Takin A Walk/Episode Nineteen with American Television Personality Tom Bergeron in Seacoast New Hampshire

Buzz Knight:

I’m Buzz Knight. And today I am so excited to be in Seacoast, New Hampshire. I’m here on this chilly morning to be Takin A Walk with Tom Bergeron. Tom is the best. He’s an American TV personality, game show host, TV host, and comedian known for hosting Hollywood Squares, America’s funniest home videos and Dancing with the Stars. Let’s go take a walk with Tom.

Buzz Knight:

Well, Tom, it is so great to be with you here in New Hampshire, takin a walk. Thank you so much for the time. And the Takin A Walk series is all about finding new friends and reacquainting with people and just having a good old time. So thank you for having me.

Tom Bergeron:

Well, my pleasure.

Tom Bergeron:

And as I said to you when we first made contact, I love the idea of this kind of a podcast, this kind of a casual interview. I think I should mention to those listening, it is really cold on this first day of March in 2022 and we’re walking on a treeline street in New Hampshire. Earlier, it was about nine degrees. I think it’s warmed up to probably a good solid 13 degrees. So, it’s not that I’m second guessing my agreeing to do this, but I hadn’t anticipated mother nature throwing a little speed bump. But see, now that we’re moving, Buzz, I’m warming up already.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah. I pulled into the driveway and I said to Tom, “Whose brilliant idea was this?” But-

Tom Bergeron:

Hey, it’s your podcast.

Buzz Knight:

I know, I take the hit. That’s okay.

Buzz Knight:

So how do you use taking a walk at a particular time if you’re working on a project or something like that? I mean, do you use walking to kind of release you and get into a groove on something?

Tom Bergeron:

Very much so, and it’s sort of part of my fitness regimen too. Out in California, there are so many wonderful hiking trails. And over the past few years, that’s been a regular part of my routine, usually on weekends, on a Saturday, hit some of the trails anywhere from Santa Monica to Santa Barbara.

Buzz Knight:

Wow. Must be some beautiful places.

Tom Bergeron:

Oh, yes. Yes.

Buzz Knight:

You got some favorite spots?

Tom Bergeron:

Yes, there’s one called the Ray Miller Backbone Trail that overlooks the Pacific Ocean in Malibu.

Buzz Knight:

Oh.

Tom Bergeron:

And that is followed by a brunch at Paradise Cove in Malibu and the mango mojitos that I feel are my reward for hiking.

Buzz Knight:

I love that. I could just see it, I could taste it.

Tom Bergeron:

Yeah. Oh, it’s delicious.

Buzz Knight:

Oh, that’s awesome.

Buzz Knight:

Now, I believe transcendental meditation is or has been part of your life. Is that correct?

Tom Bergeron:

Yeah. Oh, yeah, for about 40 years actually. Yeah. It’s a daily part of my life. And it really started because of my temper. I never directed it at anybody else, usually at myself or at the Sheet rock in my apartments when I was single. But I thought that was something I had to get a handle on. And also meditation, it’s like building a mental muscle. So you stay, as best as one can, in the present moment of your life. So you’re not fretting about what you’re going to do later or what you did before and kind of missing what’s happening now. So it served dual purposes for me, it helped me calm down a bit and be better at assessing stress as it presented itself. Not all stress needs to be treated equally. And it also helps keep me present on television anyway, when I do live television, you want to be present. You don’t want to be thinking about something else.

Buzz Knight:

Now, do you still get the butterflies on live television?

Tom Bergeron:

No. It’s interesting, I tell students who are just starting out sometimes, that energy you feel… How you label energy is important. If you say, “Oh my God, I’m a nervous wreck”, or you say, “I’m really excited”, you’re having the same energy, but you’re labeling it positively and negatively. So I’m sure early on… I have a sense memory of the first time I actually was on the radio when I was 17 and my heart was beating like a jackhammer. Years later now whenever I’m on television, I’m excited. I wonder what’s going to happen. And the years I’ve done live TV, I’m like a kid on Christmas morning. I’ll usually meditate ahead of the show. Back when I did the dancing show, I’d meditate between the dress rehearsal and the live show. And my feeling was, I’m ready for anything out there. And I couldn’t wait to see what would happen, even if an occasional dancer fainted, or people rushed the stage, or whatever.

