![]() “I saw a void, and I tried to exploit that void.” “I just tried to create my own world,” says Hall of the show’s run. “Like many acts that start off sizzling hot, Hall’s was tough to sustain with the hip crowd, who never finds anything hip for the long term.” With ratings low and the competition from Leno and Letterman intense, Hall stepped away from the show in the spring of 1994. “Within months Hall was a phenomenon.”īut things didn’t last. “ had a lock on the youth crowd, especially younger women,” wrote Bill Carter in his classic account of late-night television, The Late Shift. In 1992 when, then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton wanted to cement his reputation among young voters it was on Hall’s show that he famously chose to showcase his saxophone-playing. Here was a 32-year-old without a huge profile prior to its launch, suddenly his show was bringing in $50m a year for Paramount, who picked up the series after Fox passed. It is easy to forget now but in the late 80s and early 90s, Hall really did shift the needle on late night. That successful spell as interim host led to his big, career-defining break: The Arsenio Hall Show. When he followed Hank’s advice and switched to standup comedy in Los Angeles, he took every opportunity he could, including filling in for Joan Rivers, who had just quit her talkshow on Fox. He wrote in to The Tonight Show and tried to get himself booked as an 11-year-old (his mother kept the polite rejection letter for him). As a child he admired Carson so much that he started practising magic and playing the drums because his idol had. Hall says his career has been a series of happy accidents, but in reality he worked hard to craft those opportunities from an early age. Let’s talk about sax … Bill Clinton performs Heartbreak Hotel on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1992. “I really do think that I kind of broke the mould a little bit, and allowed people to do it their way.” “Something that I would whisper to you that I probably shouldn’t say out loud, is that now I see a lot of people – black and white – doing things that I started,” he says. It’s an absorbing potted history of an innovative show and, at a time when the likes of Trevor Noah and Eric Andre are playing with the late-night rulebook, it serves as a reminder that Hall paved the way. As host, Hall would “constantly push for the stuff I liked, that I thought America didn’t know about”. And the time he got into a scrap with producer, Paramount, when he tried to get NWA on his show (“Ice Cube gave me this tape, and it said ‘Fuck tha Police’ in Sharpie … Paramount was like: ‘There’s no way that’s gonna happen’”). There’s the tale of how his hero, talkshow legend Johnny Carson, recommended a young Usher to him (“ gave me two names: Usher, Raymond”). ![]() From his home in Los Angeles, he tells me about the time he booked an unknown MC Hammer after approaching him outside a hotel (“I kind of broke a single for Hammer”). More specifically he likes to tell stories, meandering ones that are rooted in his talkshow heyday. More than 25 years since the show first went off air (it was rebooted in 2013 but axed after one season), Hall still likes to talk. In the era of Jay Leno and David Letterman, Hall would be the hipster’s choice of late-night frontman, with a young and fanatical following who came to him for loud clothes, up-to-date guests and Hall’s own convivial hosting for its five-year run.
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