Tuesday, 8/16

I've been doing them for eight and a half years, and have yet to see one of the 450+ I've done. And if I don't watch it this week, I never will.

Back in 2014, even before I started hosting “High School Bowl”, I started doing a weekly segment for the Thursday night Fox UP news called “On The Town”. It was just me spending 90 seconds talking about stuff going in the UP the upcoming weekend. For eight and a half years I've been churning them out, including weekly during the early days of Covid when absolutely nothing was going on.

Today, I shoot the final one of them, at least for me.

I'm voluntarily giving them up. The new TV gig I can't yet tell you about precludes my doing them any more. And so after almost 500 of them, as well as outlasting 13 different anchors and reporters who've been shooting them, it's now, like all good things, coming to an end.

And when I say I haven't watched a single one of them, I'm not kidding. For whatever reason I don't watch a lot of local news on TV, and for whatever reason I've had no interest all in checking one of the segments out. After eight and a half years I have no idea what they look like or how dorky I appear in them. I've just never had the inclination to check one of them out.

Yes, I'm strange. What's your point?

8-)

However, I do know that other people have watched them. As with (seemingly) everything else I do in my life I've had people come up to me on the street and say how much they enjoy them, or how they watch them every week. And that's cool. I've been doing the segments for almost a decade to make sure people know what's going on in this great peninsula, and it sounds like I've been able to do that, as least to a point.

So, mission accomplished. And thanks, as always, to everyone for the kind words.

When I finish shooting the last one this afternoon I will entering a very strange place for me. For the next six weeks I will not be appearing on TV at all. Since I started doing “On The Town” I've been on TV at least once a week for almost a decade, but after this afternoon? The UP will have to wait until early October until I'm back.

I hope that span will allow them to recover from whatever trauma I've brought upon them the last eight and a half (non-stop) years.

I do need to thank Steve Asplund and the late Bill Blohm, who convinced me to do it, as well as Andrew Lacombe, who understands why I won't be doing it any more. I also have to thank the 13 different reporters and anchors I previously mentioned, everyone from Rachel (who shot the first one) to Ben, who'll be shooting the last one. It's been fun.

And with that, I'm TV free until a four day span at the start of October, with the return of “High School Bowl” and the debut of...

Something completely different than anything I've done on TV before.

(jim@wmqt.com)