duncan228
09-02-2007, 11:15 AM
Anyone watch this?
I think he's great. And funny. The show keeps my whole family watching, even my mom watches. To entertain across a wide age range impresses me.
This was in my local paper this morning, it's a NY Times article.
I liked learning his backround, he's done some fun stuff. I never heard of him before Dirty Jobs.
http://www.ocregister.com/entertainment/rowe-jobs-job-1836137-dirty-think
Hey, somebody's got to do those 'Dirty Jobs'
Mike Rowe strikes one for the common man whose common jobs take some getting used to.
By JESSE McKINLEY
New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO – It's a crystal clear afternoon here, and for once – just once – Mike Rowe is clean.
Rowe is sitting at a lunch table in a somewhat unlikely location: a recycling center on the city's rugged southeastern fringe, not your average place for a picnic but nicer than most of the holes that he is usually found in.
The problem is Rowe's occupation. Or occupations, as the case may be. For the past three years he has been the host of "Dirty Jobs," the gross-out cable hit on the Discovery Channel, a gig that has exposed him to untold tons of sludge, sewage, mud, manure, detritus, excreta, road kill and plain old nastiness.
Worse yet, he seems to enjoy it.
"TV does a bad job of portraying common people," he said as recycling workers drove by with forklifts hauling giant bricks of crushed cans. "By and large, they are either turned into heroes, with a lot of dramatic cello music behind everyday activities, or they are reduced to these punch lines.
"My idea was if I really tried to do the work – really, really tried – and not be afraid to fail or look bad next to the person who's actually made a career of this, then in the end when the dust settles we'll have this situation where the viewer can determine how difficult the job is on their own and determine how gifted the actual worker is."
Eddie Barbini, an executive producer of the show, said Rowe's appeal was his ability to be, well, normal.
"There are no spokespersons for the working man out there," Barbini said. "But Mike is that guy."
Among the workers Rowe has toiled beside are a skull cleaner (think elk), shark tagger (think "Jaws") and something called a worm-poop rancher (I don't know what to think).
All told, Rowe has tried more than 100 dirty jobs – usually three per episode – with his 150th, as a yak farmer, due on an October show. Many can be seen on Labor Day, as part of a 15-hour marathon on Discovery.
Along the way, Rowe says, he has broken two toes, one finger, two ribs and slipped a disk. Now 45, he has had injections for most every water-borne disease around and a couple of extra shots as well. Which ones? he is asked.
"Rye, whiskey and Scotch is always good," he said.
Some of the typical occupational hazards he faces were in evidence on an episode in which he descended into the pungent underbelly of San Francisco with a sewer inspector. Once there, he squatted ankle deep in waste water, was doused with an unidentified liquid and watched as cockroaches – so many cockroaches – scrambled along the walls and in one case, into his jumpsuit. There also were rats.
"Normally, this is the part where I'd look into the camera and say something pithy and somewhat amusing, and memorable," Rowe said, upon emerging from the underworld, looking winded and genuinely relieved. "I got nothing."
A large part of the popularity of "Dirty Jobs" comes from Rowe's ability to crack wise on cue, a talent he says he learned while toiling in another type of diamond mine: the QVC shopping network, where he worked for three years in the mid-1990s, cutting his teeth as a late-night jewelry pitchman.
That professional detour came after a stint as an opera singer in Baltimore (his hometown) and before one as a globetrotting in-flight video host for American Airlines. There were other jobs too: Tylenol pitchman, voice-over artist and an early endeavor as "a very arrogant, long-haired, bearded thespian who had very specific ideas what the craft should be."
Playing other roles, however, never really worked for Rowe. Playing himself, however, has proved quite lucrative. He is currently a Ford spokesman and narrates "Deadliest Catch," another Discovery Channel series in the lousy-job, noble-man genre, this time devoted to Alaskan crab fishermen. He is also increasingly in demand on the lecture circuit, where he is known to expound – seriously, he says – on the "changing face of the proletariat vis-à-vis the modern-day work ethic and the digital divide."
"We discuss a lot of high-minded concepts," he said of his corporate keynote work. "I tell them, 'If you're going to look at blue collar here and white collar there, you're going to encourage this kind of class warfare when they're actually two sides of the same coin.' "
Of course he also talks about what it is like to be attacked by animals, his occasional co-stars.
