From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

It's The Treatment.

It's the Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell.

Fenton Bailey has been so busy that it's kind of astounding that the creator of so many

different television shows and films has had time to write a book. I wouldn't even have time

to read a book if I were him. His book is Screen Age, How TV Shaped Our Reality from Tammy

Faye to Ruffa Paul's Drag Race. It's always a pleasure to have him here. So often in the book, you started

off talking about reminding us that Andy Warhol once wanted to do something that would have been

basically the bedrock of things like Big Brother and other kinds of reality shows to ending the book

of the Oscars, which, as you remind us,

has always been a reality share. Yeah, I think reality has sort of quietly been television's

killer application. And, well, I guess coming on for a hundred years since it was sort of

discovered as a medium, I think it's taken that long for it to discover itself or find its groove.

It's also so much for you about these kinds of things that people didn't take seriously

end up so much in the way shaping your life.

There's a great section early in a book where you write about seeing the naked

civil servant and just watching John Hurst's betrayal of Quentin Crisp and how that moment had an

impact on you. I think, you know, we are all sort of children of the screen age and who we are

has actually, yeah, it's shaped by our DNA and our parents and the way we're

brought up.

But I think increasingly, the screen is also kind of shapes who we are.

And so a lot of my key memories are sort of memories of watching things, you know,

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