In talk radio, a producer does a wide variety of tasks in facilitating a show, including booking the guests, screening the listener phone calls, occasionally engineering the program, and most important, holding the hands, supporting, consoling, encouraging, and simply trying to get along with some of the most egotistical, egocentric, neurotic, insecure, demanding, opinionated, sometimes horrible, but oftentimes wonderful and always remarkably talented human beings to talk across the face of the earth.
They include some of the biggest in the business: Larry King, Sally Jessy Raphael, Gil Gross, Tom Snyder, Lou Dobbs, Charles Osgood, and more.
Bernadette also collected a number of insightful anecdotes interacting with hundreds of high-profile guests during those caffeine-charged years, from media, show business, and politics—many as quirky, ego-driven, and neurotic as her talk show host bosses.
ABOUT BERNADETTE:
Bernadette Duncan Harrison is a 30-plus year veteran producer of talk shows, having worked with such stars as Larry King, Lou Dobbs, Sally Jessy Raphael, Tom Snyder, Charles Osgood, Gil Gross and many more. Her articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News, Cosmopolitan and Seventeen among other publications. Duncan’s new book, Yappy Days: Behind the Scenes with Newsers, Schmoozers, Boozers and Losers (Talkers Books, 2015), focuses on her fascinating encounters with hosts, celebrities, politicos, and over-the-top characters while she was a producer at ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and other media outlets. It provides the reader with intriguing insights into the personalities and egos of these high-profile figures and a behind-the-scenes look at how talk shows are produced. She currently lives in Massachusetts and Florida with her husband Michael Harrison, publisher and founder of Talkers magazine.