Buzz Knight:

Now take us back to the mean streets of Haverhill and your beginnings that were the radio piece. And ultimately, how it all led to Hollywood?

Tom Bergeron:

I often say that my career only seems logical in hindsight, it has all of the trajectory or logic of a hostage note cut up and pasted from different magazines. But at 17, I always knew I wanted to be either as a broadcaster or performer on stage. And when I was in high school in Haverhill, Massachusetts, I found out that an English teacher was a part-time newsman at the local radio station. So I endeavored to be his best friend, got in news public speaking class. We actually did become really good friends later. He introduced me to the station manager at the local radio station and I got hired part-time with no experience really other than just a lot of energy and desire. And I remember planning to go to Emerson College to get a degree in broadcasting and hopefully get a job in radio. But as a senior in high school, I had a job in radio already. So I didn’t want to leave a job in radio to go to school to hopefully get a job in radio. So I stayed working at the radio station.

Tom Bergeron:

The station manager at one point said, “I didn’t hire you for you to not go to college.” And he took sort of a paternal interest in me, he said, “If you don’t go to college, I’m firing you.” So I ended up going to the local community college and taking theater courses and such and kept the radio job. And ended up working with and starting a mime company, me, one of my theater teachers at Northern Essex and another friend. So a buddy of mine had the best… Because I was doing a morning radio show in Haverhill. And then in the evening I’d be performing with this mime company. So a buddy of mine said, “It’s the weirdest thing because when we hear you, we can’t see you. And when we see you, we can’t hear you.” Isn’t that great?

Buzz Knight:

Yeah. That’s awesome.

Buzz Knight:

Now, did that teach you also improv or…

Tom Bergeron:

Well, yes. Both the radio and the theater did actually. They’re really complimentary in that way, but I’d always loved the silent film comedians, Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, people like that. And so mime was the closest approximation of silent film comedy that I could get to. And interestingly, I cite a teacher I had some years later in south Paris, Maine, Tony Montanaro, who had studied with Marceau, and was probably one of the most influential teachers in my life to the extent that I often say my best broadcasting teacher was a mime because he really taught me how to be present on stage. I keep going back to that term because it’s important to me. But the idea of really being, as Tony would say, on the deck when you’re performing.

Tom Bergeron:

Good morning.

Speaker 3:

Good morning.

Tom Bergeron:

I have a neighbor walking a fine looking dog.

Tom Bergeron:

How are you doing? Hey, buddy.

Buzz Knight:

The walk of the day with the dogs, it’s always something.

Tom Bergeron:

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Tom Bergeron:

Our oldest daughter has a little dog that I refer to as my grand daughter, in California. And I am so smitten with this dog.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah. Sometimes they get a little funky in the cold, but-

Tom Bergeron:

Well, so do I.

Buzz Knight:

Exactly.

Tom Bergeron:

Like this morning, for example.

Buzz Knight:

Exactly.

Buzz Knight:

Now, how did you end up to WMJX, the Greater Media station with our friend Peter Smyth?

Tom Bergeron:

Oh, yeah.

Tom Bergeron:

Well, Peter, whom I owe a great debt to and he never fails to remind me… I was working at WBZ-TV and WBZ Radio. My talk show on television, People Are Talking, got canceled in ’93. BZ Radio went to an all-news format, sort of shifting out from under me. So I ended up going to… I was still doing interviews during a new news hour on television, but I was offered the morning show on Magic on MJX. And I did that. I signed a one year contract. I remember saying to Peter, “There’s some other things kind of in the wind, job possibilities.” He said, “Look, if your ship comes in, I’m not going to get in your way.” Well, about nine months later, I got offered the morning show on this new cable network called FX in New York. And I also got an offer from the late Roger Ailes to join a cable channel called America’s Talking. It was an easy decision to not go with Roger Ailes.

Tom Bergeron:

And I remember Peter saying to me when I told him about the FX gig, “What I told you I’d honor if your ship came in. I didn’t expect a fleet.”

