IT’S live from New York! ... but there is a long rite to attending all those popular talk shows made here.
Getting the free tickets to become part of the studio audience is a nearly impossible feat as everybody else has the same intention as well.
Fans of Saturday Night Live would queue up at the crack of dawn, even in the dead of winter, for a standby ticket into the studio. No kidding.
Such standby tickets do not even guarantee admission, as these shows tend to overbook their tapings to ensure that all seats in the studio are taken up.
Thus, these tickets are good only if those who have a prior confirmed ticket are a no show that day.
To secure confirmed tickets, you would have to appease Lady Luck for at least one year.
Most of these shows, which invite online applications for tickets, would caution on their websites that there could be an arduous wait to gain access to their studio.
The View, that morning talk show helmed by Barbara Walters on ABC, says there is an estimated 365-day wait for tickets.
Celebrity chef Rachael Ray, who is in head-on rivalry with The Martha Stewart Show, has a one to two year-waitlist to her show.
Then there are the less daunting ones such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart which airs on cable. An online booking made on April 5 got me into its June 26 taping. The e-mail reply came with a caveat: “You reserved your tickets with us but you will not be confirmed until we start giving out our studio tickets.”
Others like Anusha Thayagan secured a booking just two weeks prior to the show.
An occupational therapist from Virginia, Anusha checks the website constantly for the available dates to the show as she has been a huge fan of Stewart.
“I watch it religiously,” she said. It was quite a breeze for her to get a ticket for the show unlike someone she heard who purportedly paid US$100 (RM344) on eBay for The Oprah Winfrey Show which tapes in Chicago.
There were at least 50 people already in line when I turned up at 2.45pm that day although ticket holders had been told to come from 3.30pm to 4pm.
The crowd was enthusiastic, not minding the sweltering summer weather as they queued up outside the building where its entrance carries the sign “Abandon News, All Ye Who Enter Here”.
Chilled bottled water was given out to ease the heat and thirst. And, boy, was it a long wait.
It was already 5.25pm by the time ticket holders were escorted inside the studio that looked smaller than what you see on TV. And by then, we had been exhorted at least three times to laugh out loud, to have fun and to answer nature’s call before the taping began.
The message is clear: You should be beside yourself laughing during the show. A chuckle here and there just won’t do.
“We’re on cable. We are too poor to provide the laugh track,” a female staff joked. And of course, CLAP! Loud and hard.
Stewart entertained the audience for several minutes before the show began. This funny man invited people to ask him questions “so that I can pretend to get to know you.”
All sorts of questions were thrown to him from political ones such as his views on Dick Cheney and the controversial attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales, to personal ones like “how do I get bootleg copies of your old MTV shows?”
He pondered for a minute before replying: “China. Look for a guy name Hong. Tell him I sent you.”
The taping began at 6.20pm and 40 minutes later, it was all over. Bruce Willis was the guest that day, hawking Live Free or Die Hard (Die Hard 4.0).
“It was a good experience. I thought they would have had to do a lot of editing but that’s clearly not the case (as the taping proceeded smoothly, just as how viewers saw it on TV),” Anusha said.
“I wished, though, that they had provided a better waiting area,” she added. There were no seats, so most people stood in the queue while others sat on the floor.
Another show here in Gotham is Late Night with Conan O’Brien, which hands out 75 standby tickets at 9am on the day of the show.
By 8am, a long line was snaking outside NBC Studios. Those who got the tickets were asked to come back again at 3.45pm to find out if seats were available for them when the taping began about half-an-hour later.
I was handed standby ticket No 58 which, predictably, turned out to be a lemon.
Next, the million-dollar question: What about the Late Show with David Letterman?
Standby tickets are available by dialling a certain number at 11am on the day of the show. After labouring several mornings punching the telephone keypad to get through the constantly engaged tone, success was mine.
The number assigned to me was 25. Standby ticket holders were required to come to the Ed Sullivan Theatre later that day.
So did I earn bragging rights that watching the Late Show had been among the Top Ten Things I have done here? Sigh.
