KCOP MAKES PLANS FOR MARATHON II

The ink was hardly dry on this week’s ratings reports, when executives at KCOP (Channel 13) began crunching out ideas to top their hit program, last Sunday’s Los Angeles Marathon.

“This year we had the Goodyear blimp and two helicopters,” said station president Barry Frank. “Next year we want the Goodyear blimp and five helicopters.”

As KCOP proudly trumpeted this week, its three-hour broadcast Sunday of the first Los Angeles Marathon reached a far larger audience than just about anyone in local TV circles had anticipated, including the executives of KCOP.

The broadcast of the race received a 35% share of the viewing audience, an unusually high figure for any locally produced program and exceptionally high for a Sunday morning show. The station estimated that more than 1.5 million home viewers watched the race coverage.

The marathon’s share of the viewing audience edged out the station’s previous biggest hit, the 1978 miniseries “Sailing to Byzantium” by one percentage point.

Frank said that the station was “amazed by the numbers” and that the coverage as well as the race turned out to be “a very big and important event to the community.”

“You know, three months ago, there wasn’t any station in this city that wanted to gamble on the marathon,” station manager Rick Feldman added. “There weren’t seven stations waiting in line salivating to get this.”

Not even KCOP, as it turns out. Frank and Feldman said that the station had planned for half the audience the show wound up getting and sold advertising time based on the lower projections. The show made a significant profit anyway, they said.

It also provided KCOP with a promotional boost for its local news team, which was heavily represented on the broadcast.

For a local station, KCOP’s coverage of the marathon was an Olympian undertaking: Along with the small air force, the station used 120 staffers, six on-air reporters and 25 cameras placed along the race route.

“We wanted to get our news people out there to L.A.,” said executive producer Peter Schlesinger, noting that the station intended all along to reach a more general audience than just people who might be runners. The program included more than 40 recorded inserts to explain various aspects of marathon running, health and other matters relating to the race.

The station had 8 1/2 weeks to prepare for the marathon broadcast, and, Schlesinger said, there were days that he doubted the team would pull it off.

“There were a couple of times when I had to sit people down and ask, ‘Yes or no? Can you do it?’ ” Schlesinger said. “It went off without a hitch. it was strange, as if somebody was with us all along.”

(Even the weather played into their hands, although rains through most of Saturday had prevented the station crew from conducting a full-blown two-hour rehearsal.)

Although the station received some criticism for over-covering an event that did not possess an abundance of video drama, the audience share more than justified the effort to KCOP executives.

And station manager Feldman has already begun soliciting ideas for next year’s race. Almost certainly, he said, future coverage will include following a runner or runners in the pack, rather than only the leaders, and more attention to disabled participants making the marathon in wheelchairs.

“We’ll be going a little deeper into the personalities of the race,” Feldman said. “Next year, I think we’ll deploy things a little differently.”