Tom Bergeron:

Now we hear in the background… I don’t know if you pick it up, we got some forestry work going on in the neighborhood.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah. This is the authentic nature of taking a walk.

Tom Bergeron:

Yeah, that’s right.

Tom Bergeron:

I called them ahead of time. I said, “Start sawing some wood.”

Tom Bergeron:

So anyway, so Peter graciously… And I think putting himself at odds with his own bosses a bit… let me out of the contract. And I went to New York, co-hosted this wonderful morning show on FX called Breakfast Time, which is still my favorite experience in television.

Buzz Knight:

Oh wow.

Tom Bergeron:

And so whenever I see Peter, I thank him. And he says, “Yes, you should.”

Buzz Knight:

Yes.

Buzz Knight:

Well, it was sort of unheard of for a station like Magic to have a high personality morning show host.

Tom Bergeron:

I wasn’t high when it wasn’t legal. Oh, I see what you’re saying. Okay. Sorry. You went somewhere else.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah. It was a different tactic. But certainly, I had just come to town and people loved it. People loved the station and they loved what you did. And then you left town.

Tom Bergeron:

Yeah. Well, of course, radio was where I started. So for me, it was almost a natural evolution. And Peter and Don Kelley, who was the program manager, they gave me a lot of rope, I have to say. Don would call me into his office periodically and say, “You got to stop fading the songs halfway through, so you can do bits.” I said, “Well, I think they got the gist of it.”

Buzz Knight:

Oh, I love it.

Buzz Knight:

So, then what, after the FX experience, led you out to California?

Tom Bergeron:

Again, here we go back to the hostage note logic of my career. So I’m doing this morning show on FX and we thought of ourselves as the farm team for Fox. You do well on FX, maybe the Fox Network would like to do a version of the show. That’s what happened. Unfortunately, the executive who greenlit the move, left and went to Paramount, leaving us in the hands of somebody who wasn’t as crazy about our format when we got to the network. That turned into a bit of a nightmare. That was a, be careful what you wish for scenario. But at that time, Good Morning America, Roone Arledge was watching the Fox version and came and offered me a fill-in stint on Good Morning America. Also, on that Fox show, that ill-fated Fox show…. and I have to put ill-fated in quotes because a lot of what happened as a result of it was good. I met Whoopi Goldberg and we hit it off.

Tom Bergeron:

So I end up on Good Morning America doing fill-in with the thought that I would take over for Charles Gibson. That ultimately didn’t play out because the person that replaced Joan Lunden, a woman whose name mercifully escape… Oh, Lisa McRee. She and I had no chemistry at all and so it didn’t pan out that I took over for Charlie. But King World came to me and said, “Hey, we’d like to have you audition for Hollywood Squares in Los Angeles.” And I didn’t want to really move to Los Angeles at the time, but I knew Whoopi was one of the executive producers, was going to be the center square. And I thought, well, they’re flying me out. It’d be great to see her.

Buzz Knight:

That’s awesome.

Tom Bergeron:

So I went out not really expecting anything other than I’d visit some friends and have somebody else pay for my trip. And Whoopi and I picked it up where we had left it off on the Fox show, had a great time in the audition. I was told later that they thought I was the only person who auditioned who wasn’t intimidated by Whoopi. And I thought, how could you be… She’s a sweetheart. How could you be intimidated? But so they offered me the job with the condition that we move out to California and I turned it down. And then the next day they said, “Okay with you, we will fly you out.” And you would shoot that show, five shows in a day. So, I’d fly out on a Friday, shoot 10 shows Saturday, Sunday. Fly back Monday. It was like a lucrative semi-retirement.

Buzz Knight:

Wow.

Buzz Knight:

Were you living in New York or that area?

Tom Bergeron:

Connecticut. Yeah.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah. Wow.

Buzz Knight:

But the grind of those shows in one day, that must have really fried you?

Tom Bergeron:

Well, we shot it… To an extent, but we shot it pretty close to live. So the day would be, I’d show up probably around well after nine. There’d be a sort of a group makeup area with a little breakfast, bagels and things. We’d start shooting at 10. By 1:30, we’d have three shows in the can. Break for lunch, come back and shoot what were the Thursday, Friday shows and be out by 4:30.

