It's Tuesday night in Minneapolis around 11:00 pm. Homework needing attention, bedtime in the not so near future, motivation at an all-time low, T.V. on. Well, slackers, while that homework sits on the back burner, here's a chance to expand your vocabulary, stimulate your mind, and take part in a little competition all from the comfort of your couch. Minneapolis Television Network Public Access channel 17 has “Totally Scrabble Tuesday,” an interactive, live, citywide game of Scrabble, and participation is only a phone call away.
Hosted by the faceless voice known as Hamil, the show is set up so all you see is a bird's eye view of the game board which takes up most of the screen except for a strip along the bottom where the letters that callers are able to use and the phone number to call in are seen. Each caller gets to spell one word, creating a City of Minneapolis vs. Hamil layout and sometimes a little team rivalry. As strange and unappealing as it may sound to some, Scrabble Tuesday has accumulated quite the cult following, and numbers are always growing.
The host since January 2004, Hamil Griffin-Cassidy, took over the Scrabble TV concept from a man named Martin Hallanger, who had the idea back in the early 1990s and was doing it on a smaller scale. According to Griffin-Cassidy, their show also gained some notoriety but Hallanger lacked the TV personality to make the show a consistent reality thus causing the end of Scrabble TV in 1998. One day in '04, Hallanger and Griffin-Cassidy were bouncing ideas off each other at the public access studios and the idea of bringing back the Scrabble show was put on the table. Both being extremely involved in public TV, it was only a matter of time before someone like Griffin-Cassidy picked up the Scrabble idea and ran with it.
Originally intended to be a one time, experimental episode, Griffin-Cassidy brought back scrabble for a night and within the one-hour time slot already had a caller on the line begging them to make Scrabble a weekly event, marking the rebirth of Scrabble TV. Hallanger now holds the title of the audio/visual guy, making him very involved in the Scrabble process without being the host. Together, Griffin-Cassidy and Hallanger make sure that this Tuesday night war of words goes off without a hitch and are the backbone of this underground cult classic.
More entertaining than the concepts of Scrabble TV itself are the people who call in faithfully week after week and have organized team names. According to Griffin-Cassidy, “The best part about the show is the callers. When someone calls in and wastes a potential triple word score and spells a bone head word instead, the people at home feel like they are smarter than that person, and people love to feel smarter than someone else.”
For Griffin-Cassidy and his viewers, this is what makes the element of live interactive TV so interesting, and one of the reasons why Scrabble Tuesday is beginning to take off.
Within the broad and general title of the city of Minneapolis team, smaller sub-teams have formed, each with their own name, skill level and or level of sobriety, and sometimes even a catch phrase. On any given night, a viewer could hear from any number of teams located all over Minneapolis . For instance, the members of Team Tony Danza enthusiastically shout out, “Who's the Boss, Hamil?” whenever their call is answered, to which Griffin-Cassidy always obediently replies, “Tony Danza is the Boss.” A team with a more relaxed approach like the Tour de Bong team who greet Griffin-Cassidy with the bubbly sound of what viewers are left to guess is a bong hit, followed by a chuckle and a laid back, “What's up Hamil?”
Another big team found on the Scrabble TV phone line is Team Grove Street, cleverly named after a fictional gang from the video game “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.” I sat in with Team Grove Street for a game of Scrabble on Tuesday night to really get the feel of what it means to be on a Scrabble team. Clad in their matching custom made dark green Grove Street hoodies with cell phones in hand and the Scrabble TV number queued up on speed dial, each member of Team Grove Street waits for the right moment between callers to get their chance at representing the team. Perhaps the most hilarious thing about this underground public access show is that as obscure and low budget as it is, there is never a moment of dead air and the call-in line is almost always busy. In fact, even callers like Team Grove Street , who has five or six people calling between every player in hopes to get through, can go a whole show without airtime.
Although it's a friendly game, the competition is intense. More often than not, Griffin-Cassidy will effortlessly beat Team Minneapolis, raising the level of play and putting the pressure on callers to make their turn count. Ironically, even though Griffin-Cassidy is victorious the majority of the time, he says he doesn't like Scrabble and just found it effective to get people to call into his show and spread awareness for public TV and it's potential as an uncensored vehicle to exercise free speech and self expression.
Griffin-Cassidy also hosts the occasional Sunday night show on an inconsistent basis called “Call in Karaoke,” in which he uses various Karaoke DVDs or the video game “Karaoke Revolution,” and has people call in and sing over the phone while watching the words on the TV screen.
Call it friendly competition, call it self-expression or call it a stupid waste of time. Either way, Totally Scrabble Tuesday is here and with viewership growing, competition rising and Griffin-Cassidy winning, this show is something that no one should miss.
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