Why Lilacs Don’T Bloom On Television

Many homebound parade lovers were justifiably upset on May 20, when, for the first time in 44 years, the Lilac Festival Global Credit Union Armed Forces Torchlight Parade was not televised live.

“We did get lots of calls, and some very unkind calls,” said Brusan Wells, the festival director.

To recap, here’s the situation: The festival association decided for the first time to put the rights to the telecast out to bid. Yet not one local station submitted a bid, not even KHQ-6, which had carried the parade for 44 years as a community service.

So in the post-parade aftermath, Spotlight has been on the phone, attempting an “intervention” to see whether the parade can return to the tube next year.

Wells said the odds are good.

“We will be going out to bid on June 1 this year, in order to give the TV stations an adequate amount of time,” she said. “I think we’ll have a commitment by Oct. 1.”

Last year, the bid process began much later, too late for the TV stations to get it in their budgets. So this should solve one of the problems.

However, timing was only one of the problems. KHQ had at least three other reasons for not bidding on it, according to general manager Lon Lee.

Televising the parade is expensive and the station was losing money on it every year, which it was willing to do before being asked to pay for the rights. Also, KHQ was fighting NBC every year over the fact that the station was pre-empting the network’s prime-time programs, especially during the series finales in May, a sweeps month. Finally, a lot of viewers got angry every year when their prime-time shows were pre-empted, even for what many other people feel is a deserving community event.

Meanwhile, both KREM-2 and KXLY-4 have other reasons for being cautious about taking on the parade. KREM already commits a huge amount of resources to Bloomsday and Hoopfest, while KXLY also has the Children’s Miracle Network Telethon. Both stations already feel they have their plates full in the spring.

“That has to cost KHQ an awful lot of money to televise the parade,” said Barry Barth, general manager of KREM. “I don’t normally say this about the competition, but I think they did a spectacular job of covering that parade, and they didn’t need to be doing that.”

KHQ said Thursday it won’t even be bidding on the rights for next year.

“We’re out,” said Lee. “We’ll be carrying the XFL (the new football league) on NBC next year on Saturdays, and I have no choice.”

So this problem may be knottier than the Lilac Festival Association thinks. We’ll revisit this issue again as it develops.

Live on tape

Did we say that nobody televised the Lilac Festival Parade this year?

That’s not entirely correct. If all went according to plan, KXLY-4 aired a taped version of the parade from 1:17 a.m. to 3:17 a.m. this (Sunday) morning. The entire parade was taped by a crew of volunteers.

The hour is brutal, but at least people were able to set their VCRs and get a tape of the parade, a week after the fact.

Debut Foundation for the Fox

A local performing arts institution has stepped up in support of restoring the Fox Theater as a performing venue.

The Debut Foundation for the Arts has pledged a portion of every ticket sold in its Debut Performing Arts Series to go toward a restored Fox. Wayne Larson, who runs the series, said they will support the Spokane Symphony or any other entity which will purchase the theater and restore it.

The first Debut Performing Arts show of the season will be the Michael Martin Murphey Acoustic Quartet, at The Met on June 18, 3 p.m. in a special Father’s Day concert. One dollar of every ticket sold will go toward the Fox restoration. Tickets are available through G&B Select-a-Seat (325-SEAT or 1-800-325-SEAT).

You might remember Murphey as the singer of “Wildfire” and “Geronimo’s Cadillac,” and more recently as the man who is keeping the tradition of cowboy songs alive.

The Debut Performing Arts Series is also bringing in two dance shows, “The Ballet Stars of Moscow” on Oct. 9, and “Swing Dance America” on Feb. 28. Both shows are scheduled at The Met, and they help explain why Larson is so enthusiastic about a restored Fox.

“These are two great examples of productions that would fit nicely into a renovated Fox,” said Larson. “They are too big for The Met, but too small for the Opera House.”

`Titanic’ ticket event

Individual tickets for the first show in the 2000-2001 Best of Broadway series, “Titanic: A New Musical,” will go on sale Friday at 10 a.m.

This musical version of the famous story actually pre-dated the blockbuster movie by a few months, and it became almost as much of a hit, at least in Broadway terms. It won five Tony Awards in 1997, including Best Musical.

The touring version docks at the Spokane Opera House from Sept. 6-10. Tickets are available from G&B Select-a-Seat or online from TicketsWest.com.

Season tickets for the entire five-show season are still on sale, too.

RiverPark overdose

By now, I suppose plenty of people have heard about the Inlander-KXLY poll on the RiverPark Square parking garage issue. In addition to gauging public opinion about the controversy itself, it also gauged public opinion about the media covering it.

Among the poll’s findings: Only 50.2 percent of the people who are familiar with The Spokesman-Review’s coverage found it to be “fair and unbiased.”

Sounds a little high to me, considering the percentage of my friends who like to taunt me about this issue.

But I also found a few other interesting media tidbits among the raw data.

For one thing, it doesn’t appear that KXLY-AM talk host Rick Miller’s incessant pounding of the issue is endearing him to all of his listeners. Of the small minority (about 12 percent) of people even familiar with Miller’s coverage, about 7 percent said it had influenced them to listen more, while 25 percent said it had influenced them to listen less. (The rest said “about the same.”)

No other media entity had such high “less” numbers, but in general, the media’s “more” numbers were relatively low. As the Inlander said in its analysis of the poll results, it “may indicate that the public is a little less enthralled by the issue than local news editors think.”