Mike Rowe’s cable hit highlights the reality of grunge work.
When anyone describes a grueling job with “It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it,” think of Mike Rowe, host of the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs. Former co-host of CBS Five’s Evening Magazine with Malou Nubla, Rowe now finds himself sucking out septic tanks with a hose or flinging poisonous stingrays by their nostrils off the deck of shrimp boats. Since airing in August, the show is becoming a cable hit: it’s the third highest-rated show in its Tuesday night slot. The idea for Dirty Jobs came from a series of segments Rowe did for Evening Magazine which had him collecting garbage from San Francisco’s cramped Chinatown tenements and riding around with the guys who put boots on cars with too many unpaid parking tickets. I rolled up my sleeves and headed out to one of Rowe’s favorite haunts, the San Francisco dump, for the poop on Dirty Jobs.
Paul Kilduff: You recently visited a turkey farm. How did that go?
Mike Rowe: There are 70,000 turkeys in a pen and the first thing you do each day is walk in and look for the dead ones. You pull out about 100 every morning–100 dead turkeys, all rotten, half-eaten.
PK: Not exactly a free-range turkey paradise. What are the origins of Dirty Jobs?
MR: One of the first ones we did was this Chinatown garbageman routine and it just kicked our ass so bad. I ran with these guys all night long. The tenements there are so narrow you can’t get a garbage can through, so they use these burlap sacks. They run five stories up, all night through little hallways over thousands of shoes that are stacked in the hall because they don’t wear their shoes inside. Then they cinch ’em up and put ’em over their backs and run [down the back stairs] and dump ’em in the truck–all night long. It’s like a Santa Claus from hell.
PK: You wanted to do a show about slogging trash?
MR: I knew I didn’t want to do the heart-tugging tribute to the American worker with cello music. I also didn’t want to turn them into straight guys and be some moron going out and making jokes at people’s expense. That’s what TV does–it’s got to be one or the other. These guys aren’t heroes. They’re just people with jobs. So how do you not overstate it or understate it? And the thought was the only honest way to pay tribute is to roll up your sleeves and do the work.
PK: What happened to E vening Magazine ?
MR: For me it was creative differences–I wanted to be creative and they didn’t give a difference. E vening to me was a victim of its own success, in the sense that they had this 25-year brand. I grew up watching it in Baltimore. I loved it.
PK: Did you say to yourself: I want to do that?
MR: Absolutely. I didn’t know I’d be doing it in the coolest city in the country, that was all a bonus. We were thinking we would do this quirky, mildly subversive twist on an old brand and just have a ball. But I believe that the advertising department was simply unable to resist the low-hanging fruit that was E vening Magazine . We were on a half-hour a night and 11 minutes of that was ad inventory. Then they were selling segments. Hey, I’m Mike Rowe. Tonight I’m here at the San Francisco dump, blah, blah, blah. Well, nobody knows that the San Francisco dump paid $20 grand for me to come out there and do a set of wraps. Suddenly, everything about the show is for sale. That’s when “Somebody’s Gotta Do It,” the name of the segment that led to Dirty Jobs, came about.
PK: What constitutes a dirty job?
MR: In the most obvious sense, it’s got to live up to its title. The underlying notion is this belief that polite society is held together by people who are willing to do the scut work. And again, it’s not about making heroes out of them, it’s just about pointing it out. The best Dirty Jobs we do are ones that say look, if that job weren’t gettingdone these would be the consequences and those consequences would be unacceptable for most people.
PK: Such as?
MR: The guys who pick up road kill–nobody gives them a second thought. Two hundred thousand dead deer in Ohio alone last year. If everybody who picks up road kill for a living calls in sick for three weeks there is no national highway system. We are in gridlock coast to coast. My other intent for the show is to always keep it light. I just can’t bear another somebody telling me that I should feel grateful. I get tired of TV telling me things. Just show me stuff.
PK: There must have been some Dirty Jobs ideas you’ve turned down.
MR: We did a thing in Oklahoma last week called skulls unlimited. This guy gets heads sent to him from around the world and he carves all the flesh off to create skulls for medical schools. He does it with bear heads, boar heads, deer heads, and human heads. It’s so shocking I just don’t know if we can put it on. But it’s funny too because these guys have such a gallows sense of humor.
PK: Got a favorite Dirty Jobs experience?
MR: The bat biologist, going into a bracken cave with a guy named Jim Kennedy, standing in three feet of guano that had billions of dermestid beetles in it–it’s a flesh-eating beetle. You’re being bitten by beetles. It’s pitch dark. Forty million bats are swirling around you. They’re pissing on you. They’re crapping on you and they’re giving birth on you. The placentas are hitting you like little exploding grenades. It’s dark and you have a laser to take the temperature of the colony, which is about 110º F, and you’re inspecting random bats for mites while you’re sinking in their shit. You just can’t believe how bad it is, and you’re standing there with a scientist who loves bats and is telling you isn’t this great, and you’re just slowly sinking in their pooh going, Man, I miss Malou.
Suggestions? E-mail Paul Kilduff at pkilduff@sbcglobal.net.
