KNBC SCALES WEATHERING HEIGHTS DURING STRIKE

Strikes aren’t funny. But KNBC is.

In fact, the NBC-owned TV station owes a debt to the 2-day-old strike of the National Assn. of Broadcast Employees and Technicians (NABET) that has sidelined a third of the network’s 8,000-member work force.

Never has Channel 4 been a bigger hoot.

With non-union and supervisory personnel filling in for strikers, Monday’s Channel 4 newscasts were echoes of those pioneering TV days when everything was not only live, but also unpredictable and occasionally disastrous.

There is that classic story from the 1950s, for example, about an actor whose character in a TV drama had been shot to death getting up prematurely and exiting while the camera was still on him.

And now, metaphorically, the corpses are rising again.

Channel 4 inadvertently using footage of a fist fight between the Ku Klux Klan and anti-Klanners to illustrate a story on NABET picket lines? Weather-map-less Fritz Coleman reduced to spinning a student’s globe to illustrate his weather segment? Sportscaster Fred Roggin apologizing for taped Dodger highlights that omitted the highlights?

The news was never funnier.

You had the feeling that Monday would bring problems for NBC when Willard Scott’s lapel mike fell off during his initial weathercast on the “Today” show. And who did the camera catch bending down and retrieving the mike from the floor and returning the little gizmo to Scott? A floor technician? No, “Today” host Bryant Gumbel, who quickly retreated to his anchor desk.

For the most part, the strike-caused glitches have been minor, with sound problems and errant graphics the most evident. There were some notable exceptions, however.

There was, for example, the judgment glitch on the part of Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner in asking a non-union NBC camera crew to “excuse themselves” after union crews from other stations threatened to boycott his press conference if the “scab” crew remained. The fill-in NBC crew reluctantly complied, and was later granted a separate press conference by Reiner.

Segregated news?

One can understand union crews supporting their NABET colleagues at NBC. And the media-walkout threat that Reiner faced Monday likely will be repeated at other press conferences as the strike continues. However, since when are public officials allowed to dictate which media shall cover their press conference and which shall not? That’s interference. Reiner should have ignored the threats, held his press conference and let the chips fall, even if the Channel 4 crew was the only one present.

In the “Say What?” category, no one looked more foolish than Jay Rodriguez, NBC vice president for corporate information and Stiff Upper Lip.

Asked on camera Monday if the strike was hampering NBC, Rodriguez replied: “Everything’s going fine.”

Fine, that is, compared to being hit by a typhoon or sinking in quicksand.

Rodriguez was seen making his optimistic thumbs-up statement on Channel 4 almost immediately after the station’s first news debacle of the day.

“Picket signs are up in NBC studios across the country today, including here at Burbank,” substitute anchor Colleen Williams began, introducing a story about the NABET picket lines. Then Channel 4 went to the tape.

The wrong tape.

Instead of the orderly NABET pickets, viewers saw another outdoor scene, one of utter chaos, screaming and wild slugging, with people hitting each other with their fists and huge signs and generally going berserk, culminating with a man shown being subdued and handcuffed by police.

It was footage of Thursday night’s violent brawl between Ku Klux Klansmen and anti-Klan groups in Glendale prior to a scheduled debate of a hairbrained scheme to deport persons with non-Western European backgrounds from the United States.

Sorry.

“That’s clearly the wrong tape,” anchorman John Beard interjected with an admirable straight face after about 30 seconds.

The bigger laugher was still two hours away, on the 6 p.m. newscast, whose fill-in producer happened to be Channel 4 News Director Tom Capra.

Fritz Coleman has always been Channel 4’s resident weatherwit, besides being a stand-up comic in his other life. This time he outdid himself, with a big assist from the strike.

Warned in advance that his usual weather map might be inoperative, Coleman produced his “alternative map,” a globe. He spun it for the camera before producing a small cutout of the state of California from his jacket.

Then he began. . . .

“It’s a typical June day,” Coleman said a second before a large “2” inexplicably filled the screen. “It’s two out,” he immediately cracked. But who was on first?

He introduced a weather picture of Santa Monica--the visual over which the day’s weather statistics were to appear. “It will be here momentarily,” he promised.

No Santa Monica.

Coleman coolly filled the awkward next seconds with a monologue about life insurance, and then seemed briefly rattled.

“We have the wrong tape? How about we just put the numbers up and we have one of those black backgrounds?”

No numbers. No black background. Still no Santa Monica.

“OK, OK, we had a high today of what?” Coleman wondered. Every station had a weatherquizzer. Now Channel 4 had in Coleman TV’s first weather asker . Perhaps this was a weather game show.

“How about I just read ‘em off the page . . . like a laundry list?” Coleman said about the temperatures.

And on and on he went, reading numbers--like the old days when TV wasn’t cluttered by graphics--with numbers and other data tardily appearing on the screen.

“Do we have any maps at all, or do I just use the globe?” Coleman asked. “Go to the globe,” Beard said from off-camera.

Meanwhile, it was time for “Today’s Weather Question.” It had to be time, because the “Today’s Weather Question” graphic appeared on the screen.

“Oh, let’s just forget today’s weather question,” Coleman said, “because we just may not make it off in time for prime time.”

Back to the globe. Coleman ordered camera three--”I’m in charge here!”--to zoom in. He was beginning to sound like Mr. Rogers: “And tilt down. Can you tilt down? Tilt down more.” Wrong camera. “Go to camera three,” he pleaded.

Finally, camera three came in tight on the globe, on which Coleman had written “Fog/haze, upper 70’s.”

Coleman continued bravely before finally completing what may go down as the longest and most weatherless weathercast in history. “If there was real weather to do,” Coleman said, “I don’t know what I’d do at this point.”

Sportscaster Roggin was the designated victim on the 11 p.m. newscast when his highlights of the Dodgers-Padres game were, well, on the shortsighted side. He asked viewers to “imagine” Padres scoring, as seeing them score was impossible because the camera was aimed at the wrong part of the infield.

Fritz was wrong. It was not a typical June day. Just a funny one.