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IS ANYBODY THERE ?

    

Television unlike many kinds of entertainment is a solitary situation (unless like The Tonight Show it's performed before a studio audience). Shepherd had great skill in making the viewer feel that he was talking directly "with" them. However, the NJN Program Manager didn't like Jean Shepherd - Doug  embodied the “proper” conservative New Englander and thought that the show was "too common" for the New Jersey public TV airwaves that he stoically piloted.  When the first season of Shepherd's Pie was near its conclusion he made it clear that the show was over.  (Most Public TV management that I dealt with during my public television years rarely cared if a show had a big  audience because selling commercials wasn't necessary.  Many of our current shows has such miniscule viewers that they could be rated by services like Nielson and Arbitron.  I quipped that our News show was so unwatched that we could save a lot of money by hiring a few folks to call  each viewer personally and telling them what happened that day! There was always an internal war between the news staff and our “artsy” producers) 

So I decided to prove something to him.  We did the next show "live" instead of taping it in the afternoon.  I informed Jean carefully that we needed to do our own Nielsen Ratings so we would have the data to go for a grant to do another season of shows at NJ TV or somewhere else if necessary..  At the end of the program Jean did a clever pitch - "Hey gang if you like our  little show give us a call at the number on the screen and tell us  - hopefully we’ll be back…and thanks gang it's been great doing our thing here in good ole New Jersey.  

I used the "Beg-a-Thon" phone number which forwarded to 5 additional lines so there was a better chance of logging many calls (if they came) without a bunch of busy signals.  I had recruited two of the staff to answer the phones.  The moment Jean finished repeating the toll-free  number on air the phones began to ring.  We took over 300 calls in the first hour.  The phone company called and told us that another 85O busy signal calls were bogging down the Trenton switch - the Bell tech asked what were we giving away?   After two hours of calls I told my faithful staff to unplug and turn off the system.

 We didn’t need to continue, we  had made our point.  P.S. The show won an Eastern Educational Network grant.  We took it on the road to that organizations state’s and subjects and aired another season in major markets of NYC, Boston and DC.


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