Thursday, December 16, 2010

A blanket apology/explanation on guest commitments

By Rick Morris

On this past week’s episode of THE FDH LOUNGE (Tuesdays, 7-10 PM EST on SportsTalkNetwork.com), we had a commitment from comedian Adam Carolla for an interview at 7:30 PM EST. Our phone never rang.

A few weeks back, we had a commitment for an interview with sportscaster Chip Caray. Similarly, that did not transpire either.

I’m not going to bury anybody or take any shots, because I don’t know what transpired in either instance. The FDH New York Bureau is still looking into rescheduling both of them if at all possible. But inasmuch as neither of these matters was completely unprecedented and we try to keep it as real as possible for our viewers, I did want to address the circumstances.

We haven’t had many no-shows, but there have been a few. They have been disproportionately among our more famous visitors and in most cases, they have insisted on calling us as opposed to furnishing a phone number. That’s how higher-profile people roll, I suppose, and we pretty much have to take what we can get on conditions for booking them, but it does leave us without recourse if we need to provide a reminder or inquire as to why we haven’t heard anything.

We had no reason whatsoever to suspect that either of these most recent examples would fail to materialize. In the case of Carolla, we received a copy of his book from his publisher and those entities NEVER send freebies without making sure their authors go on and plug the book. That’s actually been an amusing lesson in the course of this show – how much the publishing houses value each individual book sent out for promotional purposes. Rarely have we received a free book and not done an interview. In the case of Caray, he had been on the show previously and we had enjoyed a tremendous conversation. Based on that limited experience, I know him to be a gentleman and I can guess strongly that the no-show was an honest mistake.

Our goal is for each show to be an event, one that is conducted at a very high level. We are not satisfied when any element keeps us from our goal of perfection, whether that be technical difficulties, last-minute shufflings/cancellations or the like. Even if it causes my partners to raise their eyebrows a bit, as the executive producer, I did feel an obligation to explain this one matter just as a means of explaining that everything we promote everything honestly. This is a show without any pretence as to who we are or how we operate, so I hope that our transparency is taken into consideration the next time we promote an appearance that results in a no-show. We will do everything we can to make those few and far between and we are sorry for when they do happen.

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