d never heard of them, but they looked pretty cool, so I tuned in. It was bad! Obviously from the same team that did the Sonny and Cher show. But it didn’t work for the Hudson Brothers. And the Saturday morning show was bad too- but of course that was geared towards kids!
Well.........I WAS a kid at the time, about 11 or 12 years old, but it was still bad.

 

I thought The Hudson Brothers Saturday morning show was the best thing ever. Of course I was 4 at the time.

 

I think I was five and enjoyed it. I've seen a couple of episodes from the DVD set and the show doesn't hold up too well, but it got me into the Hudson Brothers' music.

There were a couple of other variety type shows on Saturday morning in the later part of the 70s. Wacko, which had Dwight Twilley with Tom Petty on bass as one of their regular music guests, on CBS in 77. Hot Hero Sandwich on NBC in 79 was kind of a SNL for Saturday mornings. It actually used the same studio and had some cool musical guests, including Joe Jackson, Rachel Sweet, and Eddie Money.

Then there was this, which only lasted a few weeks before being renamed and cut down to a half hour.

 

I always thought the Dean Martin Show sucked as a kid. Maybe good guest, but it just wasn't that great. I preferred the Jerry Lewis Show! Of course the absolute worst ' Lawrence Welk" -- the weird time warp that show is - is what I imagine Hell is like.

 

There’s the issue of perspective... it was a three network universe. There was no way to SEE an artist/performer other than these shows. So you sat through 45 minutes of crap to maybe encounter something great. I loved Red Skelton’s characters and jokes when I was 12, but seeing The Animals or the Stones in the middle of the shtick was to understand what Alice must have felt.

 

Hard to imagine working with Dick Clark being "enjoyable."

I worked with him (rather "for him") and--like everyone else I ever knew that worked for him--I thought he was a prick.

Cheap as could be and not good to the people who staffed his shows.

Bill

 

I feel embarrassed for the audiences of the time, occasionally.

The clip of Judy and Barbra Streisand singing "Get Happy" and "Happy Days Are Here Again" is pretty famous, I feel. Apparently the Christmas episode with the kids is also really well-loved.

 

I don’t agree, this has a great lineup and it looks like the music is live.

 

The Jackson 5 had a show like this when their career faltered a bit, before Dancing Machine made them hip again. Michael Jackson hated being on it.

 

Omg that was so brilliant when he did that. He did the same favor to old Xmas variety specials too I think in season 4 or 5? It was one of my favorite Letterman episodes ever.

Dan c

 

I remember watching the 80s version with my sister. It might’ve sucked but I didn’t care because Dolly was on it.

dan c

 

Wonder if what the Bert Convy Show was like.

And Dean Martin was hopelessly retro.

 

Dick Clark lived in a rental/low budget country club called Drexelbrook ,in the Philly suburbs, during the early DJ/Bandstand days. Ed McMahon lived there as well,working for a diiferent TV station. I grew up in the area ,my Pop's drug store was nearby and I sometimes attended events at Drexelbrook. The pool and,when frozen,ice rink showed up a few times when Bandstand went national and became American Bandstand.
I have a salacious Dick Clark story that I cannot tell since I cannot confirm. What I can tell is how the story was told to me. I discovered a person who lived next door to my Pop's store back in the day. 30+ years after and 75 miles away, we found out how close we were in the neighborhood,though never meeting . Oddly enough,we met in a drug store where she now worked, in the shopping center in the Lehigh Valley where I worked. How she recognized me and other facts of her background lead me to believe that what she knew about Dick Clark probably happened,yet,once again,not for public consumption without confirmation. If true,a real stinker.

 

A little variety show trivia...Tom (age 13) and John Keane (age 12), sons of an ex-L.A. record company exec-turned-promoter (for his boys, natch) reportedly became the youngest people ever to host a prime-time variety television program. The Keane Brothers Show aired on CBS for four weeks in 1977 as a summer replacement for Wonder Woman.

While their bubblegum pop star careers, as with most performers in the genre, had a very brief shelf life, the brothers both went on to have respectable careers in the SoCal music/recording business as adults.

 

Good Lord
They even paraded Alice out there lol

 

Oh
My
Gawd

 

That was a really fun show.

That's a terrible show, but they actually were very talented as singers and musicians. Hey, I'd say already it's better than Pink Lady & Jeff!



Jeff Altman showed up on a podcast some months ago and said he really regretted doing the show, and that he had turned down a sitcom to do the variety show. He was (and still is) a really funny, talented guy... but the other two? Not so much.

 

We did quite a few of Dick's shows at Complete Post here in Hollywoo, and he was actually "generally" pretty good. But a good friend of mine was once on a 1980s location where Dick lost his mind and fired about a dozen crew people because things were going slow. He pointed to my friend and said, "hey! Do you work for me?" And he said, "no, I'm with the truck." Clark grimaced and said, "then you're lucky, because if you'd worked for me, you'd be fired, too!" Very temperamental man. He had a replacement crew there in an hour and they got everything done very quickly.

On the two or three interactions I had with Dick, he was fine -- maybe a little tired, but not a screamer. Of course, we couldn't be fired, since we only worked for the company doing the post work and not directly for him.

 

I finished a ton of shows at Complete Post. I trust we know many people in common. True that Dick Clark was not a "screamer"--which differentiated him from many pricks of the era. He was just the cold-blooded sort that could fire a dozen people in a day--people he was exploiting with low wages and treating badly--and not think a thing about it.

Not a nice man.

Bill

 

A lot of people don't know that Dick Clark made Don Cornelius furious when he tried to do his take on Soul Train titled Soul Unlimited. Don succeeded in getting Soul Unlimited cancelled.

 

Yeah, I've heard similar things from other people. I know an announcer on one of Dick's game shows who was fired because he made some silly off-hand joke in his warm up, basically saying that Clark looked good because he had an aging painting buried deep in a closet (a Picture of Dorian Gray reference). For some reason, Dick took offense at that and told the guy after the taping, "you're not coming back tomorrow." Very cold-blooded.

In late 2004, they shot promos I think in October or November for the upcoming "New Year's Rockin' Eve" special with Dick, and I worked on all of those for ABC at Complete. I was surprised that Dick was struggling to get through the takes, because normally he would just knock out 2 or 3 and be done for the day. This time, he went 10-12-13 takes, getting angrier and angrier at himself for getting the words wrong, and he didn't seem to be "the same old Dick" he used to be. I think it was in the first week in December that Dick Clark had the stroke, and he was never the same after that.

 

Anyone remember the Sonny Bono Show?
First there was the Sonny and Cher Show massive hit
then they split and each had their own show
Cher still could draw and could sing but poor Sonny tried to just do a comedy show and didn't go well

 

The Sonny Comedy Revue. Sonny got all the writers and rights to the sketches from The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. People thought his show would be successful and Cher’s would flop, but the reverse turned out to be true.

 

Ken Berry's WOW show is a contender.