Read Online Odd Jobs by John Updike - Free Book Online

witnesses to shootings, victims of floods, debunked economists, and freshly traded quarterbacks all now gaze into the camera levelly and speak in shapely sentences. Golfers are expected to have a few words for the camera between shots, and do; local police chiefs never know when they’ll have to supply a twenty-second statement for the national news, and when their moment comes they enunciate as sonorously as Raymond Burr playing Perry Mason, if not John Housman urging the praises of Smith Barney. Television has so interpenetrated our daily lives we are no more shy of it than of the family cat. It comes into our homes, and our homes go into it. During the last hostage crisis [TWA, Athens-Tunis-Beirut, July 1985], families were shown on television watching television, where the kidnapped were being interviewed by their kidnappers, and then were in turn, the families, interviewed by the local television news team.
    We love being on TV. Passersby mug and wave behind the on-the-street reporter. Spectators go to sports events wearing funny hats and purple hair to court their death-defying second of electronic multiplication. People in ballparks drape banners from the railings to attract the camera to themselves. “The wave”—the successive standing up of section after section—is folk art invented for television, a stadium full of hams performing as one huge telegenic creature. Television need not focus any longer on the famous; its focus
is
fame, and throughout theWestern world the nightly news commentators are better known and more trusted than the political leaders.
    In my very slight TV career, I have waited for my six-minute morning-interview stint in company with Muhammad Ali and Peter, Paul, and Mary, with a ninety-nine-year-old beekeeper and a seven-year-old chess player. The latter showed no less aplomb than the former. Radio and the cinema in their heyday tended to create an elite of the golden-voiced and the silver-skinned; almost anybody can be on TV, once the switches are thrown. Being natural beats any performing skill, and a German interviewer recently explained to me that, on television, being a bit ugly helps. Everything, in a sense, helps. There is no hiding from the camera; but, then, in this laid-back era of the global village, why hide? The studios themselves tend to be cozy places, with coffee and doughnuts in the green room, cheerful confusion on the set, and tinselly cardboard props leaning against the walls. The atmosphere is that of an underrehearsed high-school play: no matter how badly things go, it’s only our parents out there and we’ll meet at the sub shop afterwards to laugh about it.
    Once I found myself enmeshed in a televised spectacular. Three hundred “stars” were assembled, many of them nouveaux novas but all of them with an undeniable lustre, even a detectable radioactivity; the women had eyelashes like receiving antennae, and teeth shaped by laser beam. The taping of the unwieldy show, in the Radio City Music Hall, dragged on and on, through mistakes and retakes; the saintly patience of professional performers was amazing to a short-fused print-media type like me. Elderly actors and actresses (Jimmy Stewart, Ginger Rogers) already deep into apotheosis gamely went through their paces, and went through them again. The ordeal began in the morning and finished at two the next morning, when the grand finale was staged. We all assembled to sing a song whose words were flashed on cards behind the central camera. Most of the audience had melted away or was milling about in the hysteria of advanced fatigue. The moon was sinking over Manhattan. But were we in front of the cameras tired? No. We were on TV. Lillian Gish was in front of me, Cesar Chavez to the left, Dinah Shore and Raquel Welch somewhere in the vicinity. On my right, a tall enamelled female, unknown to me but no doubt known to millions, had a throat of steel as she warbled from the cards. A retake was called for; she and the