Send in the Clowns (and the Censors)

As I mentioned before, J.A. Presents was a Junior Achievement television company I joined during my senior year in high school.  Although I saw my role as primarily being a writer, I was also tapped to be the booth announcer because I have a deep voice.  That was how I became the “voice” of Tidy-Didy Diaper Service.  Anita or Keith, I believe, had sold a commercial spot to Tidy-Didy and because the company did not have a ready-made commercial to run, we had to create it.  Since I was in the booth, I don’t know what was actually shown on TV.  I just know that when I was cued I gave forth in my best basso profundo, “And remember when you make a change, make it Tidy-Didy!”

After hearing my announcing debut, Bob, one of the good guys at the station (who also did community theatre), said, “If we ever sell caskets on TV, you’ve got a career.”  I also remember doing voiceovers for Kentucky Fried Chicken, White Castle, and Continental Wigs.  For Continental Wigs, I also had to design a logo because they didn’t have one (I seem to recall it was just a small, hole-in-the-wall shop downtown).  Anyway, after I had come up with this hand-lettered creation done with pen-and-ink on poster board, Mike, another station employee, insisted that I bill Continental Wigs for it.  I didn’t really want to, feeling that it hadn’t been part of the discussion when the commercial spot was sold, but Mike wouldn’t take no for an answer.  So I did and the company begrudgingly paid me $25 (which was almost as much as the airtime cost).

Giving a bunch of teenagers free rein to create any kind of TV show they wanted probably is not what management at WLW-C had in mind when they agreed to sponsor a Junior Achievement company.  Maybe they expected Mike, Bob, Lou, and the other staff to keep us under control.  Whatever the case, when we decided to do a satire on high school study halls it was a recipe for disaster.  All of us contributed ideas and, I think, all of us appeared on camera.  My big moment was when I got up to sharpen my pencil, slipped on some marbles, and did a tremendous pratfall (I had done some high jumping in junior high, so I was an “expert” at taking falls).  The other members of the cast engaged in similarly outrageous antics.  We were quite pleased with result, feeling it was an accurate representation of what was going on in central Ohio high schools.

The show never aired.  Apparently, someone in management got word of what we had committed to tape and decided it wouldn’t be prudent to broadcast it.

So for our grand finale, we did something really stupid. “Laugh-In” was a popular comedy show of the time and had gotten a lot of mileage out of various catch-phrases.  We decided to string together a series of blackout sketches, each of which concluded with, “J.A. Presents!”  (You had to have been there, I guess.)  So we busily constructed a number of sets, each of which we only used for a minute or two.  For example, we had some men exploring a cave and uncovering the inscription, “J.A. Presents.”  The joke, as I remember it, was that we were essentially promoting a show which, since this was our final broadcast, would never been seen again.

We taped it, ran it, and said goodbye to Channel 4.

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