To: Buckeye who wrote (3063 ) 2/11/1998 7:33:00 PM From: Mark[ox5] Respond to of 27968
Wednesday February 11 8:25 AM EST Kinder, Gentler Downey Touting Talk Show By Cynthia Littleton HOLLYWOOD (Variety) - Tanned and rested, Morton Downey Jr. is on the gabfest comeback trail -- again. Emboldened by the recent rise of The Jerry Springer Show, Downey is ready to play the love-to-hate-him loudmouth role again for a national TV audience. If the audience can embrace Springer's brand of talk-wrestling, he reasons, then surely there's room for a kinder, gentler, more therapeutic and slightly less in-your-face version of Downey. "I'm always accused of being the father of modern talk television, but I think Jerry Springer has taken the whole thing to ridiculous ends," Downey said. "But there's nothing wrong with that; that's his kick. I think we're going to call my show 'Where Enemies Meet.' People who have disagreements, people who hate each other will have the opportunity to work out their differences." Downey is working on five-day-a-week talk show targeted for a spring debut. But he faces an uphill battle if he wants to reclaim the national audience that was (briefly) awed by him in the late 1980s. So far, the show (which is backed by Gotham-based employment agency Firamada Inc.) has been cleared mostly on low-power TV stations serving small markets. But that's farther along than Downey got with his last two aborted talkshow comebacks in 1991 and 1993. This time around, Downey says he's better prepared to produce a solid talk show because he's older (65), wiser and has had the humbling experience of sacrificing a lung to cancer. The 1989 skinhead incident (in which Downey claimed to have been attacked at the San Francisco airport by skinhead toughs) and other examples of Downey excess are all behind him now. Besides, his life story has the stranger-than-fiction qualities that Jerry Springer fans ought to relate to. "I've done stupid things in my life, but people are very, very nice to me," Downey said. "They forgive me my foibles, knowing that I'm as human as they are. I've made mistakes, but heck, my mistakes have never brought down a country, or even so much as a family." Reuters/Variety