James Marsters

Ramble about "The Sharon Osbourne Show" taping Disclaimers: I don’t own anything or anyone mentioned below. The purpose of this is just to let people know what the taping was like. I did not have any audio/visual recording equipment, so I’m not vouching for my accuracy, but I did my best. Since I have not yet learned the art of trimming my words, I’m unnecessarily verbose. Sorry for using so many words to express so few ideas.

SPOILER WARNING! There are some spoilers for an episode of "Angel". I’m not sure which one it is, because it was referred to as the next episode and I’m not positive when this show will air. All remotely spoilery material is in white text, so you’ll have to highlight it to view.

The Wait (Outside)

I’ve been writing so many of these, I’m sort of surprised people are still reading them. The taping was fun!

There were lots of people out front waiting when I got there. One of the fans had been there since 8 in the morning to make sure she got in! I saw lots and lots of familiar faces from the rallies, the convention, and the Ghost of the Robot concert Saturday. And every time I come to one of these things, I’m blown away by just how cool everyone is. I’ve said it before, but this group of fans is one of the nicest groups of people I know. As expected, there were at least 8 women for each man that was in line.

I was very happy to see a bunch of people wearing their savingangel t-shirts! A number of people also commented on what a great job savingangel is doing and/or mentioned that they wouldn’t have known about this opportunity if they hadn’t heard about it through savingangel.org. I passed out about 60 postcards for people to fill out while they waited. The prelabeled targets were Target (the store, pun unintentional) and Mr. Levin of the WB. I got the impression that many people had a lot to say to him.

The people in line weren’t all "Angel" fans, of course. Some were fans of the band, or of Mr. Marsters personally, or of Sharon Osbourne. One girl looked at me and asked me about the show, because she felt so lost in the crowd of fans.

They finally started letting us in around five-thirty or so. They took us in in small groups and we did the usual security hokey-pokey: ID check, purse inspection (for cameras and cellphone cameras, mostly), and metal detector. Then they took us into a shaded area with benches for us to sit on while we waited. Which was a very good thing, because the temperature’s been up in the 90s lately. We waited there for a while and hung out until six or so, then they moved us to just outside the studio. When we got there, I realized how many people they must have had to turn away. There were more than a hundred (I suck at estimating numbers of people) but there’d been a lot more than that at the gate.

We got the usual talk about how to behave at a taping, the reminder that we should turn off cellphones, and a security warning. We were also told that recording the show would be a felony and that we would be arrested if we tried it, yadda-yadda. I’ve been to a LOT of TV tapings, but it’s the first time I was told that recording was a felony.

The Wait (Inside)

After a while, they finally let us in. They seated us from the center, filling out. So the very first people in line were at the very end on the right. The rows filled up from the bottom to the top. We’d been told that the seats at the top were best, because the cameras didn’t get in the way.

The audience seating is set up so that the first row is a line of couches on the floor with the rest of the set. Then there are rows of folding chairs on risers behind them. The top row is maybe 15-20 feet higher than the people on the floor. There are little speakers mounted on the row in front of you when you sit down so that you can hear what people are saying (they speak in a normal tone of voice and wouldn’t be very audible without the output from the mikes). The "living room" part of the set was directly in front of us. There was a "kitchen" area off to the audience’s right, and another room with a fake balcony-looking thing behind the "living room." On the left was a fake fireplace, which was where the band’s equipment was set up. I ended up sitting in the third row in a perfect position to watch the band.

The warm-up guy was really not very good. The warm-up guy’s job is to hype up the audience and get them excited (usually about guests that they don’t know about or don’t care about). His jokes were pretty vulgar and not that funny, and anyway, I think it would have been hard to get most of us any more excited than we already were. Anyway, along with all the bad jokes, he mentioned that the show had been cancelled, and that while episodes would run until September, they’d only be taping until May 11. And suddenly I realized why Mrs. Osbourne has been so sympathetic to "Angel" fans.

They’d already taped the first "segment" of the show, so the first bit we were there for was the James Marsters part. One more note: the day that this show airs is apparently Baskin-Robbins’s free ice cream scoop day, and B-R had donated a bunch of ice cream cakes with the faces of all the guests on them. There was a LOT of cake on this show.

Mrs. Osbourne came out with her dog. I don’t know its name, but it’s a cute little Pomeranian. While they were setting up, James Marsters suddenly emerged from the back someplace. There was the usual screaming response, of course. He came back out again once and waved to the audience.

