Audio By Carbonatix
Turn on your TV at 9 o’clock next Tuesday morning. You’ve got your Sally Jessy Raphael. You’ve got your Regis and Kathie Lee. And over on Channel 45, you’ve got your Tom Tabback.
Who?
Actually, the big question may be: What?
You see, The Tom Tabback Show is a talk show quite unlike any other.
You doubt it?
Does Johnny Carson pay a local TV station to air his program?
Does Geraldo Rivera tape his show in a Holiday Inn disco in Mesa?
Does Oprah Winfrey’s “green room” feature a Murphy bed?
Can Arsenio Hall boast that he is the nephew of the guy who ran Mel’s Diner on TV’s Alice? Heeeeere’s Tom!!! “DOES THE WORLD really need another talk show?” asks Tom Tabback, who resembles a toothier, mustachioed version of Lyle Waggoner (the third banana on Carol Burnett’s old TV show). “Absolutely not. But I realized that going in.”
Now closing in on his first anniversary on the tube, the 39-year-old Tabback is the host of the Valley’s only locally produced talk show. And in a TV age when slick packaging and sensationalism (witness Personalities and A Current Affair) are everything, The Tom Tabback Show is a happy, homey throwback to the milquetoast days of Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas. As Tabback’s relentless publicity factory is so fond of pointing out, the show is full of “old-fashioned, lighthearted fun.”
Think of a cornfed couch confab where everything is groovy and never is heard a discouraging word. Kind of a folksy version of SCTV’s Sammy Maudlin Show. Or, in the words of one press release, “If you are getting tired of the oversensationalized, negative, or just plain boring programs on television, there is a positive alternative.”
Last year, Tabback became positive that he was that alternative. A former Phoenix police officer turned health-aid mogul, the self-avowed “ham” had long harbored show-biz ambitions.
After all, the business hadn’t been bad to his uncle, Vic Tayback. (The late actor decided to spell the family name phonetically.) But even though Tom Tabback landed a bit part as a cop when Clint Eastwood’s The Gauntlet was shot here in 1977, Hollywood wasn’t exactly breaking down his door.
Unfazed, Tabback decided to bankroll his own TV program with an eye toward syndication, a move that some might have interpreted as a case of galloping egotism.
“I’m not doing it for the money,” says Tabback. “I’m doing it because it’s fun, it’s what I enjoy and I think I can be good at it. But God Almighty–you’ve got to make money, too, or you won’t have fun for long.”
Realizing that he needed a solid air date to lure West Coast names for the short flight to his divan in Arizona, Tabback’s first task was buying a drop-dead slot on Channel 45’s Tuesday-morning schedule. The companies that flood TV with infomercials do it all the time, but rarely does anyone buy time to air an entertainment show.
“Sure, it’s an unusual way to go,” admits Tabback. “But it was something I had to do in terms of lining up some good celebrity guests.” That’s where Tabback’s ten-woman production staff comes in. (Some of them double as employees at his SportStar Nutrition Supplement company.) “They’re hard chargers,” he says, “fantastic little gals who accomplish so much that they boggle my mind. I think if I asked them to call the president, they’d have him on the phone waiting for me in fifteen minutes.”
To date, Tabback’s task force hasn’t been asked to place any calls to the Oval Office. The “gals” have, however, spent many hours phoning the far reaches of the Hollywood galaxy to line up a roster of has-beens, wanna-bes and never-weres. As his publicity claims, “Hollywood comes to the Valley of the Sun!”
It’s not an easy task. “Last week we were supposed to have Nancy Grahn, but we couldn’t get her because she ended up having to be in wardrobe all day,” explains Tabback.
Who?
“We got Timothy Gibbs to fill in for her, instead,” Tabback adds. “He did a fantastic job, by the way.”
Who?
(For the record, Grahn and Gibbs are players on the NBC soap Santa Barbara. Like most of Tabback’s guests, they don’t exactly suffer from overexposure.)
“Once the shows go on hiatus, we’ve got all these people saying they want to do the show because the word is out this is a great show to do,” says Tabback, who claims that “Roseanne Barr, Kim Basinger, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera” are “future guests being scheduled.”
“These people are having fun,” he says of his guests. “A lot of celebrities avoid doing shows where they might be asked embarrassing questions about their personal lives.”
On The Tom Tabback Show, no one gets embarrassed but the star himself.
Just ask recent guest Ed Asner. He had barely walked onstage when Tabback asked the seven-time Emmy winner whether he’d won more of the TV acting awards than any other performer. (He hadn’t.) And then there was the time that Tabback decided to “surprise” actor Michael Ansara by introducing his wife. (No one was less surprised than Ansara–his wife had flown with him to the taping.)
And who could ever forget Tabback’s riposte when a supporting actor from a syndicated sitcom you never heard of mentioned a TV documentary about women and heart disease. “I see!” the host chortled. “Instead of just giving heart attacks, now they’re getting them, too!” Even Ed McMahon wouldn’t have har-de-har-harred at that one.
Staging the show inside an East Valley Holiday Inn disco was another concession to necessity. (The show has since made a sideways move to a banquet room in beautiful downtown Chandler’s San Marcos Hotel.)
“There really weren’t any other facilities that quite met our needs,” says Tabback, who dreams of someday building a studio for the show. “Sure, the TV stations have studios, but the only time we could have used them was during off-hours. And how are you going to get 200 people to come watch you tape a show at midnight?”
While the Mesa motel disco did have its advantages (primarily its proximity to the large population of senior citizens who typically make up a Tabback audience), the site also had its drawbacks. Thanks to cheesy production values and an admittedly inexperienced host, early shows taped at the motel looked like homemade talent-show videos.
