Huell Howser Says ‘Hello Moscow’ on KCET

“People in television try to make it sound much more difficult than it is because that justifies their existence,” Huell Howser said.

Actually good television can be amazingly simple, and Howser proves it.

In December he went to a video store and bought a camcorder for $1,700. Then he bought a round-trip ticket to the Soviet Union, flew to Moscow in late January and, with virtually no preparation, spent two weeks there taping extraordinary interviews with ordinary people.

Although Howser has been in television a long time and his “Videolog” segments are among the very best things KCET Channel 28 produces, he had never operated a TV camera of any kind before. “This destroys the mystique of television,” he says. “It shows you can just go and do it.”

He went and did it.

The result is “Hello Moscow,” an intimate, magnificently unslick, utterly charming, absolutely irresistible half hour that is Howser at his populist best, just meeting common folk and letting them be themselves. It airs at 7:30 tonight on Channel 28.

Without politics.

“I did not go where everyone else goes--Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw standing in front of the Kremlin,” Howser said this week. “I would just get up in the morning and head out. Where I ended up is where I would shoot.”

He shoots the Bird Market where Muscovites buy, sell and trade pets. We see not only dogs and cats, but a duck standing on one leg.

He shoots at a massive heated outdoor swimming pool where a man gives him the thumbs-up sign. He shoots at a barber shop and at a gym where his translator labors to explain to a weight watcher what Howser means by “couch potatoes.”

He shoots at a record store where a man with some age on him winces at the mention of rock music. “Glenn Miller,” the man says. “This is music.”

Howser shoots inside the flat of a woman who has translated “Gone With the Wind” and in a classroom where elementary students are learning English.

He shoots at a flea market where a vendor is selling painted Gorbachev eggs, Stalin and Brezhnev rubber masks and ties proclaiming “I Love Gorbachev” and “I Love the KGB.” Howser buys one of the ties. “This is capitalism gone berserk,” he says.

And in a crazy wonderful way, television gone berserk.

What we have here is a friendly Tennessean loose in snowy Moscow with little more than a lightweight camera and a smile, yet somehow seeming not to be a trespasser while creating these fascinatingly simple people portraits. This man is really good.

Howser financed his own trip, then covered his expenses by selling “Hello Moscow” to KCET. Instead of always thinking so cosmically in its programming, KCET would do well to follow the “Hello Moscow” model and use this same camcorder technique to explore the soul of Los Angeles and its neighborhoods.

What works in Moscow will work in Monrovia.