FanGrok Online Issue 44 - 14th June 1998

Editors: Adam Richards, Andy Thompson, Owen Richards with net facilities by Robbie Langton

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LIES, DAMNED LIES AND JERRY SPRINGER

By our public humilation correspondent: Dulaika Goode-Schaffeting

The Jerry Springer Show, the TV chat show that’s more of a shat show, the programme that takes lowest common denominator television down to astronomically minus values, has now been outed as “fake television”. According to Julia Francis writing in TV Quick, the producers of this charming insight into human coprology have confessed that guests are hired actors, not real people.

Actors

’s investigation has further discovered that the bleeps which viewers have assumed hitherto covered up expletives now turn out to be a device to cut down on the cost of the scriptwriting - the actors don’t actually say anything at all underneath them! Programme spokeman Martin Snydefangler stated, “The budget can get very tight: paying all those folks to dress up in stoopid looking clothes to sit in the audience shouting adulation at the frontman costs a fortune - the average studio extra is simply not capable of faking sincere adoration for such a noxious little jerk with any conviction, so we have to get people with at least three years as drama majors in and pay them union rate for speaking rôles to do that. We gotta make cutbacks somewhere, you know, and replacing the dialogue with bleeps is a good way of saving dollars.”

Overdo

Snydefangler went on to admit, “We do overdo it sometimes - there was one episode when the onlyintelligible things spoken were old Pisspot’s intro and his slimy homily at the end. Mind you, that was during a writers’ strike for danger money - two of them had choked on their own vomit over their own laptops and needed hospitalization. Of course, no-one writes the homilies themselves - we just raid ancient copies of Reader’s Digest..... Another reason we have to use the bleeps is because a lot of the speeches are unfinished - the writers can only get so far into them before they get severe personality disorders and have to go and lie down in a dark room with bendy wallpaper.”

Degrading

Some of the scenes of violence are, it turns out, actually real. The ‘poor schmuck’ actors are overcome with such waves of self-loathing and disgust at what they are doing that they try to escape from the set, and are forcibly restrained by the big, beefy security guards - who naturally are all supplied with powerful earplugs to avoid them getting similar crises of conscience at taking part in such degrading spectacles.

Shame

Greta Flapdangler, who starred in the “My Best Lay is a Well Hung Stallion” episode (which also starred Bucky the Horse, before his recent demise), opined, “Yes, it’s dirty, degrading, humiliating work, but it’s better paid than nude mud-wrestling, which is my main source of income. Heck, it’s the first time I appeared on TV with most of my clothes on! I wore a wig and latex mask, so none of my friends recognised me. I thought I’d gotten away with it until that reporter from The National Enquirer hacked into their payroll database and tracked me down. Oh, the shame of it! I’ll never live it down. Mind you, Bucky was real nice. I was supposed to be going out on another date with him the day after he exploded...”

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