If you follow an Angeleno on Twitter, you know that L.A. had some crazy high winds yesterday (up to 70 mph). And it affected Craig Ferguson’s taping of “The Late Late Show” when the winds knocked out power at CBS Television City.
Show publicist Katie Barker says lights started dimming and then suddenly went black about 5:45 p.m. as Ferguson was interviewing actress Alicia Silverstone, leaving both in the dark as to what was going on. Producers decided to keep the blackout as part of the show and handed Ferguson a flashlight. [Variety]
The clip of Silverstone’s interview is below, and the power goes out at the end of the video just before Ferguson goes to commercial. Before that, it’s a whole lot of Ferguson doing an amazing job of making great television out of Silverstone’s boring-ass diet book. He really is a tremendous host, and I’d watch the show more, but… it’s CBS. “NCIS” is the number one TV show in the country. I kind of take that personally.
UPDATE: I added the clip of Ferguson using a flashlight at the end of the show.
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Man, if only someone could invent a way to power wireless electronics, then they could power those cameras. Maybe if they hooked a camera to a lightning rod or found a way to turn garbage into fuel.
I could be wrong, but I think they re-aired the claymation episode with Johnny Knoxville and Richard Lewis.
at Johnny D: Conan was able to tape his show during the massive new york black out back in 2003. They only did about 10 minutes because none of the guests showed up. But it was the same deal with cameras and mics but flash lights. I assume since TV lights us such an ungodly amount of power its not practical to have a generator big enough to do all the lights in all the studios, so they just have one big enough to run the cameras and Mics and what ever it is the cameras record into these days.
I couldn’t find a clip of conan’s in my quick glace at youtube but they mention the episode in
the wikipedia article on Conan. it states, “During the Northeast Blackout of 2003, Conan and the staff taped a short 5-minute introduction explaining that the episode they had planned would not be taking place due to the blackout. Studio 6A was powered by a generator and lit by battery-powered floodlights. A standby show was aired in-progress after the intro.”
source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Night_with_Conan_O%27Brien
Wonder how many boxes of crayons Alicia went through writing that book.
Was the wind strong enough to send the show back to 1992 when Silverstone was relevant?
You don’t want to know the dirty things Letterman would have done in that situation.
Well, it’s CBS so I imagine the collective suck was powerful enough to keep the cameras powered up.
Was it “fat Alicia Silverstone” or “Alicia circa 1996″?
Because maybe someone did her a favor and just turned out the lights?
Someone at another site I can’t remember made a good point – why didn’t the cameras and microphones go dead as well? Are they running on a generator? If so, why wouldn’t the lights be on that generator as well? Conan was able to broadcast during the NY power outage a few years ago because they hooked up the cameras to a generator, which wasn’t powerful enough to use on the lights. Does Ferguson simply keep the cameras on a generator backup at all times? Weird. Although even if it was a hoax, I don’t care because Ferguson is awesome.