St. Remedius Medical College: "And Now A Word From Our Sponsor"
A Variety Hour TV Special To Beat All Others
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
The history of television through the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries is full of stories of projects so stunning in their hubris, tastelessness, or sheer delusion that the only appropriate response is “Drop the coke spoon and keep your hands over your head.” The sole broadcast of The Star Wars Holiday Special on CBS in 1978 is an oft-referenced example, as is the sole episode of Heil Honey, I’m Home on the BBC. Other projects just invoke a shake of the head and muttering under the breath. Only one, though, involved a thorough investigation by the world’s public and private exonormal research organizations, as much for the content as for the circumstances of its broadcast. This, of course, refers to the sole broadcast of the Andy Kaufman Writhes In Hell Variety Hour.
August 6, 1997 was otherwise an inauspicious day for television viewers in Dallas, Texas. Standard network broadcasting had settled into the usual diet of reruns of fall series, occasional pilots for rejected series repackaged as “made for TV movies,” and various specials released in summer as cheap filler rather than risk losing Neilsen ratings points by releasing them when viewers were actually home. Original cable programming was sporadic, most video watching was still via VHS tapes, and streaming services only existed in science fiction magazines. That night, the big draw was an event involving two noted local actors: the reunion of the cast and crew of the late 1970s CBS sitcom WGON In Philadelphia, including interviews with stalwart character actor Gordon McCanless, known for years locally for hosting a morning children’s show before landing a starring role on WGON, and his recreating his famous catchphrase “We’re staying on the air!” At the commercial break, instead of an ad for the upcoming 1998 Chrysler Thunderroad SUV, all that appeared was a station ID card reading “KDFU Channel 20: Now Showing!” This card also appeared during commercial breaks on every other station in the Dallas area and interrupted a PBS repeat of Nova on space junk. This was disturbing enough, but the Captain Midnight and Max Headroom signal hacks of 1986 and 1987 were a precedent. Those who changed the station to Channel 20, though, encountered a program with no precedent whatsoever.
Those who tuned in were greeted with a scene of a huge lake of molten sulfur, fumes and smoke obscuring the far side, with a lone figure in the center, submerged to its waist and thrashing in obvious torment. A closeup established someone looking much like the actor and comedian Andy Kaufman, who died in 1984, before the titles “THE ANDY KAUFMAN WRITHES IN HELL VARIETY HOUR!” appeared over the picture, then cutting to a list of guest stars to appear later. The image returned to Kaufman, with the voiceover “…and now our host, ANDY KAUFMAN!”, with a closeup of Kaufman screaming before being pulled under the molten sulfur.
Although the show was entitled “Variety Hour,” viewers received a solid two hours, without commercials, of one of the most disturbing presentations ever to be projected by a cathode tube. The show started with a closeup of a post drill revving in a mound of hamburger, followed by a duet of a seeming 70-year-old Sid Vicious and a seemingly 26-year-old Liberace singing “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor On the Bedpost Overnight?” Next, astronomer Carl Sagan and paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, in a set copied from the Gene Siskel/Roger Ebert movie review series Sneak Previews, presented a savage and thorough debunking of the Michael Behe book Darwin’s Black Box, finishing with their final comment of “Hated it!” Beat author William S. Burroughs then teamed with Chicago columnist Mike Royko to demonstrate how to perform a spark plug and alternator change on a 1976 Ford Pinto before releasing the parking brake and crashing it into the side of a Budweiser truck. Charles Lindberg, Roy Chapman Andrews, Ambrose Bierce, and Al Capone, all identified by their names on the fronts of black Speedos, knee-deep in whipped cream and beating each other with pool noodles. Jayne Mansfield and Clara Peller leading the audience through a robust discussion of string theory. Howard Phillips Lovecraft repeatedly hit in the face with a Frito pie. Halfway through, Kaufman emerged from the lake of sulfur dressed as Elvis Presley, only for extras dressed as Burger Chef and Jeff kicking him in the crotch and throwing him back into the lake. Each was separated by about 30 seconds of a closeup of a cat cleaning itself and slurping while doing so, with captions reading “ANSWERS TO FOLLOW” and “LOVE FOR SALE; EVERYTHING MUT GO!” Less than a decade before the debut of YouTube, the general public had never seen such a cavalcade of horror, and it kept going for another 55 minutes before the camera returned to Kaufman in the center of his lake, his singing David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” before screaming one last time and diving below the sulfur before the camera faded out. After that, nothing but the snow of an empty channel.
Those who sat through the nightmare were mostly too shocked to do more than twitch slightly, and those who started video recording as it started discovered that their tapes were useless. A massive recursive pulse followed the broadcast, frying cheaper VCRs and wiping the tapes on more expensive ones, with the tapes that survived showing no sign of any recording whatsoever. A Federal Communications Commission investigation found no trace of the transmission or how it could have been sent via Channel 20, a channel that had not once been used for TV broadcasts in the Dallas area. Obviously, presumably, Andy Kaufman was dead, as were every other member of the cast as shown, and a subsequent FBI investigation discovered no hints as to the shooting location, the equipment used for recording, or of any of the bodies of the deceased being disinterred or even disturbed. As the Twenty-First Century dawned a little over two years later, the mystery increased slightly when WDFU came on air again for five minutes in the fall of 2001, solely to show a single station ID card reading “Andy Returns in 2003!”, with audio of Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon laughing “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
Contrary to reports, Andy Kaufman is still dead. Not pining for the fjords, but passed on.
And the St. Remedius angle? St. Remedius, along with most of the other exonormal investigation institutions on the planet, conducted extensive research into the broadcast before finally stopping in 2004. Despite extensive rebuttals and denials from St. Remedius videographer Edgar Harris, a contingent of video archivists and festival operators remain convinced that a copy of the broadcast survived the recursive pulse, and is currently in the extensive St. Remedius audiovisual archives. This conviction led to lawsuits, attempted break-ins, and even a famed live-feed attempt at hacking into the electronic archives. If the video exists, it is in spite of no trace within the surviving St. Remedius archives after its disappearance, in none of the personal papers and effects of any extant or previous St. Remedius staff, and in no related collection at the Library of Congress, the Vatican, or the Smithsonian Institution, Mere rumor of finding the video, though, has led to such stunts as smashing the concrete in front of famed Dallas club Bar of Soap in search of a buried lockbox, swiping records from the Dallas SPCA animal shelter in attempts to ID the cat in the video, and a seance around the gravesite of Lee Harvey Oswald. All such attempts have proven futile…for now.
Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.