Pink Lady

I also watched this for the car wreck syndrome. Any second I thought for sure a head would come rolling across the stage. (you just never knew). I just loved when Jeff Altman and Pink Lady would try to talk to each other...you know, the usual banter of a variety show. It was funny because they couldn't understand what each other was saying. Altman would try to make a joke, Pink Lady would look at him, then at each other, and giggle. Very surreal...

...for if TV is indeed a vast wasteland, this was the show found at the lowest elevation near the stagnant alkaline pool. We had world hunger and want in 1980, and NBC could have spent money to solve it, but inexplicably used the funds to put this show on the air for five episodes instead.

Did Fred Silverman ever notice that the ability of Keiko and Mituyo to handle English was minimal at best? Heavily padded out with guest spots to cover this rather blatant shortcoming. (The first show featured as guest star...Sherman Hemsley. Be still my beating heart.)

Not to mention Silverman's failure to consider America was not exactly a massive market for Japanese "idol music," whose appeal to the Japanese is that it is entirely predictable. And yes, Jeff Altman -- with the exception of his own routine in the first show of a certain U.S. President trying to boogie -- is scathingly unfunny.

I watched it out of the car-wreck syndrome, in other words it was so terrible I couldn't stop watching. And oh yes, if you stayed until the end of the show, a bikinied Keiko and Mitsuyo got into a hot tub with Jeff Altman. I guess I was easily bribed back then.

Pink Lady and Jeff is widely considered one of the worst shows ever made for

television. I didn't think anything could be worse than "That 80s Show," but Pink Lady is.

The sketches are horrendous; as we sat around watching the DVDs (a gag gift

my friend gave his brother), we argued about whether they had actual writers, or the performers made it up as they went along. My best guess is that the writers had a big bottle of tequila and a bunch of funny cigarettes in the writing room.

File this one under "so bad it's funny." I can't imagine watching it alone, but if you're with a bunch of friends who want to make fun of it, the DVD's worth a

view.

Ahh, for the halcyon days of Freddy Silverman! Supertrain, Sheriff Lobo, Hello Larry, and the nadir, Pink Lady and Jeff. I can't imagine why network executives have such a poor reputation for intelligence. I mean, who could have predicted that an obscure Japanese duet, appealing primarily to little girls carrying "Hello Kitty" lunchboxes, wouldn't be successful on American network TV? Oh, and by the way, they *don't speak English*. Sounds like a sure-fire hit to me.

I enjoy surrealism as much as the next guy, but seeing the girls mouthing the punch lines to jokes, and laughing on cue, was quite disturbing. And poor Jeff Altman, this was below even his dignity. At least they had Ernest.

Absolutely pathetic. A test pattern would have been more entertaining.

I caught a showing of this variety show over on Trio, and cannot say I'm overwhelmed by this relic of the Carter Years. The idea was certainly original enough: Take a popular (and actually pretty talented) idol-singer duo from Japan, team them up with a second-banana American singer and craft a variety show around it. Nice idea, lousy execution. Where to begin...

1. The writing is rivaled only by those apocryphal monkeys trying to write Shakespeare, an sad fact as Mark Evanier is easily capable of much better than this dreck (look at his consistently funny co-writing work on "Groo the Wanderer")

2. Mei and Kei are talented enough singers, and probably were talented actresses in Japan, but they didn't have enough of a command of the English language to grasp the right comic timing for the language.

3. Jeff Altman DOES have enough of a command of the English language, and he couldn't make a man being tickled to death laugh.