Monday, July 30, 2007

When TV was smart . . . and human





Tom Snyder is dead. If that doesn't matter to you -- if you don't know who Tom Snyder was -- you are the poorer for it.

In the '70s and '80s, Snyder's Tomorrow came on after Johnny Carson signed off at midnight. And if you stayed up, you were usually in for interesting conversations -- back when people on TV had interesting conversations, as opposed to infomercials for their just-released whatever.

Sometimes Snyder's conversations were hilarious, sometimes awkward, sometimes just this side of a televised streetfight, most of the time wonderfully quirky. All of them bathed in swirling wisps of cigarette smoke.

Above, we have three YouTube clips of Snyder Does Punk. First, a couple of delicious 1980 segments where the King of the Colortini exposes the Artist Formerly Known as Johnny Rotten for the overgrown-adolescent poseur he was, and then a 1981 interview with The Clash.

Tom Snyder could do "straight" interviews with the best of them. But Snyder at his best usually had little to do with "straight" interviewing. At his best, Tom Snyder was your brilliant, smart-assed uncle, telling funny stories and engaging in verbal swordplay with fascinating guests in from the fringes of somewhere or something.

All of it, as noted, bathed in swirling wisps of cigarette smoke.

Tom Snyder was bigger than life, as evidenced by Dan Aykroyd's hilarious Saturday Night Live parodies of Tomorrow, and our culture is diminished by his passing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well said. A man as bright and opinionated as Tom Snyder couldn't get hired to do TV these days. Unless he wanted to do parody instead of straight interview/news/journalism.