"About a yard and a half."
"Then don't worry. Blinky'll talk Sachs out of it. Still, I have to hand it to him. It's a nice idea."
Avery Borden of Borden, Olson and Mardine (nicknamed Borden's Oleomargarine by the business) arrived with disastrous news. The client had decided to go institutional for the New Year's day broadcast and eliminate the product commercials. Mode Shoes would content itself with wishing a Happy New Year to the American Way of Life in a single middle break, which now threw the entire show out of kilter. It added an extra three minutes to entertainment time, necessitating the insertion of a new number, and worse, it threw out the first and last commercials. Shows are carefully framed around the commercials in terms of tempo and climax, and the break is as essential as punctuation in a sentence.
It was for emergencies of this sort that the weekly show conference was held on Thursdays. The staff was able to cope with immediate problems as well as post-mortem the previous week's show and plan the one coming up in four weeks' time. They all met in the brain room of Grabinett's office. Presiding was Raeburn Sachs, taking notes was Mrs. Sachs. Present were: The Star, his agent, the producer, his budget, the writer, his partner, the dance director and the music director.
They post-mortemed the Christmas show. The client, Grabinett reported, was pleased but with two reservations. First: When Oliver Stacy handed each contestant his or her lovely pair of Mode Shoes as a gift for appearing on the show, it was requested that he use a French accent in naming the shoe style. The client felt that Stacy's accent was not sufficiently Parisian.
Second, Grabinett continued, the matter of prizes. The difficulty over the Grand Prize on the Christmas show made the client wonder if the questions weren't too difficult.
"Too difficult!" Lennox protested. "For God's sake! We're setting those questions at the kindergarten level now. How dumb do you have to be to win a prize?"
"It's not as if we're giving away big prizes," Grabinett blinked apologetically. "Aeroplanes and trips to Europe and islands in Canada. For big prizes you got the right to ask tough questions."
"How small is five hundred dollars?" Lennox demanded. "That's what our prizes average. And it's a lot of money. We don't have to give it by forced feeding, do we?"
"A man in public is fifty percent dumber than the same man in private," Ned Bacon drawled cynically. "We did a story about that on 'The People Against—'. We—"