SCTV is the funniest show on the air and maybe the best too
Video central is no longer New The York City, or Studio City, or even beautiful downtown Burbank. It is a place called Melonville, and it is not on the map. It exists only as the fictive setting for NBC's SCTV (for Second City Television), a show that originated in Canada and is the fastest, smartest 90 minutes on any TV channel, anywhere.
Melonville is headquarters for the program's SCTV satellite net work. Its production offices are located between an H&R Block tax center and a nuclear-waste disposal dump. SCTV President Guy Caballero, a sleazebag in a modified Panama and a white three-piece blend, appears frequently on-camera to bilk, berate or fawn before his audience. Un like one former President of the U.S., who did not like to be photo graphed in his wheelchair, President Caballero will not show up in public without his. He has no physical need for it, understand; he merely finds it useful for inviting viewer pity and respect and boosting the totals on one of his periodic — and thoroughly fraudulent — telethons.
SCTV Station Manager Edith Prickley, who favors rhinestone-studded glasses and a leopard-skin coat to match her rakish chapeau. has had several programs of her own — a cooking course, a talk show that was a literal conversation stopper and an outdoor safari documentary that never got much farther than the parking lot. None of them has done particularly well, perhaps because Mrs. Prickley has the anxious friendliness of a piece of misfired puffed wheat and a laugh like the lullaby of a yak.
As a programmer, Mrs. Prickley has a record at least as distinguished as Fred Silverman's. Among her winners: The Sammy Maudlin Show, a Caballero-in-spired festival of show-biz glitz presided over by a rump-bussing host and a couple of regular guests, Entertainer Lola Heatherton, whose specialty is a piercing rendition of New York, New York, and Funnyman Bobby Bittman, whose jokes are as tarnished as his gold chains; and The Great White North, a public service program in which two dim-bulb brothers, Bob and Doug McKenzie, swill brew, cook back bacon and discuss such issues as the lack of parking space at doughnut restaurants.
Mrs. Prickley barely has time with all this to book movies for Monster Chiller Horror Theater, which is hosted by Count Floyd, the dipso anchorman of the SCTV news, masquerading in vampire dress. Certainly she never has time to screen her selections. One week's entry was Dr. Tongue's 3-D House of Stewardesses, in which the actors attempted to achieve the illusion of objects flying from the screen by swaying like pendulums. This was followed by Whispers of the Wolf ("Boy, sounds really scary, eh, kids!" howled the Count), which turned out to be an essay in abject despair by Ingmar Bergman, complete with a dwarf, camera compositions like geometry proofs and racked dialogue like "Life makes me vomit" — all of it rendered in subtitles that were almost obscured by dirt in the corner of the projector.