Even its brightest stars will tell you there’s no business like show business, that it would be sheer folly to imagine your future on terra firma just because you finally landed a movie role as an extra, or somehow managed to worm your way into a position on a hit TV or radio show. The advice is spot on, whether applied to American showbiz or its distant Looshan cousin.
Ask my friend Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose credentials include every bodybuilding award extant, several blockbuster movies and Governor of California, America’s third largest state. Almost everyone, save Donald Trump, was convinced Arnold was the perfect replacement for the Donald after he danced his way from the highly rated The Apprentice to the White House. Not for the first time, Mr. President proved on the button. For a full season NBC’s suits hung in there with their new find—until audience figures forced them to acknowledge Mr. Olympia was no Donald Trump.
Then there’s the singular Earl Huntley, whose special credentials include his unforgettable stint as Saint Lucia’s ambassador to the U.N.—and one of the two local repositories of the secrets of the toxic bog known as Grynberg. Still he somehow managed to convince RCI no one else in all of Saint Lucia was better equipped to take over Newsspin when differences between its regular host and management proved “irreconcilable.”
Then again, who better than Earl Huntley when it comes to selling snake oil? Some might say no public relations outfit would attempt to promote the soi-disant “statesman,” not when there is so much on record concerning his career as a public servant and politician manque. As I’ve said elsewhere, Huntley addressing such subjects as diplomacy, corruption in high places, abuse of office, fraud, election results, badly behaved government officials, subjects that on Timothy Poleon’s Newsspin were regular fare, would be like having O.J. Simpson as the host of a church-sponsored show about marriage counseling. Vice paying homage to virtue!
Newsspin’s fans are a faithful lot. That is, faithful to the creator of the show that from its inception 20 years ago was irresistible. It was sometimes serious, sometimes sad, even ridiculous—but always worth a listen. I have no problem admitting my addiction to Tim’s, er, idiosyncrasies. So would his regular listeners here and abroad, I suspect.
And so it is good to know that RCI, too, saw Earl for what he is (a statesman he is not!). And it didn’t take them all that long to discover he could never in a million years pick up the highly successful show where Timothy Poleon left off and move on as if Poleon had never existed. It remains to give Jack his jacket and say Earl Huntley can now boast a world record: three days after he attempted to take control of a highly successful show it’s been canceled!
