# a;w. °#.,; f boo 's ..... ... .... }.. { ......n ~ {. ..t. .. .. .. ....... ............... .. ..... .. .... }... .. ,,.. .. .... ... .. ...t v^ fv. .. :nv. :::::::::: . ...............+::$"ii}<'.; yi;%:4};}}:::" i:":",:4:y:? :%i:{>..{}"':r:j:"::":;:{-i .v.:. ... ....... ... .......:: v:: t.......... . 'r?. '".£{e{t '{ .#tt',{ vv.#"}..v}.t-,,,5..;.t.$....i..ds .wt{t":r:}n ...........::.::............. ........:..,........ ....,,...:.,,:,,..:...:................................,,.t........,...,.:.....,.........................,..,:,,.:::. :::::::;::.{"::::::.t...................... ............................... .................................................. Touch Not Quite the TV Guide By Gerald Sussman Crown Publishers/Prince Paperbacks 64 p.p., $3.95 By Larry Dean J 0 NE SURE-FIRE method for interesting an audience in what you're writing about is to involve them in the goings-on. Well, who am I to dispute a time-proven trick of jour- nalistic tyranny? So here goes...: Who was the lucky celeb to find herself immortalized on the cover of the first- ever TV Guide magazine? You have three minutes to dwell on it, or the newspaper-world time thereof (about as long as it takes me to grab a Nehi creme soda from the fridge). OK? Had enough? Time's up! And the answer is... (Casio fake drumroll, please)... Lucille Ball! Yup, when TV Guide started aiding and abetting the plague-like spread of boob-tube fascination, the beguiling redhead's show, I Love Lucy, was an affirmative smasheroo, igniting millions of television living-rooms the country over with a deep blue radioactive glow on a weekly basis. So who better to adorn the initial issue than comedian- ne-extraordinaire Ball, then queen to the pre-Neilson rating honchos? Since Lucy faded into semi-obscurity, occasional Match Game appearances, a slew of revamped Lucy shows.(most with cohort-for-life Vivian Vance, and some with saving grace Gale Gordon as Mr. Mooney, the braggart boss), and reruns of the old series, TV has un-. dergone its changes while keeping the quality level high all along: from Leave It To Beaver, to Griff, to The Dukes of Hazzard, there's no denying its divinity. Right along with TV grew its nanny, TV Guide, chronicling the ups 'n' downs of America's #1 zombie sweepstakes. It's there every week when you find yourself stationed in the grocery line, staring out like an accusation from racks and racks of National Enquirers, Globes, Stars, and other lurid gossip rags. It gets hard to resist picking up People when the lady in front of you has a cart piled high with enough groceries to last through six day afters, and that desire for satiation sometimes tran- smits itself to your hand, ultimately reaching out for Self-Help Diet Books, Astrology monthlies, and all the other check-out counter library favorites. Those books are the cherry on top of the sundae, the final exclamation of relief after a few hard hours of shopping and mostly, they're a total waste of time. TV Guide, on the other hand, serves a more definite purpose - to enlighten you on television programs for the coming seven days. Over 40 million wallowers in TV propoganda buy it per- week, and, after its usefulness is fulfilled, it hits the Hefties, never to be seenagain. So what better magazine to parody than TV Guide? A resounding chorus of "None!" answers that query. Prince Paperbacks, a new subsidiary of Crown Publishers, has taken the task upon themselves, and with the help of scribe Gerald Sussman, will fund the unleashing of Not Quite TV Guide on an unsuspecting world-at-large. Sussman is the former editor-in-chief of National Lampoon, and author of The Official Sex Manual, The Up Yourself Book, and The Over-Extension Univer- sity Bulletin. With credits like those, one would assume that Not Quite TV Guide is Pulitzer Prize material, but, alas, not quite. It does have its fair share of laugh (just like its imitatee, in and of itself), but overall, the humor is juvenile and predictable. Stylistically, Not Quite TV Guide is true to its source. The lay-outs, typeset- ting, artwork, ads and etcetera all evoke that ever-rising nausea that TV Guide and other rags of its ilk propagate. There's cigarette spreads "Barlady," instead of Barclay, showing a man getting a drink spilled on him - tee-hee!, camera ads, cheesy black and white service ads, the usual hype for upcoming specials and syn- dicated programming, food, tampons, and even a crossword puzzle that works! Kudos, then, to art directors David Kaestle and Leslie Engel, who, between them, share credits from National Lampoon and other related efforts, such as Miss Piggy's Guide To Life, the Playboy parody, Not the Bible, and the surprisingly-accurate Off the Wall Street Journal. But the realmeat of any parody must lie between the lines, and Sussman's jokes just" aren't good enough to keep the diaphragm vibrating. Some of his TV listings are peculiar or bizarre, but most are strictly standard comedic fare. On a single page, he can go from something truly weird (like this movie listing: "Vampire Dogs. " (1980) Standard fare, but dogs wear black capes. Rory Calhoun, Nancy Kwan. (4 hrs.)) to something truly bland (a show called Orthodonture For Infan- ts). Ironically, this is the nature of the real TV Guide, and any work of such detail as Sussman's parody is bound to have its dips in quality - plus some jokes are going to go over some peoples' heads anyway (again like the real thing). From Not Quite TV Guide's time of conception to completion there was the relatively short span of three months. Not very long to organize and instigate the creation of a book, but nonetheless, those are the dates, according to the promotional material that accom- panied the book. Sussman explains in the promotional stuff that the swiftness in finishing his brainchild was due to the fact that once he got going, "the one-liners just kept coming." That may be true, but like any barrage of one-liners, tedium grows after so much of the same thing, and the laugh-potential recedes into blackness like a dot fading off a TV screen. National Lampoon included a pull-out TV Guide parody of their own in a par- ticularly hilarious issue of a few years back, precluding Sussman's work by quite a length of time. That, as I recall, was extremely funny, and succeeded on almost all levels; whereas Sussman's book is hit and miss. This tells me two things: one, that Not Quite TV Guide is not quite an original concept, and two, that whereas National Lampoon had a whole staff at their disposal to toss TV Guide parody: Satirical laughs, but not overly hardy ones around ideas, Sussman just had himself and two designers to handle the whole shebang. That might indicate some degree of spreading oneself too thin with Not Quite TV Guide. Most great comedy is written with at least two writers collaborating together so that the jokes don't get stale, or too one-dimensional; in the case of this book, the funny stuff just isn't enough to account for all the filler. While I don't think it's a total wash-out, I suggest, for some real belly achers, that you check out the so-called "real thing" for insight into our culture's dimestore philosophy and deevolution proselytization for TV ad- dicts. Fabulous drinks - 2 for i from II am til 7 pm. What a setting. You'll prob- ably like to stay for dinner. o1iB4L FOOD AND DRINK 3150 S. Boardwalk (near Briarwood) Ann Arbor " Phone 668-1545 f i i 12 Weekend/January 20, 1984