ROSE HELPS THEM MAKE IT THROUGH THE NIGHT

Most TV viewers probably haven’t watched Charlie Rose say “Good morning, and welcome to CBS News’ ‘Nightwatch’ ” for a good reason: They are sound asleep.

But for many late-night TV addicts, early risers and insomniacs, “Nightwatch”--which airs from 2 to 6 a.m.--is a staple of their pre-dawn TV schedule.

“I think that’s one of the wonderful things about this broadcast,” says Rose, whom one CBS News executive calls “an undiscovered gem in the lost art of interviewing.”

“We’ve become a friend to people during the night,” says Rose, who became host of the broadcast a year ago when CBS News moved the 2-year-old show to Washington from New York and changed its format from five anchors to one. Lark McCarthy, a former local news broadcaster, does news breaks.

CBS News President Edward Joyce says that with the move to Washington, “The broadcast has found a center for itself.”

Rose sees the show as a combination of hard news and in-depth interviews with politicians, national policy setters and newsmakers, mixed with conversations with a variety of others, including actors, entertainers and sports figures. His premise is that good conversation will generate an audience.

“My theory about the broadcast is that people who watch this show for the most part watch in the intimacy of the night and their own house. They want to eavesdrop on interesting conversation,” he says, adding that “there are very few places in television where you can be involved in good conversation.”

Executive producer John Huddy, a former Miami Herald newspaper columnist, believes more men than women watch the show. A typical viewer, he surmises, “is a 34-year-old male with a used Porsche in his driveway, a copy of Omni, Penthouse and Time on his nightstand . . . who is about to buy a videocassette recorder.”

Rose’s hair may be askew, and he’s sometimes over-prepared for a guest, says Huddy, but more important, “he’s fair to people and almost never offends anybody. They feel they got a fair shake.”

Adds Joyce, “Charlie has the right low-key personality that makes it very easy at that time of night to sit and watch a serious interview.”

The show actually is done “live on tape” during the day; i.e., taped for two hours just as if it were live. The broadcast is shown in full, then repeated. On Sunday night, Rose tapes a show with a studio audience and McCarthy later takes live telephone calls from viewers.

CBS News says ratings for a recent week showed that 1,020,000 households watched the show--about 21% of the homes with sets turned on during those hours. “Nightwatch” is carried by 100 of CBS’ 200 affiliates, the network says.

While the ratings aren’t exactly sending executives out for champagne, Rose says the show is finding its rhythm and its audience. “I think people are beginning to discover us. You can feel it in letters; you can feel it on the streets.”

While “Nightwatch” is Rose’s first late-night TV talk show, it’s something he’s long wanted to do. (“Nightwatch” is the only surviving late-night network news-talk show. ABC and NBC have abandoned efforts at lengthy late-night news shows.)

Initially, Rose came to Washington several years ago to host a nationally syndicated daytime TV talk show. The “Charlie Rose Show” appeared in 50-60 markets, but folded after two years because it didn’t make money. Critics said Rose was too much of a Phil Donahue clone.

It was a painful setback for Rose, now 43, a bright, outgoing, handsome man who arrived here with high hopes of repeating the success of a morning TV talk show in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

John H. Rohrbeck, vice president and general manager of KNBC in Los Angeles, who oversaw the syndicated show’s production in Washington, says he thinks stations were a little too impatient for the show to build an audience.

Rose is “a very intensive individual who works very hard, and loves what he does. He has a unique gift in terms of interviewing people,” Rohrbeck says.

There’s hardly a trace of the South left in the voice of Rose, who grew up in Henderson, N.C., an only child who wanted to be a doctor. After a stint in Washington as a senator’s aide in the mid-1960s, he says, “I felt this pull to be more involved in the world around me.”

Instead of medical school, he went to law school. He practiced law in New York, married a journalist and fed his news appetite with some local TV free-lance work. A lunch with Bill Moyers changed his life. Before they’d had dessert, Moyers had offered him a job. “I was 30 years old. Everybody was saying to me I was too old to shift careers,” Rose says. Nonetheless, he joined Moyers and became executive producer of his public-broadcasting show.

It was Moyers who encouraged Rose to do some interviews. But it was Rose who decided to try his hand as a TV network news correspondent. “I wasn’t very good,” he says quickly.

As a reporter, he happened to substitute for the host of a local daytime TV talk show. He won several compliments and decided to try it full time, first in Chicago and then Texas.

After his Washington show folded, Rose free-lanced interviews for a local TV station and did early-morning radio while trying to decide what to do next. “Nightwatch” put him back on his feet and on the air.

To be sure, Rose has his fans. Women write him letters and poetry. Divorced, he has had a reputation as one of the town’s more eligible bachelors. And there are the accouterments of success: a white Mercedes, a spacious brick house in a fashionable section of Washington, a satellite dish in the backyard and a hot tub on the deck off his bedroom.

Many colleagues regard him as smart, well informed and a hard worker. “He’s good, he’s talented and he knows every aspect of the business,” says a friend. Others, however, describe him as a man in too much of a hurry who takes himself too seriously. “He’s so nakedly ambitious,” says an acquaintance.

Rose created a flap here at the CBS bureau last fall when he was accused of a racial epithet during an interview with actor Howard E. Rollins Jr., star of “A Soldier’s Story.” Rose was about to mention the Negro Ensemble Company, which produced the original stage version of the story, and stumbled over the first word. That segment of the tape was edited, but it did not halt complaints from some bureau staffers that Rose had said “Nigra.” The matter has faded, but Rose says he still isn’t exactly sure what he said.

“Nightwatch” producers say they may add another contributor to the broadcast to help with interviews, especially those from Los Angeles. But Huddy says, “It’s clearly Charlie’s broadcast.”

With only a $14-million budget and little promotion, “Nightwatch” isn’t a high priority for the network. But that doesn’t bother Rose. As he puts it, “I want us to be the best broadcast that CBS has.”