Don't Go in the Walk-in, Gordon!

I'm not sure how we got started doing this, but my daughter and I binge watch two of the older Gordon Ramsay series, Kitchen Nightmares and Hotel Hell. 

In case you've been slaving in the kitchen of a substandard restaurant for the past 20 years and haven't been paying attention, Gordon Ramsay is the British chef, enfant terrible, bad boy extraordinaire who berates the shows' dumb-dumb restaurateurs, innkeepers and hoteliers brave enough or stupid enough to ask him in for a consult; this is when their businesses are just a rotten smell away from going under. And judging from the looks, rotten smells abound in these places, and thank God no one has perfected Smell-O-Rama.

Not everyone who invites Ramsay over for advice is a dumb-dumb. Often they are the spouses or partners of the dumb-dumbs, and their savings are fast dwindling because the dumb-dumbs were dumb enough to get them into these messes. The place is being run into the ground by the dumb-dumb's poor cooking, poor business planning or outright selfishness. Gordon is sympathetic to the dumb-dumb's much better half even as he is all in the face of the dumb-dumb. 

In the case of Kitchen Nightmares, it's pretty much inevitable that Gordon will venture into the restaurant's walk-in refrigerator. It's the restaurant reality show equivalent to a teen in a slasher movie saying, "I'll be right back!" 

"Don't go in the walk-in, Gordon!" I shout at the screen, but Gordon doesn't listen and goes in anyway where he finds himself in a haunted house of rotted beef, moldy pasta and slimy chicken. Gordon shoves his arms wrist deep into the gunk just to gross us out even more and to give himself added justification for a string of bleeped out expletives. Sometimes Gordon rushes out of the walk-in and straight to the nearest trash bin where he heaves up one of the awful meals prepared for him earlier by that episode's dumb-dumb.  Some of my favorite Ramsayisms include, "Wow-wow-wow-wow, wow," "Look at that!" (gasped in hushed tones like someone who's peeked beneath the casket lid's lower half to find that the deceased isn't wearing any pants), "Looks like a dog's dinner," and "I've eaten that!"

To give you an idea just how dumb the dumb-dumbs get, in one episode, a wife learned she was co-owner of a ramshackle, money-sucking, badly decorated inn when her husband called her up and said, "Guess what!" In another, a father who has raided his son's savings to buy a restaurant, proceeds to bend Gordon's ear about what a jerk his father was. 

We also binged season one of Hell's Kitchen where Gordon takes wannabe restaurateurs and screams and yells at them through a series of competitions until one of them wins a restaurant where they can hire their own staff to yell at. 

It sounds like a dream come true. (No, it doesn't!)

Rabbit Ears

When I grew up in the sixties and seventies, we had about seven television channels, and switching around within them was a breeze. Today, TVs are "smart." My TV said right on the box that it was smart, but I attribute this to the fact that smart TVs are often arrogant and boastful. Being complicated, difficult, and frustrating doesn't make you smart. 

Bunny Ears, copyright 
Teece Aronin.

Since our purchase of a smart TV, I have witnessed my kids hopscotching between Hulu, Netflicks, and YouTube and using a "streaming stick" to stream shows from other places. Sometimes they needed our game-pad to get to what they wanted to watch. When I was young, the most technically advanced procedure we might have to perform in order to watch TV was adjusting the rabbit ears or switching from UHF to VHF. 

When remotes first hit the scene, my aunt had a neighbor who would get up from her chair, cross the room to where the remote was kept on top of the TV, change the channel, then return the remote to the TV top and sit back down. In that case, the TV wasn't smart and neither was its owner.

I need at least one kid handy when I want to watch TV because I'm dumbfounded by all the equipment needed to watch one simple television show. In my defense, even my son referred to one of our recent TV tech add-ons as "that cable thing we just got." 

Last night both kids were going to be away so my daughter, Syd got me all set up to watch HGTV. She was going out the door when I asked how to change channels. Syd said, "I'm sorry, Mom, but I think we'll have to wait until I have more time." 

Then she left me all alone with nothing to keep the TV running but its smarts and mine.

