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The Star Online: Entertainment: TV & Radio

Posted: 31 Aug 2011 02:17 AM PDT

Talk show The Doctors injects some zest into medical science with its panel of attractive doctors.

THE first thing that came to mind when I heard about The Doctors was – "Not another Grey's Anatomy!"

Well, I quickly found out that it isn't yet another take on cheesy medical drama (phew!). And in place of interns and residents who can't seem to keep their hands off each other, The Doctors, a Dr Phil spin-off is a daytime talk show that features a panel of doctors discussing a variety of health topics.

In the same vein as Dr Phil, The Doctors sees the panel deliver some serious medical advice in easily digestible, bite-sized chunks throughout the one-hour episodes.

Each doctor will weigh in on medical issues brought up by members from a live studio audience, as well as questions raised by users from the series' online community. Last year, The Doctors won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Informative Talk Show.

The show, which premiered in 2008 in the United States is hosted by ER physician and television personality Dr Travis Stork, who also appeared in season eight of The Bachelor as (d'uh) the bachelor. With his honed physique and chiselled face, Stork is possibly the most visually-pleasing real-life doctor any television series has ever seen.

Season three of The Doctors unravels with Stork's "Project Unhealthy", an experiment he undergoes to illustrate how junk food affects the body. "I'm a healthy person. I didn't even know what it felt like to be unhealthy," Stork tells audiences on the show.

Throughout the five-day project, Stork's very own version of Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, he gave up his healthy diet of fruit and yoghurt, veggie omelette and whole wheat bread and joined the grimy, oily fast food nation.

Other tele-genic experts on the show include Dr Lisa Masterson, an obstetrician/gynaecologist. The only female in the squad, Masterson deals primarily with issues related to the female anatomy such as birth control pills and hysterectomy, which is really a fancy term for the surgical removal of the uterus.

Then we have Dr Andrew Ordon, a plastic surgeon and reconstructive surgery expert. Ordon, who is known for dispensing frank advice on cosmetic surgery procedures on the show, also puts his scalpel to good use as the founding member of Surgical Friends Foundation. It is a charitable organisation that provides free surgical procedures to burn victims, abuse victims, people born with birth defects and others who cannot otherwise afford reconstructive surgery. Ordon has also worked with Smile Train, providing cleft lip and palate repairs.

Meanwhile, Dr James Sears, a smiley paediatrician, is arguably the most likable personality on the set. Sears, a father of two, says he loves working with children and has also been featured on other television talk shows like Dr Phil and Help Me Grow. He doesn't have the ostentatious charm of Stork or the sharp sassiness of Masterson, but Sears blends into the panel just as well with his brand of geeky charisma.

In a nutshell, The Doctors offers a brand new avenue for the discussion of medical sciences and health-related topics with the help of some very attractive doctors. What I like most about the series is that it highlights and adds professional perspective to everyday common knowledge such as the perils of obesity and cardiovascular diseases without being patronising or preachy. Stork, easily the most enthusiastic and emphatic of the lot, is especially exciting to watch.

I also look forward to Ordon's five-minute Fixes, a beauty segment on the show. Did you know that diaper cream makes a good facial mask? Well, according to The Doctors, baby diaper cream contains zinc oxide, which is great for your skin and helps to protect you from the sun. Plus, diaper cream contains aloe and other antioxidants that will make your skin smoother. Best of all, it doesn't cost a bomb. Now excuse me while I head over to the pharmacy ...

The Doctors airs on Li (Astro Ch 706) on Sundays at 11pm.

Jerry Lewis a no show at Telethon after 45 years

Posted: 30 Aug 2011 05:11 PM PDT

NEW YORK (AP) - No one would sniff at all the dollars Jerry Lewis raised for muscular dystrophy: a couple of billion during his 45-year reign as host of the Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon.

But what kind of TV did he offer in exchange? The short answer: Jerry put on a show like no other.

Labor Day this year promises to be bland by comparison, with the 85-year-old Lewis now banished from the annual rite he built from scratch and molded in his image.

As if deflated by the absence of its larger-than-life host, "The 46th Annual MDA Labor Day Telethon" will fill just six hours (Sunday from 6 p.m. to midnight in each of the United States' four time zones), rather than the grueling 21{-hour endurance contest that Lewis used to churn through with his viewers in tow.

On this year's broadcast (which, ironically, will no longer be airing on Labor Day), a quartet of lightweights are standing in for Jerry: Nigel Lythgoe ("So You Think You Can Dance"), Nancy O'Dell ("Entertainment Tonight"), Alison Sweeney ("The Biggest Loser") and Jann Carl (billed as "an Emmy-winning journalist").

