David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. Merv Griffin's 30 seconds of immortality
Merv Griffin may have lived the 30 most lucrative seconds in human history. He was noodling around on his piano when he created what became one of America's best-known tunes: the theme for his game show, “Jeopardy!”
I spoke to Merv Griffin – who died today at age 82 of prostate cancer – some years back, on the occasion of his winning BMI’s President’s Award. Yes, the Emmy-winning TV producer and hotelier also won a songwriting prize.
“It must be the strangest award they've ever given — I'm a guy who wrote a 14-second song and then turned around and did it in another key,” Griffin noted. “I've written the shortest, most recognizable song. There was a list compiling the shortest songs: ‘Happy Birthday to You’ is 17 seconds. ‘Jeopardy’ is 14 seconds. So I rewrote it in another key, then added the ‘bum-bump’ to get it to 30 seconds, which was the amount of time contestants needed to write the question to the Final Jeopardy answer. Now, it's played at sporting events; I've played it with the Boston Pops in a huge arrangement. It's one of the most lucrative themes in history.”
Griffin - who was in the first week of production on a new game show, “Merv Griffin’s Crosswords,” when he died - also wrote the theme for “Wheel of Fortune. “I visualized that wheel going around and around when writing it,” he recalled. “They've performed it a number of ways — 10 years ago, they did it with a big band; that was a great arrangement. Today, it's a kind of nondescript rock & roll arrangement that's more annoying than anything else.”
Griffin, of course, also hosted talk shows (he helped launch the careers of Richard Pryor, Jerry Seinfeld and Lily Tomlin) until it wore him down: “When I went off in 1986, I was down to listening to soap opera stars solve the world's problems, which was driving me nuts,” he joked. Those soap stars irritated him in a way that a cow who crapped on the stage of his late-night talk show did not. “I said, ‘Ohhh, it's my first bad review,’ and went on with the show. You want people to realize that they need to keep watching because anything can happen.”
In Griffin’s 2003 memoir, he offered this suggestion for the legend on his headstone: “Stay Tuned.”