The first thing I noticed is that the audio was out of sync with the video and that the video was ahead. My son tells me this is because we have a cheap internet service provider. Eventually the show I was watching shut down altogether and a message appeared on the screen saying: "Due to inactivity, playback was stopped to save bandwidth."

I sat bolt upright, with my bag of chips and yelled, "Whadda ya mean inactive?" Was I supposed to be talking to the TV? My father used to yell at ours when watching Hockey Night in Canada, but it didn't seem to improve his viewing experience and anyway, I would have thought those days were gone. If the TV was so smart, why did it need help from me?

After Syd got home, we wanted to switch to Hulu for Parks and Recreation, and it was another big process just to do that. I watched wistfully as her little fingers danced around all the stuff and like a miracle, Parks and Recreation came on.

"Syd, do you think you can teach me how to watch TV without help?"

"Oh, sure, Mom," she said. But she said it like I'd just asked if I could ever learn to build my own spaceship, and she didn't have the heart to tell me it was hopeless. 

Scary, But Not Very

When I was growing up, my favorite thing about television was a creepy genus of quasi-humanity known as horror movie hosts. They roamed airwaves free and untamed on Friday and Saturday nights after the eleven o’clock news and sometimes on Saturday afternoons. Their heyday was roughly the late 1950s through the eighties.

One of my own little horrors.
Image: Teece Aronin

Horror movie hosts first sprang from the earth when a package of aging Universal horror films was made available to syndicated television stations and someone had the diabolically brilliant idea that the movies be hosted. 

By the late sixties many local television markets had had at least one of these hosts. Vampira in L.A. was likely the first. Then there were Zacherley, Morgus, Ghoulardi, the Ghoul, and an endless string of others - many now lost to the annals of time. 

And most of the original programming is lost, too, because the broadcasts were often aired live but not recorded. Worse, some were recorded then recorded over by stations on a budget. So even for those of us who are "of a certain age," most of those programs are but dimly lit memories in the spook-house of the mind. 

The hosts' personalities ran the gamut from formal and stiff to bouncing-off-the-dungeon-walls-zany. Better yet, they were often sarcastic. Elvira, Mistress of the Dark was sarcastic and tantalizing, saucy, and sexy.

Among my favorite hosts was Sir Graves Ghastly who aired in Detroit, Cleveland, and D.C. He straddled the qualities of formality and sarcasm, once summing up the merits of that afternoon's movie by sneering that it had been "smuggled in in a cheese bag."

One nice thing about Sir Graves was that he was a little scary but not very scary. On that score he let me down only once when I had a nightmare about him climbing through my bedroom window. That dream scared me because mine was a second story bedroom, so it followed that if Sir Graves was climbing through my window, he wasn't just looking to come in from the rain.

Sir Graves "lived" in Detroit, in a castle off the John Lodge Freeway. Elements like that ignited my imagination. I remember riding down the John Lodge in the back seat of the family car watching for that castle. There's no better fun when you're a nerdy nine-year-old than looking for a castle beside a freeway in Detroit.   

And we "kiddies," as Sir Graves called us (he also called us, dear hearts), quickly figured out that he and all the funny peripheral characters inhabiting his world were played by one man. His name was Lawson Demming. But as crazy as I was about Sir Graves et al, I was just as interested in what I might find if I crawled through my family's black and white Zenith console television to peek behind his wingback chair. 

There are still horror movie hosts, even some from the old school. I'll just have to get savvy enough to track them down in the haunts to which time and technology have driven them - like wolves from the woods. 

One has fared very well, though. He is Svengoolie, whose alter ego, Rich Koz, replaced the show's original host almost 40 years ago. “Svengoolie” is syndicated nationally via MeTV, but I haven't quite figured out how to access the channel. I think I'll ask a kid to do it in which case I'll be hooked up in no time. 

So, that same technology that nearly ended them has also given the hosts new homes. If I look hard enough, I'll find them lurking amid the vaults of public access television and slinking around the headstones on social media sites.  

If I could watch the original shows again, I would want to watch them as they were originally presented, in ultra-brief blocks interrupted by rivers of commercials for local businesses with yammering salesmen. L.A.'s car salesman supreme, Cal Worthington was generally accompanied by his "dog, Spot”  who was usually a bear, a tiger or a chimpanzee. 

I know . . . It only made sense in L.A.