Mornings With Barney by Dick Wolfsie (e book reader .TXT) 📕

in Columbus, Ohio, we lost a guest in a beige couch for three days. Sitting up straight exudes an air of confidence. Don’t slouch. If there’s a fire alarm, two hundred thousand viewers will be watching you struggle to get up. Not pretty.

Speak up: The key to confidence is not to mumble. You will scare yourself to death if you whisper. Listen to the host’s or reporter’s voice. He may be a jerk, but he usually knows how loudly to speak.

Look up: Look at the host. Do not look at the camera. I am always amazed that reporters and hosts don’t mention this to the guest. I’ve forgotten myself.

Avoid jargon: Change the pitch and tone of your voice to make a point. Talk pretty much the way you might in regular conversation. Don’t be afraid to use your hands.

In summary, show passion. If you do not communicate that you had fun at the North Pole, no one will care how many polar bears you trained to play the violin. Success is all about sharing your enthusiasm.

Last but not least, be yourself. Unless “yourself” is a boring, aloof, self-centered, pompous egotist. But, of course, by definition, if that were you, you wouldn’t be aware of it.

Once the interview is over, you may feel you mumbled, looked nervous, and said really stupid things. Watch the tape, and assuming your VCR or DVR was set correctly, you’ll see it wasn’t nearly that bad. If, however, you think you were the greatest and are considering writing to Oprah to be her fill-in guest host, it probably wasn’t that good either.

If you videotaped Girls Gone Wild by mistake instead of the show where you talked about your new solar panels, give the station a call and ask for a copy of the interview on a DVD. They will be glad to help. For $129.95.

During my almost thirty years on TV, people frequently requested a copy of their interviews on VHS or DVD, often an indication that even in this high-tech age, people were still clueless when it came to recording segments off the air. Nothing has changed.

“I tried to TiVo the show, Dick, but I got Jerry Springer instead.”

One thing was certain during the nineties: If guests had any interaction at all with Barney during the morning program, the chances they would want a copy of the show increased dramatically. Barney changed the experience from an interview into an event.

The Story in Brief(s)

I felt early on as I watched people’s reactions to Barney that his true mission was to touch lives, just as he had touched Sally’s from WIBC. When people saw Barney in person their moods visibly altered. Barney didn’t care if you had just come from the symphony or the silo. Whether you smelled of money or manure, he was your buddy. Sure, all dogs are like that, but not all dogs were Barney. He was on TV. You had met a celebrity.

Barney was all heart and howl but not much of a businessman. He needed me to look out for the best opportunities to maximize his potential. I saw every would-be guest for the show through a kind of beagle lens. How could I work Barney into the segment? That was not the only criterion, but when things were in the balance, that could tip the scale. Like the time a local sign-maker wanted to publicize a new apparatus he had purchased that could inexpensively produce refrigerator magnets with a photo of your choice embossed on it.

Making a magnet with Barney’s face on it would be good TV. Everybody would want one. So, I thought, let’s offer a free magnet to anybody who simply sent a self-addressed stamped envelope to his shop. I told the owner my idea.

“Say what, now?” he said. Yes, I got that response a lot.

But wait, I had an even a better idea. How about two magnets: one with Barney’s mug on it and one with Dave Barras’s, our morning anchor. You could have only one. So which one would you request in the mail? How diabolical!

I didn’t tell Dave I was going to do this, which you can look at as a testimony to what a good-natured, unaffected, self-assured guy he was to work with. You could also just say I was a big jerk because it was clear that in this man-to-mongrel contest, Dave was going to get hammered.

The morning of the show, we displayed the two magnets on the air, both having been previously designed from a photo of Barney I had given the sign shop and an eight-by-ten glossy of Dave I had stolen from the cache of PR material in his desk. Dave had always boasted that his photos were in such great demand that there was a six-month wait before his staff could fill a request. Not true, but a funny refrain he used on the air for many years.

Remember in the movie Miracle on 34th Street, when bags of letters addressed to Santa Claus are delivered to the courthouse? The next two days at the ‘ol sign shop looked much the same as that scene in the Christmas classic. Requests for the magnet kept pouring in. How many self-addressed stamped envelopes were delivered? About three thousand in two days.

I thought I would have a happy magnet maker, but he and I were poles apart in terms of what success meant. For three weeks the guy complained to me about the extra help he had to hire to stuff envelopes. Then he discovered that the postage we requested was not enough to mail the magnet. Then angry people who got Dave’s magnet by mistake started to call. It was getting ugly out there.

What were the final numbers? I will not give you the exact stats out of respect for my buddy Dave. Despite his claim on the air that day, he apparently did not have a magnetic personality. But in one way, Dave has saved face after