The Deadline Passes--and It’s Show Biz and Life as Usual

On NBC, Tom Brokaw said: “With 20 seconds to go to the deadline, let’s bring you up to date.”

By the time he had finished, the time had elapsed.

Five-four-three-two-one. Happy New Year!!!

Only it wasn’t a new year, and it certainly wasn’t happy.

What an eerie, disorienting feeling it was, clock-watching with television and anticipating Tuesday’s U.N. deadline for Iraqi forces to leave Kuwait.

Because of the attention that had been focused on the deadline, waiting for war was strangely like waiting for midnight on New Year’s Eve. At 9 p.m. here--which was midnight at the United Nations in New York--would we cut to Times Square for packed throngs cheering the falling ball? Then kisses, horns, noisemakers, champagne and strike up “Auld Lang Syne”?

The clock continues to move, and by the time you read this, the United States and Iraq may already be at war. However, in Hollywood’s televisionland, where the guiding philosophy is “business as usual,” life inevitably goes on even as life ends. And although it’s tempting to knock this entrepreneurial routine, perhaps that’s the way it should be.

The camera is an irresistible stage, after all, and the red light flashing on is the equivalent of a curtain going up. Earlier Tuesday, for example, CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey was in Baghdad reporting on the true mood of bravado-sounding Iraqis in the streets. He asked a teen-ager standing in a crowd to describe her feelings.

“I’m afraid . . . ,” she began.

“No, no!” several people behind her interrupted.

“I’m afraid . . . ,” she began once more.

“No, no!” they interrupted again.

Finally, as Pizzey noted, the girl got the message. “I love Saddam Hussein,” she said.

The crowd behind her cheered.

In a way, this brief exposure to Iraq’s multiple faces was a metaphor for the very essence of TV, which, perhaps more than anything, is a reflector of our many moods.

And Tuesday night was no exception, despite the evening’s general gloominess.

The taped “Love Connection” was its usual hermetically sealed self, a disillusioned date telling host Chuck Woolery: “I took one look at her and wanted to jump back in the cab.”

On an “Alf” rerun, the furry alien was being accused of wanting to eat a kitten. “Doesn’t a condemned man get a last meal?” he protested.

Those endlessly hyping “Super Bowl Record Book” spots continued to run, even though there is no guarantee that war in the Persian Gulf won’t preempt professional football’s championship telecast. And on cable, the Lakers destroyed the Hornets.

On the Trinity Broadcasting Network, an evangelist was urging troops in the gulf to give themselves to Christ, while on one public access channel a woman was demonstrating how to make a pie crust from fruit and nuts.

At 9 p.m. came that murder movie “The Presidio” on CBS, “Roseanne” on ABC and the second half of the movie, “Scandal Sheet,” on Fox, all opposite Brokaw’s countdown on NBC.

“The fuse is lit,” he said.

But only a few minute later, NBC began airing “In the Heat of the Night,” Brokaw becoming a fleeting footnote to a deadline whose significance would not be immediately known in this evening filled with Angst and ambivalence.

It’s times like these that TV, even more than usual, mirrors our conflicting emotions and competing interests. Perhaps it’s human nature that our personal traumas, whether significant or trivial, can loom larger to us even than the infinitely wider trauma in the Persian Gulf.

On “deadline day,” one of the messages on my answering machine was from a man who said, with great urgency, that he wanted to discuss something that he had seen on TV. It sounded extremely important.

When I returned his call, he explained, very solemnly, how disturbed he was by the skimpiness of the costumes worn by some of the females on a recent TV special. Concern, on “deadline day,” about too much skin?

That was his crisis.

To a friend of mine, crisis meant the death of his mother. To another friend of mine, it was drugs. On Tuesday night, I called the hospital where he is in a withdrawal program, only to be told: “He can’t come to the phone. He’s in family therapy.”

Suddenly, the crisis in the gulf seemed a millennium away.

It’s Wednesday morning. The phone rings, and it’s a publicist for a local station boasting about Tuesday night ratings. “We got some really hot numbers,” she says.

I’m tuned to CNN right now, trying to put everything into perspective while half-watching anti-war protesters on the streets somewhere, then soldiers in the gulf putting on gas masks.

I’m recalling the phone conversation I had Monday with Bill Bailey, who was dying of cancer. Actually, I’d never met Bill, who was the husband of Lee Bailey, a teller at a bank where we do business. But he had read my column, and I’d heard from my wife what a kind and gentle man he was and how he had continued keeping abreast of the gulf crisis even though he was weak and in extreme pain.

The phone call from Lee had come for my wife, who wasn’t in. But Lee put Bill on the phone, and we talked briefly. He said: “It looks like my days are numbered.” He was about to enter the hospital. “Come see me,” he said. “I will,” I said.

On “deadline day,” Bill Bailey died. For him, the war was over.