No more places for artists to be bad?

I've been thinking about the years I spent in local radio.

Performers have no places left to be bad, critics have said. They mean, the performing arts have suffered because vaudeville is gone and performing artists have no place to hone their skills.

Comics and musicians used to spend years on the vaudeville circuit, doing variations on just a few minutes given them on stage, working their way up to top billing or as far as their patience, talent and "the breaks" would allow them to rise.

Of course, vadeville is dead and the thought of someone spending years working on a seven-minute act is unheard of. Who has time for that?

So, instead, churches, service clubs and other groups are made to suffer through bad performances. Like half-baked bread, these half-baked performers are neither ready nor palatable to their public.

Church leaders too often dismiss poor performances by saying, "Well, it's a blessing because they're doing it for the Lord." To which I reply, "Whatever became of the thought, 'Give of Your Best to the Master'?"

I find there is precious little that separates church performances from all other show business except for the script.

In the 1970s and earlier, many high school performers, like myself, found an outlet for the show business bug in local radio stations.

Now, there was the place to be bad! Disc jockeys told bad jokes ("Just like Tuesday's storm, there is Ralph and His City Slickers singing 'Blue Bayou'), played bad records (remember the album, "Laverne & Shirley Sing the Hits") and, on the overnight shift, would fall asleep at the console, letting the record end while listeners heard, "sssssk-shhhh, sk-shh, sk-shh" as the phonograph needle cut a deeper and deeper groove between the last song on the record and the label.

There were thousands of these radio stations across America. I worked at several of them in Indiana and Illinois.

But we had fun and conforted each other with the thought, "If we have fun, the audience will, too."

Unfortunately, financial pressures (mainly) have forced many of those radio stations to stop using local talent and play satellite feeds originating in Dallas or some other city and pretend they are using local talent. If pressed, the station management will tell you the station uses a satelite feed or the evidence will be right there in front of your ears: "You're listening to ESPN radio," is just one audible clue.

Kids really can't even be bad in high school. Students are directed to give flawless performances in band, choir and drama productions. If individuals can't give a flawless performance, they may not be allowed to perform at all. That goes for little league and school sports, as well.

So, kids grow up to become adults. There is little outlet for "green" performers to season and mature, so we end up with bad network television shows (bad often meaning poorly conceived and poorly executed) and other media that is too often mediocre.

How many times have you watch local TV only to see some graphic misspelled or to watch the announcer "fluff" their lines, stumbling over a script that was apparently ill-prepared and ill-rehearsed?

Recently, a local station misspelled "Energy" on screen, so in big letters on the graphic it came out "Engergy". The news director was reading the script on the air at the time and I wondered what she thought. Years ago, a station misspelled "Christian" -- for a commercial about an evangelist appearing at a Christian college. Only the TV said he was going to be at the "Christain" college -- a school with laundry issues, no doubt.

To be fair, local newspapers are not immune. I always hear complaints about newspapers with non-existent "jumps". The jump is the little indicator at the end of a column of text that says, "Story continued on page 3," only it doesn't continue on page 3. One day I opened the Indianapolis Star, Indiana's premiere newspaper, to find an entire page that was blank. It was not a printing problem, somone failed to plan content for that page!

In the newsroom, reporters and editors try so hard to be professional. They are taught to follow "AP style," referring to the stylebook published by The Associated Press. But they neglect things like spelling and grammar in the pursuit of AP style.

As an editor (who also exhibits poor performance too many times) I tell them, "No one calls up the paper and complains when we fail to use AP style, but they always notice when a word is misspelled, we use poor grammar or fail to make our jumps."

So, if you wonder why quality seems to be on the decline, I would offer at least one reason -- there is no place to perform badly any more! Except at the top.