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By Chris Borrelli -- The Blade (Toledo, OH) -- September 14, 1998 Late-night talk show hosts usually aren't in the business of giving audiences a chance to laugh at them. Then there's Conan O'Brien. The pale, red-haired Bostonian risks looking nuts five nights a week. At 10 p.m. Wednesday, NBC's Late Night With Conan O'Brien will celebrate its fifth anniversary with a look back at the best moments in the short history of this original and surprising talk show that is only growing more bizarre with age. Which brings us to one of the strangest moments I have ever seen on network television. (A moment so weird, it's hard to believe General Electric still owns NBC.) O'Brien has one regular skit called ``Bad Fruit Theater,'' featuring rotten fruit performing great plays. (Don't ask.) And then there are Late Night's phony public service announcements: ``So, your parents are getting divorced. You never complained when they asked you to clean your room, did you? Cause if you did, what have you done?'' These may be strange, but the strangest moment happened on Aug. 8, 1997. O'Brien filled his studio audience with 6- and 8-year olds. All 700 seats. Oh, he didn't change a thing about the actual show. He told jokes about Barbra Streisand and campaign-finance reform. Newsradio's Dave Foley was the main guest. The other was CNN financial analyst Myron Kandel. The audience, naturally, grew more and more restless as the show wore on; although pretty early on, it was clear O'Brien had lost control of the show. ``Boring! Boring! Boring!'' the kids chanted while O'Brien and Foley chatted. O'Brien apologized to Foley. O'Brien's head grew the color of a very ripe grapefruit. ``Please!'' he yelled. ``Kids! Come on. Pay attention!'' ``Bor-ring! Bor-ring! Bor-ring!'' Even when the chanting stopped, you could hear the fidgeting of 700 kids offscreen. Occasionally when things got slow and the kids became restless again, O'Brien would say, ``Uh-oh! The Boredom Monster is coming!'' Then the show would cut to a shot of the studio hallway, and we would hear sound effect thuds of an approaching monster. The problem was that the kids wanted to see the monster, and so the chanting and twiddling would only intensify. That wasn't intended. The scene seemed volatile. But the moment wasn't altogether lost on O'Brien. The tension made for marvelous television, a talk show that seemed as if it might literally collapse. You got the feeling that at any minute some NBC executive behind the scenes would pull the plug and millions of people would be watching test patterns. It was a fascinating, even startling hour of television. It was one of the only times I ever recall feeling that TV wasn't so paint-by-numbers predictable. Here was this talk show host who had been sitting on the fence with his own network for years, and instead of retreating into security and mediocrity, he was only getting better. When he started in 1993, O'Brien was such a ``virtual unknown,'' as one TV critic called him at a press conference, that O'Brien replied, ``No sir, I am a complete unknown.'' NBC execs said he was ``immature,'' and even openly wondered to reporters, ``What is this guy doing on television?'' NBC renewed his contract on a monthly basis and made no secret that it was looking for a replacement. But O'Brien's Late Night simply wasn't like anything else on TV, and it's refreshing to see audiences rewarding him by watching and NBC rewarding him by renewing his contract until 2002. And those kids? O'Brien rewarded them with a show-closing Silly String fight. Chris Borrelli is The Blade's media critic. He can be reached via e-mail at borrell@concentric.net. Copyright (c) 1998 The Toledo Blade Company |