"They ask, 'Does it hurt when an ostrich kicks you?' " he said. "'Was it scarier than the shark?' 'What about the monkey?' 'That looked painful.' 'How about that lemur?' "
Rowe is fascinated by the common man and, like most performers, has a psychological explanation – involving his family, naturally – for his obsession. As the oldest of three brothers growing up in semirural Baltimore County, Md., Rowe said he regularly watched in awe as his father and grandfather did manual labor together.
"My grandfather had a stroke in his early 60s, and my father became his hands," Rowe said. His mother clued him in, he said. "'Michael, what you're doing is reliving the earliest memories you have, which is seeing your father and your grandfather descend into some pit, clean, to solve a problem, and emerge dirty, problem fixed.' "
Rowe concluded, "I've always equated dirt with a solution."
The show came out of yet another job Rowe briefly held, as a host of a Bay Area television program called "Evening Magazine." He shot a segment about a cow inseminator, plunging headfirst into a topic that most talking heads would have shied away from. The segment, called "Somebody's Got to Do It," was "breathtakingly inappropriate," Rowe said. "We put it on the air immediately."
The segment eventually led Rowe to pitch the idea for "Dirty Jobs" to the Discovery Channel, which first broadcast it in 2005. It struck a chord with those with a taste for the disgusting. But Barbini, the producer, rejects the notion that people are just watching to see Rowe bathed in vomit and feces, among so many other things.
"I don't think it's sensational at all," said Barbini, who worked as a garbage collector and roofer before finding his way into television. "In fact I think it's completely the opposite. The idea is that we're highlighting people, the guys that are doing the jobs, the men and women doing the jobs out there. We're keeping it honest."
Rowe concurred and said the life of the itinerant job-attempter suited him. He has always had a wee problem with commitment: He is single, though he lives with his longtime girlfriend in San Francisco. And nothing suits him better, he said, than trying a job and then walking away.
"My promise is we'll get dirty, we'll have a few laughs, and maybe well learn something," he said. "And then, most importantly, I'm leaving."
I think he's great. And funny. The show keeps my whole family watching, even my mom watches. To entertain across a wide age range impresses me.
This was in my local paper this morning, it's a NY Times article.
I liked learning his backround, he's done some fun stuff. I never heard of him before Dirty Jobs.
http://www.ocregister.com/entertainment/rowe-jobs-job-1836137-dirty-think
Hey, somebody's got to do those 'Dirty Jobs'
Mike Rowe strikes one for the common man whose common jobs take some getting used to.
By JESSE McKINLEY
New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO – It's a crystal clear afternoon here, and for once – just once – Mike Rowe is clean.
Rowe is sitting at a lunch table in a somewhat unlikely location: a recycling center on the city's rugged southeastern fringe, not your average place for a picnic but nicer than most of the holes that he is usually found in.
The problem is Rowe's occupation. Or occupations, as the case may be. For the past three years he has been the host of "Dirty Jobs," the gross-out cable hit on the Discovery Channel, a gig that has exposed him to untold tons of sludge, sewage, mud, manure, detritus, excreta, road kill and plain old nastiness.
Worse yet, he seems to enjoy it.
"TV does a bad job of portraying common people," he said as recycling workers drove by with forklifts hauling giant bricks of crushed cans. "By and large, they are either turned into heroes, with a lot of dramatic cello music behind everyday activities, or they are reduced to these punch lines.
"My idea was if I really tried to do the work – really, really tried – and not be afraid to fail or look bad next to the person who's actually made a career of this, then in the end when the dust settles we'll have this situation where the viewer can determine how difficult the job is on their own and determine how gifted the actual worker is."
Eddie Barbini, an executive producer of the show, said Rowe's appeal was his ability to be, well, normal.
"There are no spokespersons for the working man out there," Barbini said. "But Mike is that guy."
Among the workers Rowe has toiled beside are a skull cleaner (think elk), shark tagger (think "Jaws") and something called a worm-poop rancher (I don't know what to think).
All told, Rowe has tried more than 100 dirty jobs – usually three per episode – with his 150th, as a yak farmer, due on an October show. Many can be seen on Labor Day, as part of a 15-hour marathon on Discovery.
