Erotic assistants might furnish the necessary heat. : Burbank! for Sex & Violence

Burbank is exploring the possibility of spending $65,000 to televise its City Council meetings.

The idea was proposed by publicist Larry Johnson, who argues that legislators everywhere are already on camera in an effort to “further involve the public.”

Meetings here would be telecast on the C-SPAN channel, where such hits as gavel-to-gavel coverage of the U. S. Senate are currently knocking ‘em dead.

Johnson’s suggestion has caused a good deal of debate around City Hall that threatens to escalate into hatred and animosity among old friends and treasured employees.

Someone ought to step in before it’s too late and explore with serenity whether the world is ready for the trauma of tabled motions and walk-on resolutions every Tuesday night from Burbank.

Fortunately, I’m available.

I can see only three reasons for televising meetings of any city council:

1. As a form of education. To manifest in fine detail why American cities are dying.

2. As a form of hypnosis. To lull potentially violent mental patients into a comatose state through video-lobotomy.

3. As a form of punishment. To relieve crowded jail conditions by forcing those who would otherwise be incarcerated to watch the sessions at home.

However, since those same factors already exist in network television, Larry Johnson may be correct in offering meetings of the Burbank council as prime-time fare.

But some additional elements are required in order to blow ‘em out of their socks in the Nielsen ratings.

First, sex.

It is axiomatic among those who market television shows that sex still sells soap, or, as they say now, nothing quite does it like decolletage.

Looking over the present membership of the Burbank council, however, I see no one whose obvious assets would leap from the tube and grab the attention of the guy with the beer can and the salami sandwich, if you know what I mean.

That is not intended to demean either the male or female members of the council, since they are no doubt fine and attractive people who have a terrific time under the covers. Not all together, of course, but in reasonable pairs.

It’s just that their private sexual virtuosities have nothing to do with communicating eroticism.

What I’m saying is, sex on TV is transmitted by virile young men and women (one wears a mustache, one doesn’t) who indulge in a kind of video foreplay for the better part of 60 minutes.

This is done mostly through impish double- entendres and smiling half-glances, although occasionally a kiss that looks a little like incipient cannibalism will leave ‘em panting in Palmdale.

I’m not sure exactly how we’re going to fit this into a format that will reasonably manifest the activities of a city council without turning the whole show into a shameful orgy, although a shameful orgy itself may be the answer.

It works for the movies.

But then, I guess, you can’t have that sort of libidinous behavior going on among our civic leaders, so perhaps erotic assistants might furnish the necessary heat. We will put that, as they say, on a back burner.

Violence.

Sex and violence, like peanut butter and jelly, are inseparable partners in the American home.

For a while, federal commissions and private organizations vigorously demanded an end to violence on television but, thank God, that little exercise in futility has subsided and we are back once more to cutting throats between toilet paper commercials.

Here again, however, we confront problems of propriety. While it may seem expedient, dramatic and even fun for Mayor Mary Kelsey to shoot rather than gavel into silence anyone who won’t shut up, a legislator simply cannot do that in Burbank.

Substitution as a form of social acceptance, however, may once more do the job.

I can see a council assistant (Jan-Michael Vincent?) bolt into the scene from off-camera and, while the audience watches in delight and horror, beat hell out of an old lady whose demand for a senior center has become abusive and threatening.

God help me, I think it will work. It’s gritty.

As a matter of fact, this whole production might be a show of sexy and violent council aides rather than council members themselves, since elected officials are usually limited by law and good taste from either coupling or killing at public meetings.

I offer, therefore, while not exactly Dallas, Burbank!

The big, flashy, tough, sexy, behind-the-scenes story of the violent and erotic lives of government’s overheated back-room workers:

The young and beautiful and often nude women who, by their willingness to “cooperate,” make things happen in a city with secrets.

The lusty, muscular, strong young men with insatiable sexual appetites who “service” the women of Burbank! and know the satisfaction of murder for political expediency.

Burbank! The city exposed. Burbank! The people amused. Burbank!

Consult your local listings.