Name: Grant Tinker on Letterman, November 23, 1982
Uploaded: 2016-12-01T17:21:36.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Grant Tinker on Letterman, November 23, 1982' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-12-01. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Grant Tinker on Letterman, November 23, 1982' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-12-01. Transcript available.

Thank you very much, Paul.
Welcome back to the program, ladies and gentlemen.
We have a fine guest lineup for the show tonight,
and we'll get them out here before you know it.
I'll tell you who they are.
Margot Kidder is here tonight, also comedian Harry Anderson will be joining us.
And my first guest tonight happens to be my boss.
He is also John Chancellor's boss, Jane Pauley's boss,
Gary Coleman's boss, Skip Stevenson's boss, Johnny Carson's boss.
Well, let's check that one.
The list goes on and on.
Please welcome the chairman and chief executive officer
of the National Broadcasting Company, Mr. Grant Tinker.
Grant, nice to see you, sir.
Nice to see you.
Thank you very much.
Very nice suit, by the way.
Attractive suit.
Thank you.
It's girls with the job.
Oh, really?
You have to have these.
How many people do you have under your...
How many people before you are...
You know what I'm saying.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know them all, but there are some 7,000 people.
7,000?
At NBC.
Yeah.
And you are the...
Help me out with your job titles.
You are the chairman of the board of NBC.
Yes.
And the...
And the chief executive officer.
Now, what are those?
I was hoping you wouldn't ask me that.
I mean, they're exactly what they sound like.
We have a board of directors, of which I am the chairman.
And we meet once a month, and those people are very concerned about what
happens to NBC and how we do, in a business sense, and in every sense.
And as a chief executive officer, that can be described in a variety of ways.
I think it's simply that the buck stops in your office.
How did you get this job?
I don't know.
I met a man named Thornton Bradshaw, who is my boss and the chairman of RCA.
He's the chairman of the board of directors for RCA.
Yes.
The parent company.
He's the super chief.
Yeah.
And, yes, NBC's parent company.
And I met him a couple of years ago, and he asked me whether I would like to
have it.
And I'm playing this as straight as I can.
I said, yes, I would.
And so here I am, and I'm very glad to have it.
Yeah.
How have things gone for you since you've taken him up on his offer?
Well, variously.
Some good, some bad.
Perhaps some people know that NBC is not the leading network, for instance, and
so we're working to improve our standing.
And it's a lot of fun trying, and we have great ambitions.
But for the moment, we are not there yet.
Now, how much of an influence do you have, say, on what gets on the air on
Tuesday night, or who's going to be the next-door neighbor on the different
strokes?
I mean, do you actually do that stuff?
No.
No, I participate in doing that stuff.
There are a number of people, many of whom you know, who collectively do that.
There is a man named Brandon Tartikoff, whom you also know, who is in charge of
the entertainment division.
And he really has the responsibility for selecting the programs and, therefore,
the things that make up the programs.
I come sort of from a program background, so I do like to moonlight over into
Brandon's area, but if there's anything you don't like, take it up with him.
Okay.
It's not my fault.
But say you, in your free time, assuming you have any free time, you're
watching a television program on this network.
Have you ever thought to yourself, a Harriet would be better as a redhead, and
then just picked up the phone and said...
No.
Yes and no.
I don't pick up the phone right away.
I'm not that compulsive.
But yes, I occasionally see something that I think might be improved or changed,
and I would have the temerity to mention it to Brandon when I see him.
But we're pretty calm as a company right now.
We think we're on course, if you'll pardon the expression, and we're going to
stay that course, and we think we're going to come out in the right place.
I just made that up.
You just made that up, huh?
It seems like, I can remember when people, when it was announced that you were
going to take this job, everyone said, well, good heavens, that's a monumental
undertaking.
What made you want to leave the security of a highly successful production
operation?
Well, it was successful, and it was a lot of fun at MTM.
But I had done that for 10 or 11 years, and I think that's long enough to do
something.
And so when Mr. Bradshaw said, would you like to try it, he just happened to
come along at exactly the right time, or wrong time, depending on your point of
view.
But, you know, he caught me at a time when I think I was ready for a change,
and I also go back twice before with NBC.
I actually started in this building in 1949 when it looked a little different,
even before Milton Berle was across the hall here, which he was a couple of
years later.