Buzz Knight:

Wow.

Tom Bergeron:

So not that terrible. And the lunch was always amazing. Whoopi made sure that all of her guests were well tended to. And so there we were…

Tom Bergeron:

We’re going to get run over by an oil truck now. Alrighty, propane and oil going by…

Tom Bergeron:

But she had it catered by Spago, and there were video games next to where we ate. One of my favorite lunches, it was me and three other people sitting, talking. The three other people were Carol Burnett, Harvey Korman, and Tim Conway.

Buzz Knight:

Wow.

Tom Bergeron:

And I was saying to Harvey, I said… No, to Carol I said, “Now there was Harvey right after you left the show, the Carol Burnett Show. Dick Van Dyke came on for I think it was only half a season. He wasn’t really there that long.” And Carol said, “Well, we’re friends, we did a Broadway show together, but it just didn’t really work.” And Harvey said, “You needed a Jew.”

Buzz Knight:

You must have just fell off the chair.

Tom Bergeron:

Oh my God, absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

Tom Bergeron:

Yeah. Years later, Tim Conway and his granddaughter came to Dancing with the Stars to sit in the audience. And Tim was sitting right at the end of an aisle near where I would go during commercial break to go confer with producers and things. And I thought, oh, I got to see if I can break up Tim Conway, that would be the best. So I’m getting the cue from the stage manager, they were about 20 seconds away from going live now. And I decide to do Tim’s old man walk like that, which is freaking out the stage manager, because I’m not really moving that fast. But Tim broke up. I thought that’s it, that’s all I needed.

Buzz Knight:

That’s it. You could just leave the earth at that point.

Tom Bergeron:

Yeah, that’s right. Exactly.

Buzz Knight:

Oh, that’s beautiful.

Buzz Knight:

Now, do you still get excited when you meet someone who you’ve followed and just admired?

Tom Bergeron:

Oh, yeah.

Buzz Knight:

Anybody recently that you’ve just happened upon that you go, “Oh my God, this is exciting?”

Tom Bergeron:

Well, there are people who became friends over the years. As a result of the Boston talk show, People Are Talking, I met Carl Reiner, the late Carl Reiner, and we became good friends for like 25 years.

Buzz Knight:

Wow.

Tom Bergeron:

And through him, I met Dick Van Dyke, who’s a friend as well. As a matter of fact, during the early months of COVID… Actually, it’s probably by November of year one of the pandemic, I actually went over to visit with Dick and his wife, Arlene, because I had an idea. I said, “Dick, I’ve come up with a song parody to the Mary Poppins song, Let’s Go Fly A Kite. And I’ve rewritten the lyrics, so let’s all wear a mask. Let’s all wear a mask, don’t be a stubborn ass. Let’s all wear a mask and help fight COVID. Strap it behind your ear, cover both here and here. Oh, let’s go wear a mask. And so I pretended to be auditioning for his Acapella group, which he really has the Vantastix. And so he say, Arlene shot it on her iPhone. So I’m singing this song and Dick hears me singing. Then he goes, “Not bad. Leave your resume with the lady”.

Buzz Knight:

Oh, that’s wonderful.

Tom Bergeron:

And I’ll see William Shatner in a couple of nights, he’s coming to the Capitol Theater in Concord to do an event.

Tom Bergeron:

Morning.

Speaker 4:

Morning.

Tom Bergeron:

Yeah, and he’s been a friend for years too.

Tom Bergeron:

And I think I… My wife pointed out, she says, “You tend to gravitate towards people you admired growing up who are in their 80s and 90s.” I said, “Yeah, it gives me hope. It gives me hope, I can be the young hanging out.” Like Bill is 90 years old right now and he just went up in Jeff Bezos’ rocket ship recently.

Buzz Knight:

Right.

Tom Bergeron:

It’s hard not to be inspired by genetic anomalies like that.

Buzz Knight:

Oh, yeah.

Buzz Knight:

When did you discover that you were funny? I mean, how old were you?

