Down and Dirty With Downey

“If you put your foot in garbage,” Morton Downey Jr. says, “you get garbage on your foot.”

So check your feet and keep a rag handy while watching Downey’s New Jersey-based, weeknightly talk show, which has just been syndicated nationally.

Starting at midnight tonight on KABC-TV Channel 7, Los Angeles viewers will have an opportunity to get down, down, down and dirty with the star of the “Morton Downey Jr. Show.”

Ted Koppel followed each night by broadcasting’s shrillest hit man? How is that for bizarre?

If you like weird, painful sensations, you’ll like this guy. He feels like an enema and wears about as well.

To call Downey crude is to call Quasimodo plain. It just doesn’t cover it. When he opens his mouth, it’s like a flasher opening his raincoat. In less than a year, he’s become TV’s version of the drunk at a party who stands on a table with a lamp shade on his head, without bothering to remove the lamp.

Off screen, Downey may be as sweet and honorable as Mother Teresa. On screen, he’s hot, onion breath--a shrewdly conceived and packaged showman who feeds TV’s eternal lust for conflict, whether it’s the bang-bang of news coverage or violence on entertainment programs.

For all his orchestrated tantrums and calculated obnoxiousness, the name-calling Downey is essentially mainstream TV--merely the latest, most vociferous star of trendy shock-casting.

Loudly hooting and rooting him on in the studio as he butchers his human sacrifices (otherwise known as guests) are mostly young, male audiences that you have the feeling are bused over from Roller Derby and later removed to the stockyards for slaughter.

Watching Downey is an experience. As with all gimmicks, however, he grows wearisome and is ultimately a bore. The “Morton Downey Jr. Show” lasts an hour, but after 15 minutes you’re yelling uncle. (The show also airs at midnight on Channel 10 in San Diego and at 6 p.m. on cable superstation WWOR.)

Tonight’s subject: PROSTITUTION!!!

Downey starts out with Traci, a high-priced call girl, and Roger, an “escort service” manager, whose disguise--a clear plastic hockey mask and dark sunglasses--makes him look like homicidal Jason of “Friday the 13th.”

The audience of yuckers and hecklers--they look like guys who blow their noses with their index fingers--howls when Downey calls Traci’s clients “horny old clots.”

Next, a New Jersey state senator, a Newark city councilman and a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union--one of liberal-baiting Downey’s favorite targets--debate mandatory AIDS testing for prostitutes and the quarantining of AIDS patients.

While expressing his own deep concern for the health of humankind, Downey smokes incessantly, exposing his guests to his cigarette smoke.

The hour is rather tame until the arrival of two more guests. “I’d like to introduce you to two of the great sleazebags of our time,” says Downey, who naturally abhors sleaze.

Enter the “sleazebags”: Jack Rose, publisher of the New York Guide to Commercial Sex, and Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw magazine, who almost immediately raise the noise level and lower the already-low intelligence level of the debate.

At one point, Downey and Goldstein are shouting at each other, literally nose-to-nose like twin Billy Martins out of control--and they’re not even disagreeing. What they are saying is eclipsed by how they are saying it, which is the point of the show.

Finally, Downey can stand no more and is forced to demolish Goldstein with his rapier wit, telling him: “At least I don’t have a face that looks like it went through a bullet-proof windshield.”

Oh, Morty, you’re so beautiful when you’re angry!

Last week, before its Los Angeles premiere, the “Morton Downey Jr. Show” did an hour that may go down as one of its most unusual and most repulsive.

The subject was AIDS.

“I’m going to introduce you to the brother of a celebrity,” said Downey, a notorious gay basher. “He’s going to come out of the closet. He’s an AIDS patient and he’s dying.”

The compassion seemed out of character. Downey honoring a man who was probably a homosexual was like Stalin toasting one of his purge victims.

But the AIDS patient turned out to be none other than Downey’s gay brother, Tony, who appeared on the show to lobby for government-funded treatment of AIDS patients. You admired Tony’s courage and candor. And seeing the two brothers together was a sweet, poignant moment. But that moment was swept away in the program’s titillating and exploitative bluster.

Morton to Tony: “Did you have anal sex?”

Later, Morton refused to believe that Tony’s illness might prohibit him from appearing on the show again.

Morton to Tony: “I tell ya . . . you’re gonna be back a thousand times! YOU AIN’T DYIN!!!!”

The audience roared, as if they’d just seen Rocky KO AIDS. But the message of this camera-tailored emotion wasn’t AIDS patients or AIDS treatment. As always, the message was Morton Downey Jr.

“I hope ya don’t die!” he told Tony when they embraced at the end of the hour. “I love ya, pal!”

Does this mean he won’t ridicule and demean gays on his show anymore?

What a guy. What a gimmick.

Surely Downey and today’s shock radio stars loudly echo those past masters of the insult, Joe Pyne and Alan Burke. Yet Downey seems to have gotten his inspiration from Orange County’s very own . . .

Wal-eeeeeee.

Yes, the “Morton Downey Jr. Show” looks and sounds amazingly like Wally George’s much older talk show on KDOC-TV Channel 56 in Anaheim. Both posture and take extreme right-wing positions. Both ridicule their guests and throw them off their shows. Both urge their studio audiences to taunt and hoot at guests. Downey’s audience chants his name the way George’s chants “Wal-eeeee . . . Wal-eeeeee . . . Wal-eeeeee.” And just like George, Downey calls people “pal.” Downey hasn’t adopted George’s silver hair helmet, but who would?

“There’s no question in my mind that Morton Downey Jr. is a clone of Wally George,” Wally charged on the phone recently. He was irate. He was furious. He was so out of control with anger that he barely could talk, except to ask:

“You say this will be in the paper Monday?”

Downey and George also share a love of publicity.

“I was totally amazed when somebody called me and said, ‘There’s some clown who stole your act and is doing it in New York,’ ” Wally said. “I had somebody tape the show and I was shocked. I saw a brown-haired Wally George with warts. He points his finger the same way I do. He calls people morons and jerks the same way I do. And he uses my vocabulary.

“He uses all my mannerisms,” Wally continued, “all my gestures, my complete format, and when somebody asked him if he was doing Wally George, he said no.”

It seems that before Downey made it big, when he was still doing a radio show in Sacramento, he made three appearances on Wally’s show. Wally suspects that Downey shrewdly took mental notes, gleaning some of the master’s genius.

“I considered this guy to be a friend of mine and he goes back East and steals my show,” Wally griped.

And not only that, but the student has gone to disgusting extremes that even the teacher never would have imagined.

“There are limits,” Wally said.