I left it once, came back in 1961, left it again in 66 or 67, and so I watched
with great interest over the years what happened to NBC, and I was, along with
some other people, a little concerned that it wasn't doing as well as it might.
And I wanted to play a part in restoring it to its proper place of preeminence.
And so, along with a lot of people, I'm trying to do that.
You've also, this is none of my business, but I think that you may have lost
some dough in this deal somewhere, didn't you?
Because you can't still have a piece of that company and run the network.
That's exactly right.
I mean, yes, there would have been a conflict of interest, so the door slammed
down the minute I left MTM and walked into NBC, and, yeah, you could say I lost,
but then I knew I was doing that, so I did it willfully and foolishly.
Yeah.
We're going to, this is a commercial.
You've probably heard the term before.
We'll be back with Grant Tinker.
Thank you very much.
The gentleman, of course, is Grant Tinker.
Now, you came from, by comparison, a pretty relaxed atmosphere at MTM to
corporate meetings and meeting folks and so forth.
What is the biggest, the thing that you don't like looking, the thing you don't
like to do that keeps coming up on a regular basis?
What's your biggest headache in this job?
This suit is really it.
Yeah.
We were very relaxed at MTM.
We lived, you know, that it was a California lifestyle, and it was just Adidas
and, you know, clothes.
Pretty much it, wasn't it?
Just the Adidas.
Just the Adidas.
Yeah.
Some days and nights.
And that's part of it.
The suit represents all the things that I am not comfortable with.
The meetings, the structured life.
And yet, on the other hand, that's all part of the challenge.
There's some of the relearning that I have to do.
Yeah.
Coming back into a big company where I haven't been for quite a while.
What about the non-programming activities?
What do those entail?
There are some ritual things that I do badly, that I'm trying to do better,
that have to do with functions, you know, business functions, occasional
speeches,
and just meetings and appearances and activities that I did not do at MTM.
That's another thing on the downside.
Now, you mentioned earlier, when you took the job, you wanted to restore the
network to...
Help.
Help, I said.
Help restore.
Yeah.
I'm not going to take all the rap if this doesn't work.
Are you making any progress?
Are things beginning to...
Yeah, without doing a commercial about it, we have some shows, particularly in
our primetime schedule, that we think are promising.
And while they haven't found their audience yet in every case, I'm talking
about things like Cheers and Taxi, which we took from ABC.
And Remington Steele and St. Elsewhere, and these are new shows that we're
having trouble getting sampled, but in which we have a great deal of faith.
And once those begin to do as well as we think they should do, I think we will
be well down that road of recovery.
Yeah.
Is there anything that has bothered you that you can't solve right now?
Well, yeah, what bothers me is that we can't solve it by next Tuesday.
That it's the slowness of it all, that I'm very impatient in how long it takes.
And that was a surprise to me.
I really thought as an ignorant outsider before I came back that, you know,
just a little fooling around with the schedule and we would be flying.
And it turns out that audience habit is a thing that moves very slowly.
Yeah.
And yours, by the way, is moving upward.
Oh, let's...
Slowly, but upward.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
Hold it.
Let's not get carried away here.
I didn't mean to embarrass.
Now, when you were the head of MTM, occasionally I would see a quote from you
where you were critical of procedures, business dealings of networks.
And I don't know specifically what those were, but do you now find yourself
guilty of what you were criticizing earlier sometimes?
Turns out that criticism was unfounded.
Oh, it's just a mistake.
No, no, no, of course.
When you're on the outside, you do tend to be a little critical of networks
because they have the power.
They're the buyer and you're the seller.
And they don't always please you, particularly when they don't buy what you're
selling.
But we try at NBC to behave now in a way that I wanted networks to behave when
I was at MTM.
I mean, not that NBC didn't behave that way before, but we want it to be a
place that creative people, the best creative people will run to and want to
work.
And I think we are, with Brandon Tartikoff's help, turning it into exactly that.
Let me ask you one final question.
Do you ever eat up at the commissary?
I have not done that.
Before you go west, just drop in there.
Yeah, I will.
Is it as good as the commissary in Burbank?
I have eaten there.
It's lip-smacking good.
It's a hot meal at a fair price.
Okay.
Gee, this whole thing has made me very nervous, but you're a delightful man to
talk to, and I appreciate your time, sir.
Well, thank you.
Thank you very much for being here.
Mr. Grant Tinker, ladies and gentlemen.
We have to go away for station identification.
We'll be back.