Interview with James Marsters

So, here we go. Mrs. Osbourne sat on the couch with her little dog, and announced that the next guest "sucked." Sucked because he was a vampire, of course. She introduced James Marsters, and he walked in, looking gorgeous as usual. He was wearing a black t-shirt and blue jeans. He still had his bleached hair.

Mr. Marsters sat down on the couch with Mrs. Osbourne and looked at the coffee table. It had a fair selection of "Spike" paraphernalia on it - photos, a book with Spike and Dru on the cover, little action figures, etc. She said, "You have all this stuff at home, don’t you?"

He replied that he pretended that all of that stuff didn’t exist. He saw one picture and commented, "Oh, there’s me kissing Sarah" or something and turned it over. When she asked why, he answered that he thought that sort of thing would make you lose your center and turn you into a jerk. He said that he’d gone on the internet to look at the stuff out there and that it had given him a pretty high opinion of himself.

He started speaking in a British accent. The words that he was speaking as he was doing it were something to the effect of not liking speaking in accents because if it was scripted and you messed up, you could do it again, but you can’t do that in real life. I have no real idea whether his fake accent was good or not (I don’t have a particularly good ear for that) but Mrs. Osbourne seemed to think it was pretty cool.

She asked him if he’d thought the role of Spike would last so long. He answered that he’d had no idea. He’d been in theater and got his artistic rocks off (his words, not mine) and had come to LA to make money. He said he’d come willing to do anything, even be Alf’s sidekick, because he needed cash. Then he said that his — agent? manager? someone — had told him about a role on a show called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", which he hadn’t been too excited about. He said he’d be willing to be Alf’s sidekick, but that he still had some dignity.

His manager or whoever had told him to just watch the show. As soon as it was over, Mr. Marsters had been on the phone gushing about how good the show was and begging to get a part on it (this is really cute, you’ve got to watch!). He said that he’d auditioned with one scene and thought it was the only scene the character had, so the lasting 7 years thing was definitely not something he’d expected.

Mrs. Osbourne asked if he would miss the hair. He said not at all. He said that maybe in four years, when his love life was (he zoomed his hand to the ground with a falling bomb/explosion sound) he would, but not now. He said he missed looking in the mirror and seeing himself. He said that she (and the rest of the world) was used to seeing that person, but that he was not. "I miss him."

They discussed his shaving his head (they did not mention "On Air with Ryan Seacrest" by name) on TV for charity tomorrow night. (He said the words "tomorrow night", but "Sharon Osbourne" will air after "Ryan Seacrest" does, so don’t be confused if you see him suddenly with hair again the day after he shaves his head, talking about shaving it.)

They did a little computer overlay where they took a picture of his head and superimposed different hairstyles and a completely bald head. He protested that that was not his head and that his real head looked better than that. He said he’d shaved his head for a play about six years ago and that he’d thought it had looked good then. He explained that he was shaving his head to benefit the Elizabeth Glazer Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

Mr. Marsters complained that he had "Tom Hanks hair" - the curly kind that goes everywhere. He said that younger people could pull it off, but that he couldn’t. He said that we might have noticed, but that at some point in their lives men are expected to have straight hair. He used George Clooney as an example, and said that he was using all sorts of things to control his hair now.

Mrs. Osbourne asked if he were happy with the way "Angel" had ended. He said, "Except that it ended, yeah." He said that with the writers they had, he thought it could have gone on for another four or five years. He said that since we fans were watching, they hadn’t expected cancellation and had put all sorts of storylines out there. Then they’d been caught with their pants down when they’d gotten cancelled, but he thought they’d done a really good job.

*(spoilers) He said he thought the next episode was one of the best ones ever. He explained that David Greenwalt, the creator of the character of Angel, had come back to direct the episode. He said that Angel and Spike went to Italy and were made total fools of. They showed a short clip of Illyria and Spike talking and fighting. The scene ended with Illyria planting a nice one right across Spike’s face. After the clip, he remarked that Amy Acker is a great actor and that she really does rock. (end spoilers)*

I remember she also said something like "I love you loads" but I can’t remember in what context. Anyway, they ended the interview, showed the ice cream cake with James Marsters’s face on it, and cut for commercial break.

Ghost of the Robot

They cleared away the living room set (to make room for the cameras) and the band set up. The warm-up guy said he hadn’t known we were all James Marsters fans (a couple of people had even brought in signs and a bunch of us were wearing tshirts for the band or the show, so you’d think it was pretty obvious) commented that we were probably the best and loudest audience they’d ever had. I wanted to tell him that it probably would be just as good if they continued to use "Angel" cast members and publicized them so the fans knew about it.

