MENACE/NIXON - A Documentary Liberated from Historical Obscurity (Part 1)

To understand how this astonishing audio documentary made its way from a mothballed storage closet in London to the world wide web (and, eventually, your earbuds), one must go all the way back to 1988.

1988 - "WE'VE GOT SOME DEAD AIR: FILL IT"

While the world marveled at Sonny Bono's political savvy in the Palm Springs mayoral election and Australia celebrated 200 years of criminal ancestors and giant spiders, a young and ambitious assistant station manager named REBECCA BAKER was given an audacious task by her superior-- find programming for the station's all but forgotten auxiliary channel, BBC RADIO 11.

Radio 11 was originally set up as an emergency broadcast channel that evolved into round-the-clock traffic and weather, then devolved into a jumble of meteorological talk shows, UFO reports, and live music from the Royal Zeyusaphone Orchestra. By 1987, 75% of BBC 11 was the warbled conversations of London's tube drivers. Baker's task was to make BBC 11 worth tuning into again.

Baker filled the air with various university DJs who were arguably only slightly more interesting than the tube drivers, though significantly less vulgar. This was no matter, as Rebecca had one crown jewel that would require all her time and energy: a weekly documentary programme that focused on digging into the most obscure nooks and crannies of the lives of historical figures. It would be called Portraitures of Power.

1989 - "WHEN NOBODY'S INTERESTED, YOU HAVE MY ATTENTION"

Baker gathered together a hardscrabble team of journalism majors, U.S. students looking to extend their visas, and a few common street thugs to do her bidding. Baker's orders to the group were to bring her the most outlandish or incomprehensible rumors and whisperings about any historical figures that they could investigate. The stories that rolled in were the kind of unfathomable stuff of Snapple Real Facts: "the Royal Family has a secret freezing vault on the moon with the remains of 12 monarchs"... "Hitler and Churchill switched bodies in 1944"... "the pyramids are made of alien cheese". A few stories passed the 'smell test' enough to go into production, and one so caught the eye of Baker that she decided to oversee the entire operation personally: a rumor about former U.S. President Richard Nixon and a nosy White House neighbor.

Fall 1989/Spring 1990 - MR. NIXON AND THE MENACE

Baker decided the rumor had enough juice to put the wheels in motion and set out to get interviews from key players and archived material. The material was a headache to unearth and the "Dennis tapes" only came to light after Rebecca helped the CIA in the extradition case of a snout-nosed antiquities burglar known as "Mr. Pig." The interviews were even harder to secure, but Baker had some of her more "street educated" researchers talk to some knowledgable federal inmates and D.C. call girls and were able to get enough dirt on Haldeman and Kissinger "to fill the English Channel".

The interviews were conducted in slippery haste as word was that current U.S. President George Bush--who was U.N. ambassador during the Nixon Administration-- was positively against the documentary and had no interest in getting back into that mess "like a family of raccoons in a Kennebunkport boathouse." The work was quick and Haldeman, for various personal, religious, and legal reasons, had to phone in his portion, but Baker got what she needed, with a savory bit of meat from the 37th President himself. Rebecca thought herself poised to be the next David Frost.

Summer & Fall 1990 - "FORCES BIGGER THAN US"

Baker was excitedly trumpeting her Nixon documentary and decided to slate it last in the Portraitures of Power season, which had started out smashingly and won Sweden's prestigious Hjjrjrjrsjh Flggruyrs award for it's first multi-episode documentary, "What Henry VIII Ate"-- a somewhat crude but fascinating study of the infamous monarch's diet by examining royal robes, paintings, and an archeological stool sample.

But as the first season of Portraitures of Power was nearing its big finale, rumblings grew louder on both sides of the Atlantic and Ms. Baker was warned repeatedly to shift the focus of the documentary to Nixon's White House pets. The evening that "Mr. Nixon and the Menace" was set to air, December 1st, 1990, the programme was pre-empted by an extraordinary achievement: the meeting of French and British workers in the construction of the Chunnel, a shocking three weeks ahead of schedule.

The episode would be aired hours later, at 3:30 am, and it was all but impossible to attract an audience for the later episodes. Rumors were that the Americans had strongly incentivized the Chunnel completion to be rushed at a dangerous pace, resulting in the death of three chimpanzee workers, in order to take attention away from the only somewhat intersting story of some bizarre neighbor of an old American president.

After its first season, Portraitures of Power was promptly cancelled and Rebecca Baker was re-assigned to another channel and BBC Radio 11 went back to its regularly scheduled programming of alien talk, obscure symphonies, and the dirty musings of London's public transportation chauffeurs.

Eventually, Ms. Baker left the BBC and the UK altogether to co-own a butcher shop in Tuscany. All materials relating to Portraitures of Power were placed into "deep storage" as the rest of the world charged ahead into a decade of Netscapes, Nicholas Cage films, and saxophone-playing politicians.

Coming up on Part 2 -- Y2K, an eccentric billionaire, and a new home for an old labor of love