Celebrities will include Celine Dion, Jennifer Lopez, Lady Antebellum, Richie Sambora and Jordan Sparks.

It may be entertaining. It may spur contributions. But as a media event, this year's telethon can hardly match the display of wretched excess Jerry Lewis guaranteed, especially in his epic, unbridled prime.

"Jerry is a ferociously contradictory personality, and that's what makes him fascinating to watch," says satirist-actor-writer Harry Shearer, a Jerry-watcher for a half-century. He noted just two of Lewis' clashing identities: "the inner 9-year-old, set loose" and the would-be deep thinker "who fancies himself something of an autodidact."

"It all makes for psychodrama of a high order," Shearer marvels.

Year after year, Lewis bounced between the polarities of smarmy sentimentalism and badgering lunacy as if in a weightless environment. He put his multiple identities on raw display, each constantly jostling for the spotlight.

Hear him on a circa-1970s telethon introducing singer Julius LaRosa with syntax-butchering effusiveness as "the kind of human being that is wonderful to get close to and near, and then you pray that it's contagious" and as "what the literal translation of the word 'professional' means," in possession of "probably the best singing voice I think anyone has ever heard, when you listen to the heart that goes into it."

It was fascinating, ridiculous, cringe-worthy and spellbinding to see how Jerry held court for the parade of entertainers, the checks-bearing civic leaders and corporate sponsors, and the adorable, afflicted kids.

The Jerry Lewis telethon was a reality show decades before the term or genre had been invented. It was video retailing, years before QVC. It was round-the-clock TV companionship long before cable news and the Weather Channel.

For nearly a full day, it was a spectacle of show-biz glitz, heart-tugging emotion and suspense: Would Jerry make it to the end without unraveling? Would the level of pledges do justice to his efforts at soliciting them?

There was a perfect symbiosis of the telethon and Lewis.

He made muscular dystrophy as big a star as he had once been. Meanwhile, aligning himself with the search for its cure gave him the gravitas he had always sought. He branded the disease with himself, and vice versa.

He was not only the host of the telethon and chairman of the Muscular Dystrophy Association (a job he would hold for 60 years), but the central figure in a massive enterprise as the self-styled avenging angel of a dread disease.

The contradictions, though, were legion, breathtaking to behold. Shearer covered the 1976 telethon during its heyday for Film Comment magazine.

"The telethon combines the hysterical mystique of the (Las Vegas) Strip superstar with equally hysterical desperation of the downtown lounge act," he wrote. "It mixes the glib disinterest of a TV star taping a thirty-second public-service spot with the glib agony of a comedian on a crusade."

There was the unresolvable question of Lewis' motives; he has famously refused to say why he poured so much of his life into MDA. How much of what he did was prompted by humanitarian urges? How much is explained by the voracious appetites of an attention hog?

And how to explain the choice of theme songs by Lewis for his righteous cause: the piteousness of "Smile (Though Your Heart Is Aching)," and, of course, the riotously inappropriate "You'll Never Walk Alone" with which Lewis, overcome by emotion, ended each telethon, daring his audience to consider it a cruel joke.

Lewis found a perfect counterbalance for his excesses and vanities in the purity and urgent need of "his" kids. Everything he did he was doing in their service, which, in his mind, absolved him of his carte blanche life-or-death extravagance.

It made him, at last, a success on TV. He was a comedian-singer-writer-actor-director-producer-movie star who, after splitting with his partner Dean Martin in the mid-1950s, had failed to match his other triumphs with any real television inroads. But on the telethon each year, for 21{ hours, he was the unquestioned boss of the Love Network.

It is not as if his TV acceptance was not a mixed blessing, as Shawn Levy observed in his Lewis biography, "King of Comedy."

On the one hand, Lewis was the star of a hit show "for which the nation not only dropped all else on a summer holiday weekend but actually opened its wallets." On the other hand, Lewis could never be certain "that it was to him and not his cause that the American public was responding with its support."

This has long since become moot, all the more so since Aug. 3, when, with no elaboration, MDA announced that Lewis had "completed his run" as national chairman, and that he would not be appearing on the telethon, as promised earlier.

Lewis has provided no insight into the matter. But it is hard to imagine how wronged he must feel after bonding with the telethon for so long. As Levy writes in "King of Comedy," Lewis "had conflated America's charitable instincts with love for himself as a public figure and even as one more lonely child."

The telethon will be on again this Labor Day weekend, in some faint version of what Lewis wrought. But for those who watch, and remember it with Jerry, it is likely to feel like a lonely affair.

Kredit: www.thestar.com.my

Selasa, 30 Ogos 2011