Tabback readily admits that, except for the guests, the initial shows were “rough–very rough.” “The lighting was shoddy, the camera work was shoddy, the sound was shoddy,” he says. “What I realized was that we needed to be making progress every week. And as long as we were making substantial progress every week, I decided I was going to hang with it.”
Tabback wasn’t the only one concerned with the show’s “look.” Perhaps fearful that viewers would assume that the initial substandard quality of the show was Channel 45’s fault, station technicians stepped in and played Dutch uncle. (“We are concerned with the technical quality and we have worked with them on it,” confirms program director Seth Parker.)
“We’re strapped,” confesses Tabback. “We have a hard time doing a quality show here because of lack of equipment and personnel who are used to working on a TV production like this. That’s why it’s all the more gratifying when I hear celebrities say, `This show is as professional as anything I’ve done in Hollywood.’ We’re to the point now where the show is very much broadcast quality.”
Some people evidently agree. Although he continues to buy time on Channel 45 to air the thirty-minute version seen in Phoenix, Tabback has successfully placed hourlong versions at 27 independent stations around the country under a barter system frequently used in TV syndication deals.
Rather than sell the show outright, Tabback’s company provides the show to participating stations free of charge; in return, his company sells and receives advertising revenue from half the commercial spots in the broadcasts.
According to Tabback, programmers in other markets perceive his retro rap sessions as a family show; in Flagstaff, Reno, and Salt Lake City, the show has been given berths in weekend prime time. “Our demographics are all over the map,” beams Tabback. “We’ve got people watching us from their early teens all the way up to people who are easily pushing eighty.”
The key, Tabback believes, is his array of crowd-pleasing guests. So he gets irked when TV listings don’t mention them. “I go crazy when I look at TV Guide because sometimes they list our guests and sometimes they don’t,” he complains. “I wish they’d list everybody’s guests all the time–90 percent of the time we have better guests than Regis and Kathie Lee and Oprah and some of the others who are on around that time.”
TRY TELLING THAT to the crowd of curiosity-seekers shuffling into the Mesa Holiday Inn’s Jubilation disco one Monday evening several weeks ago to catch a taping whose big guest was actress Lee Purcell.
“Lee who?” asks a senior citizen, echoing the question on nearly everyone’s mind.
Across the lobby and down the hall, a dozen or so bodies cram the “green room,” the holding tank for guests that, in this case, is a tiny motel room only slightly less chaotic than the Marx brothers’ stateroom in A Night at the Opera. Several young women rush in and out of the room carrying garment bags. Another woman paws through a tackle box filled with cosmetics, while her colleague winds a curling iron around Lee Purcell’s red locks.
To the uninitiated, the situation seems less like show biz than it does preparations for a wedding.
“I told them that they’d need lots of makeup for you, Lee!” jokes Tabback as he greets Purcell backstage. “Probably three or four pounds at least.” Everyone laughs lightheartedly.
Later, when someone mentions that Purcell once appeared on Marcus Welby, M.D. as a high school girl infected with VD, the host lets loose with another wedge of the soon-to-be-legendary Tabback wit. “I sure hope you’re cured now,” he chuckles. More lighthearted hilarity ensues as the actress pokes Tabback in the ribs.
Fifteen minutes later, it’s showtime! As the Tom Tabback Show Band strikes up a David Lettermanesque riff, the natty host sweeps into the disco wearing his trademark double-breasted blazer and flared trousers.
Launching into a ballad with all the aplomb of Wayne Newton, he works the room like a pro, handing long-stemmed roses to lucky ladies at ringside.
Like any host worth his salt, Tabback kibitzes with the band and crew. After pointing out the drummer works barefoot, Tabback wonders whether he’s wearing pants, either. (Ka-boom!) And what about that camera operator nicknamed “Winnie”? Tabback grins and says, “I think I’ll call him `Pooh.'” (Ka-boom-boom!)
The first guest is “Miss Lee Purcell,” and there’s a small groundswell of recognition when the audience sees the face that goes with the name. Perhaps they remember Purcell from My Wicked, Wicked Ways, a TV biography of Errol Flynn in which she played actress Olivia de Havilland. Tabback guesses that it must be very difficult playing a real person. “You must have been real proud of your work in that movie,” he says.
“Not really,” shrugs Purcell. The actress explains that she’s actually a lot more proud of her latest TV movie role in The Long Road Home as a Depression-era migrant, a part that required her to look her worst. This triggers a long discussion about the best way to remove yellow makeup from your teeth. Tabback and Purcell welcome local country singer Jimi Hall, who receives a big hand for his TV debut. Then Tabback introduces Steven R. Stevens, “agent for the stars” (one of whom is Miss Lee Purcell). Like every third guest who appears on the Tabback show, Stevens wears Western attire and delivers a plug for the upcoming Ben Johnson Pro-Celebrity Rodeo. Tabback says he himself is going to be in the rodeo, too–he’ll be the one behind the shovel.
An hour later, the ol’ clock on the wall says it’s time to go. Luckily, there’s time for one more song, which Tabback croons while shaking hands with audience members. After the show is over, some of the audience clamor for autographs.
“They’re finally starting to know who I am,” says Tabback, as he scrawls his John Hancock across an eight-by-ten glossy with a gold felt-tip marker. “Now I’m almost getting as many requests for autographs as the stars.”
Meanwhile, two elderly audience members examine the Tom Tabback tee shirts for sale in the disco lobby.
One of the women appears puzzled as she reads a slogan that says “WHO THE HECK IS TOM TABBACK?” “We don’t need one of these,” she tells her companion. “We already know.”
“They’re hard chargers,” he says, “fantastic little gals who accomplish so much that they boggle my mind.”
How are you going to get 200 people to come watch you tape a show at midnight?
“Now I’m almost getting as many requests for autographs as the stars,” Tabback says.
