Here we have the grand-daddy of so-called combat television: the Orange County, CA based HOT SEAT WITH WALLY GEORGE, apparently “the one program that makes sure the United States of America remains number one!” An ersatz political talk show, it starred the late Walter Lloyd George (1931-2003), a perpetually enraged, blond wig wearing ultra-conservative who on each program interviewed (read: yelled at and insulted) one or more guests whose views differed from his, to the edification of a perpetually jacked white trash audience. The show predated televised shout fests by guys like Gerald Rivera, Jerry Springer, Bill O’Reilly and Steven Colbert, whose every particular originated with Mr. George, although I tend to think all the postmortem pontificating about how HOT SEAT “commodified Old White Man Anger and gave it room to fester” gives this ridiculous program far too much credit.
To those of us who lived in Southern California in the 1980s Wally George, a former DJ and the father of actress Rebecca DeMornay (who understandably wanted nothing to do with him), was something of a legend. I was quite familiar with George and his act, which gained enough popularity that it was given a fair amount of media exposure (including an extended cameo in the 1985 flick GRUNT! THE WRESTLING MOVIE).
HOT SEAT commenced in 1983, long before the inception of Fox News. Wally G. had the benefit of appearing on KDOC, whose audience 
was too small to be rated (so claimed a Nielson Media Research spokesperson). Thus he was apparently under no obligation to follow the FCC Fairness Doctrine, which decreed that all viewpoints had to be given equal broadcast time (and remained in place until it was repealed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan, Wally George’s hero).
KDOC was located in the heart of Anaheim, a.k.a. Pat Boone country; Boone, for the record, had a reported 37 percent stake in KDOC, and proclaimed George “a David in a world of Goliaths.” HOT SEAT’S financiers were local businesspeople who Wally repeatedly plugged during the commercial breaks (providing a good sampling of businesses to avoid!).
Anaheim wasn’t that far from where I grew up, which explains the show’s popularity in my neck of the woods. The program was taped on Wednesday night and broadcast on Saturday, but rerun throughout the week in the form of clips that showed in the late afternoon, around the time I and my friends got home from school. Several of those friends took part in the HOT SEAT audience (I recognized ‘em in the many of the mid-1980s episodes currently embedded on YouTube), and a few even got together to impersonate George and his guests at our eighth grade talent show (which they lost).
That I never took part in either the HOT SEAT tapings or the talent show act bespeaks the fact that, simply, I was never that big a fan of the show. It’s hilarious, certainly, but rewatching these old shows I can see why I wasn’t entirely enthused: aside from George’s political views, which were frankly too over-the-top to be taken seriously, his shtick was tiresome and evidently disingenuous.
The show went like this: Wally would sit in a studio that one reporter accurately described as “ramshackle.” It featured pictures of John Wayne, the space shuttle (with the slogan “USA IS #1” under it) and Richard Nixon, with Wally seated behind a desk and his guests in chairs situated alongside it. Wally’s combative edge was apparently forged in November 1983, when an enraged guest, the anti-war activist Blaise Bonpane, flipped over Wally’s desk. From then on shouting and name-calling became the norm, with Wally frequently cutting off his guests in mid-sentence with exhortations like “All you prove is that you belong in a padded cell!,” although precisely how much of that vitriol was genuine remains an open question.
The LA radio personality Poorman (a.k.a. James Trenton) was a frequent guest who was always sure to include two or three scantily clad babes feeding and/or caressing him as George feigned shock. The DJ Rick Dees was another semi-regular, in staged appearances that saw Dees mashing a cream pie in Wally’s face and whapping him with a breakaway chair. I understand George and Dees were close friends outside the show (which appeared to be true with Poorman as well), and that George, in direct contrast to his onscreen persona, was polite and soft-spoken off the air.
Other memorable segments included appearance by a couple members of Gwar, one of whom spent the appearance stroking a fake penis, and Radio Werewolf headliner Nikolas Schreck, who ranted at length about the greatness of Charles Manson. Timothy Leary also turned up to tell Wally to “calm down!,” Morton Downey Jr., one of Wally’s most notorious imitators, was on hand to get tackled and forcibly ejected by security guards, and gay activist Larry Rice countered Wally’s view that “homosexuality should be outlawed in America” with the persuasive claim that “you’re afraid of homosexuals because you’re a repressed homosexual yourself!” Then there were the innumerable models and dancers who used their appearances on the show to do stripteases and make out with Wally, who again pretended to be shocked. That’s despite the fact that he often deliberately set up these “degrading” displays—as when he promised a stripper that “I will never see that act of yours, ever,” leaving her to respond “You might be seeing it sooner than you think!”—and included them in a VHS compilation called BIMBO BASHING.
In all cases it was Wally’s audience members that provided the lions’ share of the entertainment. The one element that was undoubtedly not 
staged, those audiences comprised a good cross-section of the white trash population of Southern California, with American flag T-shirt wearing surfer dudes intermixing with stern-faced old guys, a few women and (believe it or not) an occasional non-white face.
Freakier than many of the guests, these folk were always rowdy, to the point that Wally often spent as much time trying to quiet them down as he did berating his guests; during an appearance by ANSWER ME!’s Jim and Debbie Goad Wally actually had to threaten the crowd with expulsion. He still, however, played to them quite shamelessly, preening, bowing and generally basking in their affection. His audiences were known for chanting “WAAH-LEE! WAAH-LEE! WAAH-LEE!,” holding up handwritten signs (“Sick” and “What?” were especially popular slogans) and waving American flags. There was even a celebrity of sorts who frequently appeared in the audience: the Dodgers’ Steve Sax, whose evident function was to ask Wally and his guests questions designed to further rile up the crowd.
HOT SEAT lasted until 1993, when declining health sidelined George. He spent his remaining years hosting the daily KDOC program HOT SEAT HIGHLIGHTS, in which he presented HOT SEAT clips PATTON-like before an American flag. Things got progressively bleaker when in 1999 George simultaneously released his autobiography WALLY GEORGE: THE FATHER OF COMBAT TV and declared bankruptcy. Upon his death four years later he was virtually forgotten, even in Southern California, with the rise of right wing media in the 1990s, which Wally G. had spearheaded, ironically leaving him and his legacy far behind.