Tom Bergeron:

Yeah, that’s a really good… I don’t know. I don’t know. The way my brain works, to the extent that it does, I’ve always had a sort of a tendency to word play and define twists and things or… Yeah, but I can’t tell you when I really discovered it. And some would argue that I’m not, but-

Buzz Knight:

Your wife probably.

Tom Bergeron:

Yeah, yeah. Well, she’s a hard one to make laugh. If I can make Lois laugh, I know it was a good ad lib. Yeah.

Buzz Knight:

Here comes the oil truck again.

Tom Bergeron:

There we go. Another happy delivery. In that house there is warrants. Not out here, but in that house.

Tom Bergeron:

There you go.

Buzz Knight:

So you had this period in time where you hosted literally two of the most popular shows in America during that period.

Tom Bergeron:

Yeah. For about, God, a decade and a half. I was host of the America’s Funniest Video show for 15 years, and Dancing with the Stars for 14 years. And while I contended AFE, America’s Funniest Videos will survive the apocalypse, it and cockroaches will be the only things left on the planet. The dancing show was a… The success of that particularly in the early years was a surprise to all of us I think. I think we all thought it might be a fun summer show, but none of us really thought that it was going to become the… For those first five to seven years especially, show watched by 25 million people every week.

Buzz Knight:

And you knew when the end was there. I mean, you it’s chronicled, you did the interview with Bob Saget and so you pretty much knew this was winding down.

Tom Bergeron:

Yes. Yeah. Well, there were personnel changes. They brought in a different producer on the show. There were some network people who had come on board and it was becoming increasingly clear that we had different ideas about how the show could be best produced. And I just felt, particularly back in 2019, when we were, in the fall, on the cusp of an election year, that the show should be a respite from the divisiveness and the political angst that was so prevalent, and still is sadly. And they just felt they wanted to go in a different direction as we say in the business. And yeah, it was pretty clear that… And it wasn’t the show that I loved in those early years. From 2018, when that new show runner came on board, I could tell the end was near. But it was a great run and continues to be one of the great gifts of my career.

Buzz Knight:

So now you’ve got some cool stuff brewing, let’s talk about that, Tic-Tac-Dough.

Tom Bergeron:

Well, yes. We shot a pilot for a reboot of an old game show, which amused me no end because I have a lot of tic-tac-toe experience with Hollywood Squares. So I guess I was a logical guy to come to, right? Peter Marshall’s retired and John Davidson has his Club Sandwich in Sandwich, New Hampshire. Let’s get Bergeron. So, Harvey Friedman, who was the executive producer of both Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, is producing this along with me and Steve Mosko from Village Roadshow. So we did the pilot back in June. We are still waiting for NBC to give us the official green light. I told Harry, I said, “If our pilot was a fetus, it’s in its third trimester. They better have a birth announcement soon or I’m moving on.” So there’s that possibility.

Tom Bergeron:

Also, with William Shatner, we’ve got a deal pending with Village Roadshow for a movie script based on a real life occurrence of my sister and I buying back our family home. And so we’re looking to make a version of that story into a holiday movie. And yeah, so it’s just I’m enjoying the ability now to kind of pick and choose things that amuse me and engage me in ways that I might not have been able to do earlier.

Buzz Knight:

Well, I’m so grateful that you indulged me with this walk. This-

Tom Bergeron:

Oh, this was fun. I thought this was going to be a lot more painful, Buzz. I really have to be honest, when I texted you earlier this morning when it was nine degrees, I thought, “What the hell have you agreed to do?” But it’s been easy peasy.

Buzz Knight:

This has been great. I really appreciate you taking a walk with me, Tom Bergeron.

Tom Bergeron:

On my pleasure Buzz, a pleasure.

Speaker 5:

Takin A Walk with Buzz Knight is available on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Tom Bergeron:

How good was that? That was really easy.

Buzz Knight:

That was so much fun. Oh, that was great.

Buzz Knight is an established media executive with a long history of content creation and multi-platform distribution.

After a successful career as a Radio Executive, he formed Buzz Knight Media which focuses on strategic guidance and the development of new original content.