Season 10 Episode 25: Torch Song Duet

A sports radio quiz is giving away an all-expenses trip to the Atlanta Summer Olympics plus the honour of carrying the torch through the mall, and Al knows every answer. What he cannot do is call in, having been banned from the station over a remark he considers innocent and which the episode lets him repeat in full. So he feeds the answers to Griff, Griff wins, and Griff, who signs for the prize under the name Mr. X and introduces Al as a mute war veteran called Alfredo, becomes a local hero on Al’s knowledge.

The jealousy does the rest. Griff’s celebrity expands to a Big ‘Uns Man of the Year cover shoot, a romance with one of the cover models, and a torch relay through the New Market Mall with press in attendance, while Al watches a man he outranks in every category he cares about collect everything. The resolution is pure physics: Al tackles him, the torch goes into a fountain, and a reporter announces that the Olympic flame has been extinguished for the first time in three thousand years and the Games are cancelled indefinitely.

Bo Jackson plays the radio host, Calvin Farquhar, a name assembled from two of the show’s own writers, and the casting is a genuine coup: Jackson remains the only athlete to have been an All-Star in both Major League Baseball and the NFL. Richard Kline, familiar as Larry Dallas from Three’s Company, turns up as Big ‘Uns publisher Flint Guccione. The episode also contains the half-hour’s hardest-to-watch scene, in which Kelly asks permission to go to Las Vegas with a biker whose name she cannot recall, and Al, unable to react in front of a guest, takes it out on Bud instead.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: Sunday, May 19, 1996 on FOX
• Season 10, Episode 25
• Overall episode 237 of the series
• Production code 10.26
• Written by Donelle Q. Buck
• Directed by Gerry Cohen
• The title plays on Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy
• Timed to the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta

Guest Cast

• Bo Jackson as Calvin Farquhar
• Richard Kline as Flint Guccione
• Renee Tenison as Marla
• Rosie Tenison as Carla
• Petra Verkaik as Model #1
• Victoria Fuller as Model #2
• Larry Brown as himself
• Roy Jones, Jr. as himself
• Alex Carl as Alex

Griff Carries the Torch

The episode’s structure is a neat inversion of the usual Al Bundy humiliation. Normally he fails at something he is bad at; here he is demonstrably the best-qualified man in the room and is excluded on a technicality of his own making. Every answer is his. The trip, the cover, the model and the torch all go to Griff, who did nothing but be eligible, and Al has to stand next to him being introduced as Alfredo the mute.

Harold Sylvester gets more to do here than in almost any other episode, and the Mr. X business is the best of it, Griff enjoying his moment so thoroughly that he invents a whole backstory for his friend on the spot, complete with a quiet aside about what else Al lost in the war. The leg punch that follows is the only correction Al is in a position to make.

The guest list is unusually heavy. Bo Jackson plays the host, named for writer-producer Calvin Brown Jr. and former creative consultant Ralph R. Farquhar. Richard Kline brings a decade of Three’s Company sleaze to the Big ‘Uns publisher. Renee and Rosie Tenison appear together for the second time on the series, having turned up in season six’s “Looking for a Desk in All the Wrong Places,” with Renee also having played Miss Detroit in “Spring Break (Part 2)” earlier in the season. Boxer Roy Jones Jr. and footballer Larry Brown both appear as themselves.

Famous Quotes

• Griff: “You know all the answers. Why don’t you call in?” / Al: “Because I was banned from the radio station for making one innocent comment.” / Griff: “What did you say?” / Al: “I simply said we can put a man on the moon but we have yet to build an attractive woman golfer.”
• Calvin: “Are either of you Griff X?” / Griff: “I’m Mr. X.”
• Griff: “You’ll have to excuse my friend, Al… Fredo. Alfredo. He doesn’t talk much. Lost his tongue in the war. And a few other things too.”
• Kelly: “Can I go to Las Vegas this weekend with… What was your name? Oh, it doesn’t matter. Can I go?” With a radio host sitting beside her father.
• Kelly: “Oh, well, thanks, Dad. I won’t get married or anything stupid.” / Bud: “You’re gonna let Kelly go to Vegas?” A question Bud should not have asked out loud.

Notes

• Bo Jackson is the only athlete to have been named an All-Star in both Major League Baseball and the NFL; he played for the Los Angeles Raiders from 1987 to 1990.
• All four women on the Big ‘Uns Man of the Year cover had appeared in Playboy: Renee Tenison (Playmate of the Month November 1989 and Playmate of the Year 1990), Rosie Tenison, Petra Verkaik (December 1989) and Victoria Fuller (January 1996).
• Richard Kline is best known as Larry Dallas on Three’s Company.
• Running gag: Marcy is repeatedly mistaken for Olympic decathlete Bruce Jenner.
• The credits run over a tag scene at the radio station rather than the usual freeze frame, with Calvin introducing Larry Brown, Roy Jones Jr. and “Marcy D’Arcy as Bruce Jenner.”
• Goof: the reporter describes Al knocking the torch into the fountain before the splash is heard.
• Goof: the claim that the flame had not been extinguished in three thousand years is well wide: the modern Olympic flame dates to the 1928 Amsterdam Games, and when a torch does go out it is simply relit from a backup.
• Goof: Calvin offers Griff a twelve-piece meal from El Pollo Loco, a chain with no Illinois locations until 2004, and the food on the plate is fried chicken and mashed potatoes, neither of which that chain serves.

Watching It

Amazon’s Prime Video catalogue for season ten stops at episode 24, so there is no streaming link for this one and no card above. The episode turns up in syndication packages and on the complete-series DVD set, where season ten is presented in full.