We Americans are not accustomed to watching game show contestants being called idiots to their faces. But it is another thing entirely to watch her ridiculing American quiz show washouts. Because it's one thing to have Robinson shaming and humiliating her countrymen, shame and humiliation being two of the cornerstones of the British boarding school education. The British version of "Weakest Link" may be a national passion, but when it comes to the Americanized import, I am not amused. Goodbye." Anne Robinson is a bitch and a scold, and sure it's all an act - see how she winks and smiles ever so slightly when she says goodbye at each show's end? But after the thoroughly unpleasant exercise in public humiliation we've just witnessed, that wink is just creepy: Imagine Godzilla turning to the audience in midchomp and shrugging, "Whaddaya so afraid of? It's my shtick!" WEAKESTLINK?'" And of course, there's the polar chill of her signature line, with which she curtly dismisses losers from the show: "You ARE the. WEAKESTLINK" 36 times in the space of one hourlong show last week. She says it the same way, every time, which gets old pretty fast, given the fact that she said "the. WEAKESTLINK!" - with an accent on the first syllable. And she has a way of pronouncing the name of the show, throwing her whole body into it like a female softball pitcher letting one fly it comes out sounding like "the. She wears black, sometimes leather, overcoats and her red hair is cropped in a no-nonsense Julie Andrews do. The audience, which appears to have been coached to side with the host, gasps appreciatively when Robinson launches a zinger. The contestants, who appear to have been coached to not bite back, stand there and look miserable. "Is there any beginning to your knowledge?" "Not a single question correct, Chuck," she sniffs to one contestant.
"Who is the poster child for incompetence?" Robinson sneers in her flutey, upper crust accent as the eight contestants flub answers and fail to rack up winnings.
Watching the affectedly severe British host of NBC's much-hyped new quiz show, "Weakest Link," use shame and ridicule to put down contestants' lack of intelligence, you feel like you're back in grade school, quaking at your desk as some bitter battle-ax of a teacher rips into the slowest kid in the class. She isn't fun to hate, like Jerri on "Survivor: The Australian Outback." She isn't fun, period. By the time Clark testified, he had, at the behest of Bandstand's network, ABC, sold off his ownership stakes in those record labels, and so he walked away without punishment.Anne Robinson is a bitch, and not in a good way. So, when a Bandstand appearance propelled record sales for certain acts, Clark profited. "I think the crime I have committed, if any, is that I made a great deal of money in a short time on little investment," Clark actually told Congress. Findings showed that Clark, who hosted all kinds of up-and-coming acts on American Bandstand, also had a financial stake in many of those artists' record labels - 33 different music companies, in fact. In 1960, the House Committee on Legislative Oversight investigated Clark during the "payola" scandal, an especially skeevy moment in the recording industry's history that revealed an elaborate system of illegal and quasi-legal kickbacks and ownership stakes. It was in that capacity where Dick Clark got up to some shady business dealings. Clark's big break was as the host and producer of American Bandstand, a pop music showcase that ran from the '50s until the late '80s.
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