Joan Rivers Asks, ‘Can We Shop?’ : Television: Stations find promise in celebrity-hosted home-shopping shows.

C an we buy?

That’s essentially the question Joan Rivers will be asking Los Angeles viewers who watch her live special on KTLA-TV Channel 5 Saturday morning, when she will try to sell a selection of Christmas gifts she picked out, ranging from a $19.95 salt-and-pepper shaker to an ornate $200 Nativity egg.

Rivers is one of several celebrities who are suddenly showing up in entertainment programs on broadcast television to personally plead with viewers to dial an 800-number, with their credit cards ready, and buy, buy, buy.

Last Sunday afternoon, baseball stars Ernie Banks, David Justice and Duke Snider relived their glory days in the premiere of “Johnny Bench’s All-American Sportsclub,” a syndicated series running locally on KCBS-TV Channel 2. In between guffaws, Bench peddled sports memorabilia to viewers--from a set of basketball cards for $17.95 to an autographed Joe DiMaggio baseball for $399.

And last month, “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” host Robin Leach and actress Rae Dawn Chong teamed up in a swank cocktail-party setting to peddle their wares on ABC’s experimental”Nitecap,” which just concluded a test run in 50 markets across the country.

In between celebrity interviews with Donald Trump, Corbin Bernsen and Siegfried & Roy, Leach and Chong pushed products--a $149.95 karaoke machine, which Chong demonstrated with a rendition of “California Girls,” or a $25 heart-shaped “Cupid’s Candle” (you find your perfect match by staring into the flame).

What these shows represent, according to their producers, is the natural evolution of the home-shopping channels on cable television--which sell more than $2 billion worth of merchandise each year--and infomercials--which generate an estimated $600 million to $700 million in direct sales annually.

“I think what we’re really trying to do is create a hybrid form of broadcast programming that combines entertainment with televised shopping,” said Jim Lutton, vice president of programming for Tribune Entertainment Co. KTLA and the six other TV stations owned by Tribune are simultaneously airing Saturday’s one-hour special, “Joan Rivers: Can We Shop?” (at 8 a.m. here).

“We look at this as an experiment,” said Greg Nathanson, general manager of KTLA. “There’s no question that, like anyone in a tough economy, we’re looking to find other revenue streams.”

In addition to the traditional revenue that the Tribune stations receive from commercial time sold on the program, they will reap an additional 10% to 15% of the gross sales of products that Rivers sells to viewers in their area.

The five stations broadcasting “Sportsclub” receive a similar percentage of on-air sales. (“Nitecap,” in contrast, did not sell any commercial time, compensating ABC affiliates solely through a portion of product sales.)

In the case of the Rivers special, which is co-produced by the cable shopping channel QVC, the payoff for broadcasters could be huge. Viewers of QVC have been buying items endorsed by Rivers, the queen of TV hawking, by the truckload. In the past two years, QVC reports, she has sold $25 million in jewelry from her own designer line. Over last Thanksgiving weekend, she moved $5.9 million in jewelry and clothing after a few hours of earnest pitching.

For her Saturday broadcast special, Rivers spent three weeks running around New York to find what she considers ideal Christmas gifts. Tribune hired comedy writers to punch up the broadcast by offering comedy bits, recipes and household tips.

If the show is a success, as measured by the amount of money brought in, Tribune plans to turn the concept into a weekly series and sell it nationally. Already, Rivers is off shopping for items for a summer special.

“I think it’s wonderful,” said an effusive Rivers, who has shifted half of her career--she hosts a syndicated afternoon talk show and a weekly gossip show on cable’s USA Network--to designing jewelry and clothing lines for sale on QVC. “So many people don’t want to go out to malls. This is the logical progression. First there were malls, then catalogues, catalogues, catalogues. And this is like moving catalogues. We’re showing you something and talking about it, rather than showing little bitty pictures of it.”

The producers of these programs believe they have come up with a formula that will wind up being far more lucrative to TV stations than the infomercial explosion in the mid-1980s, when the emergence of computerized databases and 800-technology lured lots of celebrities to the tube to pitch lots of stuff. The infomercial market is now believed to have reached a saturation point.

Infomercials became popular with struggling TV stations by allowing them simply to sell a chunk of air time to companies to run their own paid advertisements. Infomercials come in the shape of talk shows, how-to shows and educational programming. Last month, Bell Atlantic even tested a “sitcommercial,” wrapping a situation comedy called “The Ringers” around a half-hour commercial for phone service.

Through the holidays, KTLA is experimenting with big blocks of sponsored infomercials on Saturday mornings, a highly competitive time period in which it has been losing money. That relieves KTLA from providing costly entertainment programming.

But infomercials do not bring much money into the station, and infomercial producers do not divvy up their sales with stations. Furthermore, the low-rated infomercials do little to build a station identity or audience.

George Back, president of All-American Television, which syndicates “Sportsclub,” said there are two things missing from infomercials: “One, they appear to be hard-sell and are put in places where audiences may not find them, usually late at night. Two, in terms of ratings, they are not watched by widespread audiences because they have no entertainment value. We thought there was a way to evolve the infomercial hard-sell into an entertainment program that would connect with the audience.”

Nearly 170,000 homes in Los Angeles tuned into last Sunday’s 4 p.m. broadcast of “Sportsclub” following the Eagles-49ers football game on CBS, according to the A.C. Nielsen Co. The show generated about 400 to 500 phone calls. Back said that roughly 75% of the callers placed orders, although he did not have final sales figures yet.

The economic model of retail television being tested by All-American and Tribune sprang from the one developed by the two national cable shopping channels, QVC and the Home Shopping Network, which share 5% of their product sales with local cable operators in exchange for a free channel on their system.

For QVC, which receives a net income before taxes of 10% of all the products it sells, these retail television programs offer an opportunity to reach viewers who can’t get the cable channel. QVC is available in less than half of the nation’s 93.1 million TV households. And in the homes where it is available, not everyone wants to watch 24-hour cable shopping.

“There’s a way to make use of our knowledge and Joan’s talent to reach new and different audiences,” said Doug Briggs, executive vice president of merchandising and programming for QVC. “Our philosophy is, anytime we can expand the universe of people who buy on TV, it’s good for our business. Some people will not watch our channel but they will watch other channels.”

The challenge for broadcasters is to learn how to sell. “What we had to learn was how to do those commercials,” said Phil Beuth, president of early-morning and late-night entertainment for ABC. The talk-show format of “Nitecap” had two “commercial” breaks built into the one-hour program when the hosts directly pitched products.

“We know how to do a talk show, but learning to do those commercials and getting the pitches down correctly is a real art,” Beuth said. “We learned that aggressive pitches and repetition are very essential in that environment.”

Early results from ABC’s test-marketing have been encouraging, Beuth said, but most of the ratings for “Nitecap” are not in yet. He is waiting for final ratings and sales figures to be compiled before he makes his recommendation to the network on whether to roll it out nationally.

Some see this new form of retail television as an example of the creative depths to which the broadcast industry has sunk in order to squeeze a profit in the face of dwindling audience shares.

“I don’t know what these people are bringing to the party that’s going to make it more exciting,” said Joel Segal, executive vice president of national broadcasting for the New York ad agency McCann-Erickson. “The goal of television is to provide entertainment. If the public finds it entertaining, I suppose there’s a value to it. Personally, I find it a bore.”