THE PLEASURES OF A FIREPLACE
BY DAN MILLER
(originally posted December 27, 2005)
On Christmas Day, one of the High Def cable channels showed several continuous hours of a video fireplace.
It was accompanied by gentle Christmas music.... a pleasant thing to have on the screen while opening gifts with family.
And it sure brought back some memories to me.
Hard to believe, but it was 25 years ago when I decided to give the gift of a crackling on-screen fireplace to viewers of my late night Channel 4 talk show Miller & Company.
The TV station managers (at least the ones I bothered to tell about it) thought I'd lost my mind.... but to their credit, they didn't object.
So we took a camera crew to the home of one of the folks who worked on the show.... set up the camera.... started the fire.... and recorded it.
The night of the broadcast, I opened by telling viewers how I knew many of them didn't have fireplaces in their homes or apartments.... so my holiday gift to them would be 22 uninterrupted minutes of an actual fireplace.
No music, no narration.... simply the sight and sounds of a crackling fire.
And that's what we did.
I'm still amazed at the response we got to that program.
Even today -- a quarter century later -- people tell me they remember the night I ran the fireplace.
And I wouldn't make this up.... two separate couples told me how that night's show had been especially significant for them since -- to put it delicately -- their babies arrived 9 months after being in front of that romantic, late night virtual fireplace.
You simply don't get any better feedback from viewers than that!
After the critical success of that programming experiment, I decided to do something for viewers who were shut-ins.... confined to their homes for whatever reason.
I decided to mount a camera on the front of a car and videotape a "real time" trip from Nashville to Murfreesboro.
Tom Griscom, our General Manager, argued that I shouldn't do it, since showing the trip would take more than 30 minutes with no commercial breaks. His priorities were a bit different from mine.
I've always regretted that I gave in on that one.
I wonder what responses I might have gotten from viewers....... a relaxing trip to Murfreesboro without having to watch the road, or keep their hands on the wheel.
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