Barnaby Wise had one of those local access shows. Every market has them, and hardly anyone watches them, but I really doesn’t matter, does it? Barnaby was practically a kid, but he’d been watching the late night talk shows all his young life, and Up Late with Barnaby Wise was patterned after them as closely as he could manage.
All of them had been following the same basic pattern for decades. Barnaby opened his shows with jokes riffing on the headlines. That’s how he got into the Kate Meadows business. For him it was local news. By a very great coincidence he’d actually grown up in Berlin, before, like a lot of other folks, relocating to Portland, where he filmed at the Maine Public Broadcasting studio. He always had a canned audience, a band leader on a cue he found with a button he could press discreetly under his desk, and a backdrop that conveniently evoked the same seaside everyone now so interested in the Meadows case expected.
He found new interest, too. In truth, Barney wasn’t that talented. He was passable. His jokes were lazy, in exactly the way a lot of people claimed much more famous and talented folks to be. His viewers didn’t care. I mean, they did. A lot of them snickered. But they watched.
Barney tended to accept the traditional narrative. Of course he did. He generally believed he was free from any litigation given the public nature of the material. Over the ensuing months he discovered he was wrong. The viewing numbers helped assuage such problems.
He’d never really had a running joke before. He discovered he loved it.
No comments:
Post a Comment