All the guys in the band were there, including the new drummer and Steve who was playing keyboard for the song they performed and was looking very hot again. He was over on the left side of the band (from the audience’s point of view) and thus pretty close to where I was sitting. There was also a guy over on the side, sitting on a stool, who played the acoustic guitar. I have no idea who he was. I’ve been told that Mr. Marsters usually plays guitar and sings, but he was just singing today (and at Saturday’s concert).

Mr. Marsters put on his headset (so he can hear the rest of the band) and ran the cord up the back of his shirt. No one yelled at him to take it off, thankfully. The audience shouted lots of other things, though. At one point he looked up at us, grinned, and said, "It’s because of you guys that I get to do things like this!"

When they were finished setting up, Mrs. Osbourne introduced the band and said that the song was from their forthcoming album, "Guards of the Radio." (Not quite "Ghost of the Robot", huh?) And I really, really, really wished that photography was allowed, because I was close, everyone was looking REALLY good, and the lighting was wonderful - unlike the stage during a concert. I suppose I’ll have to tape the show like everyone else.

I thought they were pretty good. I’m not sure of the title of the song that they performed - "Say It’s Nothing" or "You Say It’s Nothing" or something like that. Anyway, I really liked it. Charlie was a little far from the mike, so I’m not sure it caught his background vocals. He gets a nice little guitar solo in the song too. Mr. Marsters wasn’t jumping around, but he looked like he was having fun.

When they finished playing, there was loud cheering, of course. Then they brought out a large sheet cake. Mrs. Osbourne told us it was from Angel’s Food Drive (I cheered loudly, of course) and had been sent to congratulate Mr. Marsters for "Angel". I think he said something like he’d seen it before. He cut a piece and took a bite, and then they ended that segment.

The band was all smiles. Mr. Marsters and Steve hugged, and they all looked happy. The band grabbed their stuff and left the set. The drumset was taken apart later by SO people while filming the other segments of the show. Mr. Marsters talked a couple of minutes longer with some people (I recognized the same producer that did the Julie Benz segment).

He finally started walking off the set using the same entrance he’d come in by (the band had used a different one) and his fans started cheering again. He turned around, flashed us a big smile, blew us a kiss (not in a girly way), and mouthed "I love you!"

I’m positive I wasn’t the only person in that audience left smiling.

The rest of it

The warm-up guy explained that they couldn’t actually give any cake to us (he’d said at the beginning that we’d be getting cake since there was so much of it used on this episode) because the lawyers had told him that if someone were to choke on the cake, they could sue. So none of us got any. It was much appreciated, though, food drive folks!

There were a few more segments taped after Ghost of the Robot left. One was with a Lacey Chavert (not sure on the last name) who was apparently on "Party of Five" and had been in a movie called "Mean Girls". She was very pretty. It’s a teen high school movie, but she insisted that the script was good. They had a cake with her face on it.

There was another guest, a Robert somebody (I’m absolutely horrible with names) that’s been on "Friends". He was also very pretty. He’s on "Queer as Folk" now and spoke about being gay. He also commented that the audience was really awesome. He said we had great energy. He complimented us a couple more times and thanked us before he left. I’m sure he noticed that we were mostly female and attributed our leftover energy to the correct cause. They had a cake with his face on it too.

I can’t remember his name, but a Cousin somebody, who is Mrs. Osbourne’s nephew, I think? came on. He had made over a viewer (the "before" segment was the segment that had been filmed before we got there). The woman, Angie, came out and they briefly spoke with her and her sister, who was in the front row of the audience. They had a cake with his face on it, of course.

They filmed the final segment with Mrs. Osbourne’s wrap up. They did a drawing for the audience members, and one of the girls in the first row won an iPod. They then forced all of us to stand up and applaud and cheer while the cameras moved back and forth in front of our faces. I have absolutely no desire to be on television, but I’m afraid you probably won’t be able to miss me.

And that was that! I think we finished up around 8 or so - overall it was run very efficiently, with only a couple of retakes. Very fun.

As I was leaving, I ran into the fan who’d been waiting there since early this morning, and I asked her if it had been worth it. She smiled and said, "Always!" Which pretty much sums it up. I’ve never really been a fan of James Marsters outside of his work as Spike, but in the space of three days I’ve become a Ghost of the Robot fan.

Sharon Osbourne rocks. Don’t forget to watch the show when it airs!