They are guilty! we shouted in the warm hotel lobby where we are spending our last few days at in NYC. 'Yeah Sir, I agree' came a response from the manager trapped behind his reception desk. In a few hours time every TV set in America will be tuned to the Superbowl, but right now we are concentrating on a Judge debating the outcome for a family with a small kid. The child is in a television studio portraying a court room and is on suspicion charges for killing his neighbor's dog. The neighbor in question is your stereophonic Yankee blubbering into the microphone over his lost canine as his wife sits in solitude behind him. Granted this is junk TV and a whole channel dedicated to court cases too small to be carried out in a real court with your average mindless audience who would normally be seen on an Oprah Winfrey debate show. The embarrassing thing is, is that we are gripped! American TV is a guilty pleasure and today we are going behind the scenes of one of the countries most famous TV studios, NBC. Well, after we hear the outcome of this case of course!
New York's Rockafellar Center is the home to NBC, the Top Of The Rock observation deck and, um a bloody Ice Skating Rink! More of which we will fall across later! NBC is the equalivent to our ITV network and is currently showing programs such as American Idol, Saturday Night Live and the American version of Deal Or Deal. Despite NBC being a full working studio guests since 1933 could tour the building on a daily basis and are even issued with standby audience tickets in case anyone drops out. By entering through the gift shop you are shown a short film documenting the history of the channel and then given an hour or so tour around the premises. Studio 3c is the home of News Nightly, studio 3b - Dateline, 3k - NBC Sports and Saturday Night Live is filmed in the largest studio being 8h. Which, apart from SNL probably means very little to our English readers!
Guests can have a stab at reading the news and weather and put up with the shrieking 'Have A Nice Day' bimbo female who will be your guide, who incidentally doesn't seem to know much about the studio itself! For instance, we are pointed out 'a camera', told that the studios are warm and that the people working behind the glass are part of the team behind the show! Gripping stuff eh?
Leaving the 'hot' studios of NBC the temperature outside on the New York streets still struggles to even reach freezing point. The sidewalks make dangerous treading and in some parts, layered with ice. Which brings us to the part of our review you have all been waiting for. We attempted to go Ice Skating at the Rockafellar center.
Putting a spastic on ice runs parallel with relaying important information to somebody with Alzheimer's , sharing a needle with a HIV sufferer and allowing your girlfriend behind the wheel of your priceless car. In other words bloody stupid. Expecting laughs as we crippled ourselves to the skate hire block no body battered an eyelid. Surely they must had expected fatal results as soon as we tried our skates on? After the reassurance that nobody had actually died on this rink we laced up in the degrading company of other 5 year old and took our first steps. We didn't fall, we didn't stumble, amazingly we were doing exceedingly well and couldn't believe our coordinated footsteps. Our fears were dashed..
Until we reached the ice! Bursting out the gayest scream which even Andi Peters would be ashamed of (We really hate him!) our first step on the rink was as calm as Robbie William's working in a Chemist. Holding onto the railings for sheer death and our other arm steadied by our mate we screamed obscenity heard after the 9pm watershed witnessed by fellow skaters - Most of them being the 5 year old infants! Our hand had turned to a five finger icicle and our legs as useful as those of Stephen Hawkings. We managed a few skate moves, each at ten minute interviews.
At 6pm the skate closed as part of it's daily routine half hour clean. Today though there was a slight handicap, or should we say 'two'. OK, so we've used the H word - deal with it! We were half way round the rink, standard! It would take at least 30 minutes to complete the rink, or we could just do a figure of eight across to the exit - or, maybe not! Instead we plodded on and on and on. But, you know what? As we progressed, so did our confidence and progress. We ended up so professional that an onlooker took our photo and after meeting her afterwards the snapper kindly emailed us our skating attempt and here it is....
With skating sussed we had one more mission to tackle. Understand the rules of American Football. Retreating back to Soho House and gnashing on Chicken wings and fries we tried to show concentrating on the big game - but couldn't. The four hour or so game between The Colts and The Chicago Bears was torture, we lasted half of the duration and then scampered off to Times Square to catch the results on TV in an Irish bar. If you are at all interested, Colts won by a 29-17 victory. OK, so we are probably in a minority, but we will stick to our crap Yankee shows about dead dogs. A few blocks down we were aware there was a hype of activity in the NBC studios which were transmitting the game, but we were happy with our bottle of Bud and memories of our few days in the Big Apple.
From waxworks to Hip Hop tours, visits of standing buildings to rubble of others and walks in the park to skating on ice we will never forget our time spent in New York. We started our review with reference to Frank Sinatra and looking back on four glorious days we can now understand why he named the city twice!