Along the way, Rowe says, he has broken two toes, one finger, two ribs and slipped a disk. Now 45, he has had injections for most every water-borne disease around and a couple of extra shots as well. Which ones? he is asked.
"Rye, whiskey and Scotch is always good," he said.
Some of the typical occupational hazards he faces were in evidence on an episode in which he descended into the pungent underbelly of San Francisco with a sewer inspector. Once there, he squatted ankle deep in waste water, was doused with an unidentified liquid and watched as cockroaches – so many cockroaches – scrambled along the walls and in one case, into his jumpsuit. There also were rats.
"Normally, this is the part where I'd look into the camera and say something pithy and somewhat amusing, and memorable," Rowe said, upon emerging from the underworld, looking winded and genuinely relieved. "I got nothing."
A large part of the popularity of "Dirty Jobs" comes from Rowe's ability to crack wise on cue, a talent he says he learned while toiling in another type of diamond mine: the QVC shopping network, where he worked for three years in the mid-1990s, cutting his teeth as a late-night jewelry pitchman.
That professional detour came after a stint as an opera singer in Baltimore (his hometown) and before one as a globetrotting in-flight video host for American Airlines. There were other jobs too: Tylenol pitchman, voice-over artist and an early endeavor as "a very arrogant, long-haired, bearded thespian who had very specific ideas what the craft should be."
Playing other roles, however, never really worked for Rowe. Playing himself, however, has proved quite lucrative. He is currently a Ford spokesman and narrates "Deadliest Catch," another Discovery Channel series in the lousy-job, noble-man genre, this time devoted to Alaskan crab fishermen. He is also increasingly in demand on the lecture circuit, where he is known to expound – seriously, he says – on the "changing face of the proletariat vis-à-vis the modern-day work ethic and the digital divide."
"We discuss a lot of high-minded concepts," he said of his corporate keynote work. "I tell them, 'If you're going to look at blue collar here and white collar there, you're going to encourage this kind of class warfare when they're actually two sides of the same coin.' "
Of course he also talks about what it is like to be attacked by animals, his occasional co-stars.
"They ask, 'Does it hurt when an ostrich kicks you?' " he said. "'Was it scarier than the shark?' 'What about the monkey?' 'That looked painful.' 'How about that lemur?' "
Rowe is fascinated by the common man and, like most performers, has a psychological explanation – involving his family, naturally – for his obsession. As the oldest of three brothers growing up in semirural Baltimore County, Md., Rowe said he regularly watched in awe as his father and grandfather did manual labor together.
"My grandfather had a stroke in his early 60s, and my father became his hands," Rowe said. His mother clued him in, he said. "'Michael, what you're doing is reliving the earliest memories you have, which is seeing your father and your grandfather descend into some pit, clean, to solve a problem, and emerge dirty, problem fixed.' "
Rowe concluded, "I've always equated dirt with a solution."
The show came out of yet another job Rowe briefly held, as a host of a Bay Area television program called "Evening Magazine." He shot a segment about a cow inseminator, plunging headfirst into a topic that most talking heads would have shied away from. The segment, called "Somebody's Got to Do It," was "breathtakingly inappropriate," Rowe said. "We put it on the air immediately."
The segment eventually led Rowe to pitch the idea for "Dirty Jobs" to the Discovery Channel, which first broadcast it in 2005. It struck a chord with those with a taste for the disgusting. But Barbini, the producer, rejects the notion that people are just watching to see Rowe bathed in vomit and feces, among so many other things.
"I don't think it's sensational at all," said Barbini, who worked as a garbage collector and roofer before finding his way into television. "In fact I think it's completely the opposite. The idea is that we're highlighting people, the guys that are doing the jobs, the men and women doing the jobs out there. We're keeping it honest."
Rowe concurred and said the life of the itinerant job-attempter suited him. He has always had a wee problem with commitment: He is single, though he lives with his longtime girlfriend in San Francisco. And nothing suits him better, he said, than trying a job and then walking away.
"My promise is we'll get dirty, we'll have a few laughs, and maybe well learn something," he said. "And then, most importantly, I'm leaving."