AND YOU THOUGHT BURGESS MEREDITH MADE BAD...

AND YOU THOUGHT BURGESS MEREDITH MADE BAD RECORDS?: Calendar’s cover story last week on the mostly regrettable albums recorded by actors somehow missed three of the records Pop Eye has used to get rid of unwanted guests for years. If it’s 4 a.m. and those last few party goers just won’t leave, we’ve found that it helps to play Jack Webb’s solemnly intoned recitation of “Try a Little Tenderness” (“Women do get weary,” he asserts, with all the authority Joe Friday could muster).

Follow that with Sebastian Cabot’s “dramatic reading with music” of 11 Bob Dylan songs, then hit them with the coup de grace : William Shatner’s “The Transformed Man,” in which Capt. Kirk (he’s wearing his “Star Trek” uniform on the album cover) couples classic literature with pop songs. “Cyrano De Bergerac” suddenly turns into “Mr. Tambourine Man,” emoted with enough side-splitting histrionics to send even the most stubborn guest screaming into the night.

The scariest part, though, is that when Pop Eye mentioned the record to Shatner a few years back, he nodded and said, “I still like that record.” Pop Eye diplomatically changed the subject and asked him about “T.J. Hooker.”